Time for a few members who believe in the “Rule of Law” to walk across the aisle and caucus with Democrats

The Constitution makes no mention of political parties so it is apparent that the Speaker of The House is elected by a majority of individuals, regardless of party affiliation. After the chaos of party politics at the cusp of the Civil War, Democrats and Republicans consolidated with strict party rules to vote solely for their own members. But Republicans in the House are so fractured that it is time for a few members who believe in the “Rule of Law” to walk across the aisle and caucus with Democrats to make Hakeem Jeffries the Speaker of the House.

Consider the political calculus defectors from Steve Bannon’s House of Anarchy make. Either stay with chaos and their Congressional seat in a contested district or walk and possibly get primaried or not or survive given the depths the anarchists reach against their own. If nominated a “Rule of Law” Republican then can campaign as capable of working with Conservative Democrats. It’s not a tough choice but requires a spine.

November 9th  update

Mike Johnson was elected unanimously by Republicans to be Speaker of The House and showed no G.O.P. Congressman made the smart political calculation of walking across the aisle and caucusing with Democrats to save themselves for the possibility to get re-elected next November with the aid of Conservative Democrats. No, they stayed with the Clown Show and last Tuesday’s election gave some indications that it was a bad bet. 

Mike Johnson, who reminds one of naive Dave the Kevin Klein impersonator of the President, is incapable of averting a government shutdown and putting the Steve Bannon anarchist to wreck solutions and so that it may be a protracted one.

Our military presence could put us into a forced march toward global cataclysm.

The Middle East is plagued by Islam’s Sunni-Shia schism dating back to the 7th century as a local source of tribal conflict but when The United States determined that oil from the Middle East was a matter of national security this internecine quarrel was made global. The shale revolution recently made the U.S. energy independent and even a competing source of oil and gas to the region so that we can now untangle ourselves from the region’s murderous nihilism by taking out our military bases and stop giving political cover to either side of the schism. We should practice a policy of benign neglect and let the region sort out its differences. And let China suffer the consequences of an insecure oil supply.

China was proud to have brokered the opening of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, its two major oil suppliers, this past March which makes John Kirby’s, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, statement: “The United States will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardize freedom of navigation in the Middle East waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz,” an out of date policy for placing our Navy in harm’s way. Now that relations have opened between the two antagonists in Islam’s divide let the word of the foreign minister of The Islamic Republic of Iran who “considers the continued presence of foreign military forces in the waters of the Persian Gulf as a threat to the security of navigation in this strategic waterway and believes that the countries of the region have the ability to protect the peace and security of navigation in it without the presence of foreigners” stand and let China negotiate the risks of a disruption in Middle East oil deliveries.

Iran’s revolution formed by Shia fundamentalist clerics declared the U.S. to be its demonic enemy which made us the de facto friend of Sunni Saudi Arabia.  Ironically our national security was most thoroughly violated by the Saudi Sunni extremist Osama Bin Laden, who was so outraged that the infidel U.S. military was in his beloved homeland, despite that it was there to push back against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, that he formed al-Qaeda whose first act was to bomb the U.S. military base in Dhahran Saudi Arabia in 1996, then the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998, the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000 and finally the 9/11 2001 attack on New York and Washington. Nevertheless the U.S. always sides with Sunni Saudi Arabia and paints Shia Iran as the enemy when in reality it is difficult to distinguish the crimes the two regimes committ against their people and others in the region.

Unfortunately U.S. arms in the region have the characteristic of coming back to haunt our values and interests again because of the Sunni Shia quarrel. The use of F-15 fighter bombers by Saudi Arabia to bomb civilians in Yemen to shape the tribal Shia Houthi versus Sunni Haidi conflict is a willful and embarrassing breach of our trust that these weapons would be put to use in their defense, not to influence a tribal dispute in another country. And yet we still agreed to put our Navy in harm's way once again in Yemen in support of the Saudi blockade of Iranian weapons coming by sea to the Houthis.

The Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel is so horrifying that it is hard to take in but given the months of preparation by the terrorists one can logically conclude it was meant to wreck the Abrahams Accord negotiated by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a bid for economic progress by gravitating toward a historic alliance with Israel. But it is a Sunni elite’s vision. It is not one shared by the Arab masses sympathetic to Palestine and Shia Iran took advantage of this division to wreck the accord by arming Hamas with military gear to re-ignite the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

President Biden’s firm backing of Israel because of Hamas’ hideous assault on innocents is laudable but it will get tested by what looks like a “Ten Babies for a Baby” assault on Gaza with no endgame. But the placing of U.S. carrier task forces off the shores of Lebanon provides a flashpoint to a global conflict. To repeat, let's stop having our military used to settle ancient differences that never get settled. Yes, grieve from afar for all those who are lost but recognize our military presence makes possible having a local atrocity put us into a forced march toward a global cataclysm. 

Costa Rica as the Singapore of Central America

 The construction of the TSMC Arizona plant is a major step forward for the US semiconductor industry demanding STEM educated engineering talent that lifts our economy.  But it also requires a Singapore that organized Southeast Asia to build and assemble ancillary tech products to sell their chips to.

Costa Rica has the potential to become the "Singapore of Central America". Singapore is a small country that has transformed itself into a major global hub for business and technology. Costa Rica could follow a similar path, by leveraging its advantages to attract investment from the tech industry.

If Costa Rica is able to become a major hub for the tech industry then it would create jobs, boost economic growth, and attract foreign investment to itself and neighboring countries that would raise the standard of living in the region and be a solution to the migrant crisis.

If Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of Chechnya were taken out by a rival tribal faction then Putin would lose control of the Russian Federation

 Wagner Groups' Prigozhin asassination by Putin is par for the course but what about an assassination of Ramzan Kadyrov, the powerful leader of Chechnya, not by Putin but by a rival Chechnyan tribal faction protesting their people being sent to Ukraine as cannon fodder. It would deal a major blow to Vladimir Putin's control over the Russian Federation in suppressing dissent and the recruitment of fresh soldiers. And it would damage Putin’s control of other Federation Leaders who would see from Chechnya's example that blind obedience to him may not be a sure path to one’s self preservation. It would cause a dissolution of the Russian Federation and a target of opportunity for Xi Jinping sensing #PutinIsALoser that there are easy pickings for him to enlarge China’s hegemony.

Gym rat Ramzan Kadyrov may not be dying but what's keeping a rival Chechen gang from taking him out and free them from Putin's loser war in Ukraine

Index Funds allow for Showcase Directors to rubber stamp exceptional executive compensation for unexceptional result

Index funds have become increasingly popular in recent years, as they offer investors a low-cost way to track the performance of a particular market index but diminishes the efficient allocation of capital, the principal work of the stock market. Warren Buffett, the legendary capital allocator and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, has expressed concerns about the impact of index funds on capital allocation. In his 2017 annual report to shareholders, he wrote:

"Index funds are a wonderful thing for investors who don't know what they're doing. But for those who do, they're a very expensive way to get average results."

Nothing could be more average than the S&P 500, an index fund that contains the top five hundred U.S. publicly traded companies and which has no interest in interacting with those companies, reviewing their annual reports and proxy voting for their Board of Directors. The same could be said for other Index Funds and exchange traded funds (ETF). The point being there is no attempt by these Funds to discern whether their companies  are executing well or just riding along on coattails allowing for showcase directors to rubber stamp exceptional executive compensation for unexceptional result.

Michael Schellenberger's crusade to slay the Censorship Industrial Complex threatening free speech

      Michael Schellenberger's crusade to slay the Censorship Industrial Complex threatening free speech

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California Governor Gavin Newsom will kill the Democrat Party and exacerbate racism with his legislature's reparations scheme

California is considering reparation payments as a means to apologize for racism and slavery of African Americans by calculating their loss since 1850, when the state was established, through today due to certain government practices.  In San Francisco, a task force has suggested that eligible Black people receive one time payments of $5,000,000 each; a statewide task force has proposed a somewhat more modest plan with a sliding scale of payments topping out at $1.2 million. Either way the payments are equivalent to winning the lottery which will so overwhelmingly exacerbate racism and the perception of inequity that it will strip the Democrat party of every constituent not receiving a payout yet taxed to pay for it.

The first racial subset to be lost are Asian American who have suffered the same racism and inequity perpetuated by the California government since 1850. The second are those African Americans ruled out by design to limit the payments by putting the devil in the details. Finally the third are every other constituency easily convinced by polarizing media that this hare-brained scheme brought forth by Democrats is unjust.

     The Truth About The Civil War in Sri Lanka - Thomas Sowell illustrates how affirmative action converted a peaceful coexistence in Sri Lanka between the Senegalese and Tamil tribes into a perpetual civil war. California Governor Gavin Newsom is playing with fire by encouraging his Democrat led Legislature in Sacramento to bring forth a plan this July. Its another issue  for woke driven Newson to debate free to live and chose DeSantis in the 2024 Presidential race.

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Walter Isaacson in Elon Musk biography exposes #CensorshipIndustrialComplex suppression of the Great Barrington Declaration

     The Jordan Peterson podcast with Matt Ridley was a most enjoyable dialogue between the perspectives of a believer and an atheist discussing the origins of Covid and reaching the insight that truth matters more than consequence. Hiding an inconvenient fact to propagate dogma is the tool of Authoritarians who are eventually felled by their lies.

It’s currently clear Doctor Fauci halted further inquiry into the possibility that Covid originated at the Wuhan Laboratory so as to not reveal the lab’s gain of function research.  The truth was that this research was funded under his direction by our National Health Institute and that some virologists questioned it because of the possibility of exposing the public to a readily infectious and deadly virus.  It was an inconvenient truth for a public health authority trying for credibility in its battle with an adaptable and vicious virus. The Health Establishment decided to stifle debate and declare any statement other than coming from approved sources as heresy.

But Sweden’s Health Authority took a heretical turn from complete lockdown to one that loosened up among the young and in school and suffered no worse outcome than other countries that had rigorously locked everyone in. The result was clear enough for Doctors Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University to issue a letter called the Great Barrington Declaration asking for the compassionate relaxing of Covid lockdowns on the less susceptible populations which was of course declared heretical by the American Public Health Association and The United Nations World Health Organization.

Here in the U.S. where the States are the laboratories of democracy we had Governor Gavin Newsom of California adhering to dogma by closing the beaches among other lock down provisions while Ron Desantis of Florida let the people out into the open air and vitamin D enriching sunshine!  Where Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez was photographed partying maskless in Miami while New York City was in lock down. It looked like she was having such a good time that it made Bill Maher wish he was not stuck in dreary Los Angeles. DeSantis also hired UCLA’s heretic Dr. Ladapo to be Florida’s Surgeon General to compassionately let the resilient population live free. In retrospect there was no discernible difference in Covid death outcomes between CDC driven freedom deprived California and Great Barrinton Declaration free to live and chose Florida and worthy of debate between Newsom and DeSantis in the 2024 Presidential race.

 

U.S. Navy should keep out of the Strait of Hormuz

The United States “will not allow foreign or regional powers to jeopardize freedom of navigation in the Middle East waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said when he announced the increased U.S. Navy patrols earlier this month. For a variety of reasons we should reconsider this commitment to protect the oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. China is quite proud of recently having helped negotiate a diplomatic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran without appreciating geopolitical analyst Peter Ziehan’s argument that The U.S. Navy makes the seas safe for global trade and that China is the chief beneficiary.  If they believe  their effort was successful then let them take Iran’s Ministry of foreign affairs at its word; “The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the continued presence of foreign military forces in the waters of the Persian Gulf as a threat to the security of navigation in this strategic waterway and believes that the countries of the region have the ability to protect the peace and security of navigation in it without the presence of foreigners” as security enough for the free oil trade from the Middle East benefiting them.

Secondly, consider the possibility of using The Navy as a belligerent force against China in the defense of Taiwan by taking a variant of the tactic used by President John F Kennedy’s 1962 blockade around Cuba, that is a corralling of China bound  oil tankers in the Indian Ocean. Naturally we would provide humanitarian support to crew members as they float sequestered at idle for months.  Large well identified and cooperative vessels wishing to offload at some eastern ports other than Chinese on a quota market basis or just turn back to Europe and other western ports. But small vessels that turn off their transponders like those currently transporting Russian oil would remain sequestered until the crisis is over. China’s Navy hasn’t the range to interfere leaving them with diplomatic outrage as their only recourse. This corralling would be in addition to economic sanctions the U.S. would unilaterally impose on China.

Best to prepare for the defense of Taiwan to be an extra legal unilateral one by the U.S. because at President Richard Nixon’s 1972 China opening visit the United States formally recognized the mainland as China and the island of Formosa as a part of it. War games that critique military preparedness and the effectiveness of sanctions fail to address how a defense of Taiwan is initiated when it is recognized as a region of the mainland. If China were to err like Japan did by striking at Pearl Harbor to awaken a sleeping giant then a formal declaration of war by the Congress as our Constitution requires could be made. But without one our military has no authority to shoot without first being shot upon and even then restraint would be practiced to avoid a forced march toward nuclear conflagration. The war games don’t address what to do if China blockades and then later invades Taiwan without ever engaging with our Navy nor how to convince the Group of 7; Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom and the U. S. to sanction a country policing a renegade province.

We should make public that The Navy may act in this extra legal manner by beefing up the naval base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean with carriers and destroyers and requiring the Central Intelligence Agency to track the world wide position of every oil tanker in real time. Chairman Xi should  consider the risk to the Chinese Communist Party from the starvation that a resource poor China will suffer as it tries to prosecute a prolonged resource intensive invasion of Taiwan. One where the threat of the U.S. turning down the oil spigot dramatically could be an existential one. However he should decide the threat is a more effective use of our superior Navy versus adding more naval assets within the vicinity of the South China Seas where an accident could trigger a shooting war that escalates into a nuclear exchange.

A modest proposal to make long term treasuries the risk free asset regional bank managers always considered them to be

     The current banking crisis stems from the rise in interest rates catching sleepy risk managers with bond portfolio losses best left and forgotten in the good to maturity file. But the prices of those assets kept on dropping and in the case of SVB bank because of deposit outflow many billions of dollars were lost in forced sales of long term treasury bonds which when declared panicked depositors to clear out even more and caused its demise. Which brings up an idea of making long term treasuries payable at full face value when presented to Fed’s discount window and make treasuries the risk free asset regional bank managers have always considered them to be. This change would give regional banks a helpful hand to concentrate on what they do best without need of a professional staff to mitigate risk on its U.S. Treasury portfolio.

Mortgage Backed Securities, the other long term asset popular with financial institutions, shouldn't have this same advantage and require a professional team to mitigate the risk of investment's marked to market. Schwab, a big investor in MBS products, has suffered a loss in reputation much greater that its portfolio losses because as a firm purporting to be experts in financial instruments they look like they just fell off a turnip truck.

Tesla and other BEV manufacturers should make their charging ports capable of both charging and discharging

Tom Friedman predicted in one of his books, possibly The World Is Flat, that someday in the future Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) would be rolling batteries that when plugged into the grid could either charge or give the grid a buffer for peak demand.  Ford provides a two way charge port on their “Lightning” BEV truck, one that can receive a charge and deliver one as well, which makes for a very valuable energy backup system for home owners if combined with a battery backup system collecting solar energy. It would make a weeks-long power outage such as the one suffered in Texas last winter survivable. But what about an everyday money saving system for consumers and a load sharing during peak demand solution for the power generating utility?

In the North East there is enthusiasm for solar energy but not enough Sun to make it economic so that the market for battery backup systems collecting and managing solar energy from the rooftops of New England homes will remain small. Nevertheless utilities everywhere always have the capacity to generate more power than needed in the middle of the night. Connecticut has load shedding agreements with some of its business customers where they agree to cut back on the energy drawn from the grid when power is in peak demand. These agreements allow the companies to enjoy off peak pricing which is substantially less than that provided to retail customers.  I suggested in an editorial in the Connecticut Mirror that the State Legislature should allow utilities to make the same offer to homeowners with Battery Backup systems, solar or not. 

Should Tesla and other BEV manufacturers make their charging ports capable of both charging and discharging than homeowners would have access to tripling their backup storage in the event of a power outage by keeping their vehicle plugged in their home system while they wait out the storm.