No, wait. That was somebody else. What John Kerry said, in his fevered update to an almost as out of touch queen’s offer, was
Africans without electricity must select “the right kinds of electricity[.]”
Because they have the same freedom of choice and the same level of wealth as those French sans-culottes.
Seth Jones, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Defense and Security Department, is worried about our ability to deter war with the People’s Republic of China.
[M]y colleagues and I led members of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party in a simulation of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The goal was to understand how the US defense industrial base would perform in a protracted war with China and to assess the implications for deterrence. The results weren’t reassuring.
The simulation began with a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan in 2026. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but the US defense industrial base was severely stressed. The US military spent its entire inventory of Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles by the end of the first week and ran out of Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range missiles after a month.
Running out of critical ammunition in the middle of a war means we no longer even can fight that war. With the PRC well aware of that likelihood, Jones is correct that we’re losing our ability to deter the PRC.
It’s much worse than that, though, and it’s surprising that Jones didn’t take the next step in his analysis. Such a military strait means we’re losing our ability to defeat a PRC attack, and unlike Japan after its devastating attack on us at the outset of our participation in WWII, the PRC has the wherewithal and the will to follow up its initial attack(s), win outright the war—proximately over the Republic of China, but really a proxy war against us—and impose its will on us.
That’s how the news writers at The Wall Street Journal characterized Mexico’s drug and illegal alien trafficking (and sex trafficking, I add) cartel problem. Their lede:
President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to slap a 25% tariff on Mexico’s goods unless it stops fentanyl trafficking and illegal migration risks setting the trade partners on a collision course over an intractable challenge for both countries.
Set aside, for this post, the fact that it isn’t “illegal migration;” it’s illegal alien trafficking. Those folks ceased to be migrants the moment they entered Mexico illegally under Mexican law, and those who skipped Mexico enroute to illegally entering our nation ceased to be migrants at the moment of their illegal entry here.
The news writers added this:
Ahead of the new trade negotiations, Mexico’s greatest weakness has been its historic inability to confront the powerful drug gangs that control about a third of the country. Mexico has had success stopping immigration over the past year, but ending drug smuggling might be an impossible ask, in part because of strong demand in the US.
This is just silly. Mexico’s greatest weakness has not been its historic inability to confront the drug cartels; the greatest weakness is its conscious decision to not confront the drug and trafficking cartels, it’s timidity in taking on the cartels and destroying them.
Then there’s the writers’ victim-blaming sewage: it’s the addict’s fault that he’s addicted. True, no one stuck a gun in any American’s ear and forced him to take the drugs. Too often, too, the addiction results from taking seemingly innocuous drugs that have been laced with the addictor for the explicit purpose of creating the addiction and so the market. But once addicted, the only truly effective way to break the addiction and bring it under that individual’s control is through withdrawal—and that is achieved by cutting off the supply.
That brings me back to the cartels and the Mexican government’s decision to accept them as a fact of Mexican life and of Mexican governance power. It’s straightforward enough, although difficult, to reverse that decision. Cut off the supply by sealing Mexico’s northern border against the cartels and by blocking the importation of drug precursors (vis., from the People’s Republic of China), and by destroying the cartels and their drug labs.
The problem is not intractable; that’s just a chicken’s copout. Hard, certainly, very much so. But hard means possible. All that’s necessary is for the men and women of the Mexican government to have the courage and the integrity to end their collaborationist relationships with the cartels and lead an effective, and necessarily deadly for cartel membership, campaign against them. And to seal their southern border and their ports against “migrants” along with sealing their northern border with us, instead of holding the doors open for the continued flow of drugs and illegal aliens into our nation—doors held open at the behest of those so-favored cartels.
Certainly that’ll be expensive for the Mexican government to do, but it’ll only become even more expensive for Mexican citizens as the government lets the nation continue to sag into a failed, gang-run geographical area. That’s a terrible price for a government to choose to inflict on its people.
Alan Dershowitz, a defense lawyer of some skill and renown, as well as a Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus, is assembling a dream team of defense lawyers to defend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant against the scurrilous charges of the International Court of Justice and associated ICC international arrest warrants.
The question is what would be the point. That Dershowitz’ team will make a strong—essentially irrefutable—legal case against the ICC is neither here nor there. The ICC has already arrived at its guilty verdict, as demonstrated by its continued use of a well-known Israel hater as the court’s lead prosecutor in this sham case.
This is why the case must be mounted anyway:
It will also be tried in the court of public opinion, both in the US and throughout the world.
However.
Even with resounding acquittal in that public court, the ICC’s guilty verdict will stand as the “official” outcome. This will necessitate physical protections for Netanyahu and Gallant against those arrest warrants, which will remain extant. The only way to get those undone is to disband the ICC, which has irretrievably poisoned itself, with those charges and arrest warrants, as a court of justice.
Toyota Motor North America’s COO, Jack Hollis, has a plan for how Trump Can Get EVs Back on Track. The question is why would Trump, or any of us average Americans, want to? Hollis’ subheadline is promising:
Ditch the mandates and subsidies. Let consumer choice drive the market.
Then he goes off the rails.
Our approach provides consumers with many choices: hybrids, plug-in hybrids, fuel-cell electric, and battery-electric vehicles. We believe this is the best way to achieve meaningful emissions reductions while meeting customer needs.
What about the emissions from mining, transporting, smelting, transporting, transforming into relevant parts, transporting, assembling into the final vehicle that occur in the production of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper—and all that oil that’s used for plastic materials production?
What about the other forms of pollution—from mining to spent battery disposal: all those tailings, the handling of those intrinsically toxic metals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, even copper), the pollution of landfills by all that lithium, cobalt, nickel in those spent batteries?
What about the false claim that atmospheric CO2—plant food—is a pollutant in the first place? That’s never addressed except via the pseudo-science of an erstwhile head of the EPA; this is an underlying assumption that is made only tacitly and conclusorily?
All of these are blithely elided by the pushers of EVs and the punishers of internal combustion engine-powered vehicles.
I haven’t even gotten to the need to expand our electric grid to support the demands a sound EV market would impose. We need to expand, upgrade, and harden our electric grid, along with our electricity production capabilities, for a whole host of reasons beyond just supporting battery-charging.
That brings me back to my opening question: why would we want to put EVs on any sort of track, much less on Hollis’ original one? Ditch the mandates and subsidies, and let consumer choice drive the market, indeed. Add into the free market decision that heretofore omitted information regarding the intrinsically destructive nature of EV production and disposal.
The Left loves to talk about externalities and the need for pricing them into the final product—except when that’s inconvenient to their demands on the rest of us.