Newt tells it how it is: This crisis was caused by politicians. He tells how to reduce fuel costs in the short run, and the long run. “you want energy now” he tells us. And then he tells us how to get it.
How do we solve the energy crisis? Answer. Let businessmen extract oil. Drill here. Drill now. Pay less.
Michael Totten quotes a Serb:
“If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”
“You think?” Sean said.
“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can’t stop anything.”
The military weakness and incapacity of Europe in Serbia startled the Serbs, even more than America’s capacity stunned them. Since then, Europe’s martial weakness has been on display in one humiliating debacle after another. Recall Britain’s startling display of fear, weakness, cowardice, and dhimmitude in the Persian gulf.
All that wealth, and no capacity to defend it. The vultures are circling.
For a state to exist, it has to be able to destroy those that oppose it, or might oppose it, to inflict famine and ruin on hostile populations, has to be able burn the crops and flatten the cities, after the manner of General Sherman, and has to have confident belief, a belief shared by officers and men, that it is right to do so.
To do this, it needs some source of cohesion. It cannot provide its own cohesion. Pay and threats will not work to motivate soldiers, for when things go bad, when your soldiers most need motivation, these motivations cannot function, for nothing will motivate people impose the discipline.
The usual source or cohesion is ethnic identity: the nation state. Other sources of cohesion are religion, as for example the various theocratic states, such as the caliphate, and ideology, as for example the American revolution and the various communist coups.
So if a state’s cohesion came from ethnicity, then when it goes multicultural, then its soldiers and police are fighting for pay and pension and nothing more, and then it is are doomed. Similarly, when the last shreds of liberty are crushed out in the US, when the second amendment is utterly gone, and little left of the first amendment, US troops will be fighting for pay and pension and nothing more and then the US will be doomed.
Global Guerrilas reports that Mexico and Nigeria are falling, as bandits, revolutionaries, and suchlike take possession of the Mexican drug trade, and bandits, revolutionaries, Islamists, and suchlike take possession of Nigeria’s oil. But there is a lot more available for the stealing in Europe.
If the Nigerian or Mexican government goes, the Pentagon should secure the oil, but will not be able to do so without will and belief that it is right to do so. That would require an ideology that it reasonable to protect the private property rights of American and allied businessmen – which argument will not fly when they threw them to the wolves long ago, when long ago they allowed the oil and the oil rigs to be stolen by governments that are now failing.
Cruise ships are sailing to the antarctic, passengers and crew imagining the ice to be melting. One ran into a glacier and had a change of plans. Another was caught between two icebergs, and sunk.
In the coming arctic summer, we shall see a bunch of cruise ships attempting to pass what they expect to be the Northwest passage. I suspect that this may turn out to be entertaining. (more…)
The American health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. (more…)
The presidents that have done the most to smash capitalism have never been Democrats, because anti capitalist Democrat presidents have always found themselves paralyzed by gridlock – the pro capitalist faction unites along party lines, and the federal government system locks up, as it was designed to do. The founding fathers intentionally constructed the federal government so that it would be slow and inefficient at making large controversial changes.
The greatest catastrophes for capitalism have come from the anticapitalist Republican presidents, Nixon and Hoover, because they could get “bipartisan” anticapitalist measures through congress.
Environmentalists have always intended global warming as a justification installing a socialist command and control economy. McCain has just unveiled a global warming plan, theoretically market based, but in fact not in the slightest market based, a command and control plan which is the socialists wet dream. He calls it market based, but this merely means that bureaucrats will be able to blame markets for the chaos they create. The only role of the market in the plan is to be the guy that takes the fall. As Brutally Honest says, McCaine has drunk the koolaide
Maybe Obama is just as anti capitalist, or even more anti capitalist than McCain, but if he is, he will face gridlock.
Today, a lot of people are going hungry because of an energy crisis.
When we look at businesses that are attempting to address the energy crisis, for example Linc Energy Systems, we see that ninety percent of their effort, energy, and thought, is addressed to the political problem of getting permits and approvals, and very little to the merely technical details of collecting energy from nature and making it available in usable form.
Linc energy systems plans to use UCG-CTL to produce liquid fuel from coal. They set up a test plant. The major function of the test plant was not to test the technology, but to test the environmental impact of the technology. But the only acceptable outcome was no impact, which result no genuine test could ever produce. Fake environmental science manufacturing fictional crises is met with fake environmental science supposedly avoiding these nonexistent hazards.
And so, while this game is being played, people starve.
Bryan Caplan has bet $300 that Europe, and every state of Europe, will survive to 2020. I don’t make these kind of bets, because outcomes tend to be ill defined. What constitutes surviving? But I expect that around 2040, people will look back to around 2020, and say that some substantial portion of Europe, fell back then.
The nation state derives its cohesion from the nation, and the nation is not a patch of land but a people, united by something – perhaps an ideology of governance, economics, and law, but more commonly race and culture, or religion, or some such.
Nation means, still today means, a mutually supporting group of people, not a territory – a people united by culture, or by language dialect, or by race, or by ideology, or religion, or some such. Jews are a nation, Israel a nation state, Kurds are a nation, but Kurdistan is not (yet) a nation state. Iraq is a state, but evidently not yet a nation.
If a state is united by race or religion, the nation state has a disturbing tendency to commit mass murder. Even before the rise of the nation state, even back in the days when nations seldom corresponded to states, the nation was an important and vital part of Europe’s history, leading to lots of disturbingly efficient slaughter – and not just the easy slaughter of disarmed obedient sheeple that we saw so much of during the twentieth century, but the highly successful mass slaughter of armed and united peoples.
Thus a nation state inherently derives its cohesion, its strength, its military prowess from what is now called ethnocentrism, or racism, or bigotry, or ignorant superstition or capitalism/imperialism/exploitation etc.
The transnational progressives are attempting to use the power of the state to suppress that which gives the state cohesion, sawing off the branch on which they stand.
And because they have in substantial part succeeded, Europe suffers from extraordinary military weakness. Europe could not defeat the Serbs, could not defeat the Taliban. The British could not hold the most crucial oil port in the world against Sadr’s forces.
Hence the inclination on the right to predict the collapse of the EU or some of its component states. The prediction seems absurd. The states of Europe have police, tanks, bombers and an immense budget, whereas the various threats to their existence are tiny and have nothing much – but the threats have internal cohesion, and the states of Europe do not.
Jews are not the only people that suffer from self hatred and self destructiveness, though arguably they are more prone to it than other groups.
The most spectacular and extreme example of self hatred was the Khmer Rouge, which hated intellectuals and especially foreign educated intellectuals, and proceeded to murder most of them. Since the Khmer Rouge was largely composed of intellectuals and especially foreign educated intellectuals …
Rich white Anglo Saxon males also suffer from a fair degree of self destructive self hatred, as illustrated in the the recent Duke University rape scandal, though nothing comparable to Jewish self hatred.
The roots of self hatred are envy and covetousness. If one belongs to a successful group, one compares oneself to others of that group. Inevitably, some of that group are more successful in some ways than than oneself, and so …
It seems that even if you are a highly qualified scientist with a great big pile of academic credentials, there is something about being a greenie that causes your brains to dribble out your ears as slime.
There is an ecological crisis on Macquarie Island:
In an accelerating one-two hit, exploding rabbit numbers are denuding Macquarie’s hills of soil-stabilising megaherbs and tussock fields, exposing ground-nesting birds and new seeds to the ravages of rats and mice.
Along with the flora, at least 24 bird species, 12 of them classified as threatened, are under attack.
So why, you may ask, are they under attack now.
Because the brilliant scientists managing the island wiped out the cats. The cats had kept the rabbits and rats down.
When you wipe out the top predator, what do you think is going to happen?
Demand for oil will continue to rise. The supply is not rising. The only solution is massive coal to liquid plants. Coal to liquid plants can produce substitutes for gasoline, such as methy isobutyl ether, at about a dollar a gallon at the refinery gate. So why is it not happening?
Coal to diesel is a more mature technology. Coal to gasoline substitute is still theory and experiment. Maybe it is not happening because they are still working on it. But even coal to diesel is only happening on a rather small scale, a fraction of a percent of the scale needed to keep the price of oil from rising even further.
We are seeing the much predicted resource crisis and associated hunger that the greens have long predicted. Capitalism and the free market should, in theory, remedy this, providing a smooth conversion from oil to coal. No smooth conversion is happening, which may well be part of the reason so many people are losing faith in capitalism. The subprime crisis is not a good advertisement for capitalism either. Of course capitalism, unlike socialism, manages to resolve such crises without murdering millions, but this does not mean that it is working satisfactorily. When capitalism screws up badly, as is happening right now, people are inclined to listen to demagogues who tell them that if only the demagogue got to make decisions, instead of those wicked capitalists, all would be well.