Ukraine’s example makes clear to Taiwan an invasion can be defeated given the courage to resist

  President Biden’s reluctance to make Ukraine a no fly zone because it would provoke a confrontation that inevitably marches to a nuclear exchange exposes the defense of Taiwan if it were to be invaded by mainland China.  But the courage of President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people choosing to defend their democracy provides an alternative to the super powers mutually assuring our destruction by showing the Taiwanese public and its President Tsai Ing-wen the importance of self-reliance. President Xi Jinping showed his cards by strangling Hong Kong’s democracy. Ukraine’s courage gives the island democracy the template for its defense.

The poor performance of the Russian Army might give the mainland's military pause.  Formosa is over a hundred miles away by sea and the probability of failure and humiliation is high.  President Tsai must show in every way she can that  an invasion would be costly and success at gaining full police power is unlikely. The United States should provide all the material help it can to prepare for an invasion and a protracted guerilla war without a superpower crossing a blockade.

Ukraine’s example should affirm Taiwan’s military reservists' sense of purpose and makes clear that an invasion can be defeated given the courage to resist and the command structure to continue a guerilla war.  Xi Jinping may make the decision to invade but like any autocrat he will have bad information about his military’s capability and so the defending forces should prepare to  take maximum advantage of incompetence, like Russia’s forty mile stretch of stalled tanks North of Kiev, during the beach landing. It's difficult to envision the invasion landing with sufficient military personnel and supplies to take much less to govern the island but every effort must be made to harden military installations and supply depots and examine contingency plans to make the invader’s success impossible.

The self-reliant approach is the only option for Taiwan to protect its democracy because a show of force by the U.S. Navy like President Clinton used in 1996 in the defense of the Straits of Taiwan incident  would be ignored this time by China as a bluff. As the West enters the Second Cold War against the despots of the East, Ukraine clarifies the need to commit military aid to those democracies willing to fight to defend themselves so as to keep conflict local and not lead to superpower escalation. President Zelenskyy’s courage is a shining example of calling the autocrat’s bluff by piercing his aura of invincibility to reveal incompetence. He has single handedly reversed this century’s rise of autocracies and their denigration of democracies to affirm Winston Churchill’s observation that “democracy may be the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

                         

 

An appreciation of our revolution and the power of insurgency that formed it.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s courage coalesced his countrymen and Europe in a fight against Putin’s megalomania that reverses this century’s rise of autocratic rule and elevates the power of democracy. The Russian Army did not storm Ukraine like Hitler’s blitzkrieg of Poland in September of 1939 which was anticipated. On the contrary the invasion is bogged down and appears to be incompetently lead. “We’re in shock at how dumb their behavior is” stated a Ukrainian special forces member to the Wall Street Journal. “Now we mostly focus on hitting their rear, their supply convoys because if they don’t get fuel, they can’t do anything.”  The delay in the takeover has given western democracies time to provide military and humanitarian assistance and make clear to Russia that the eventual outcome will be withdrawal and humiliation from too much blood and treasure spent on what appears to be just a whim. The consequence of eventual defeat must weigh heavily on China’s Xi Jinping, another autocrat who believes democracies are weak and now clarifies how the United States can defend democracy in SouthEast Asia.

Too many times we as a nation have ignored the example of our revolution and the personal courage to mount an insurrection that wears out and defeats the super power of its time. We rejected Ho Chi Minh’s appeal for help to unshackle colonial Vietnam from France because it didn’t fit with the geopolitical chessboard of the time only to be defeated decades later in a modern replay of our revolution. Ukraine President  Zelenskyy’s courage to defend a democracy changes our perspective over the feared invasion of Taiwan by mainland China.

Currently the Pentagon has been wringing its hands over not having the overwhelming naval power that President Clinton used effectively to get China to back down in the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. But China’s naval force has grown many times over since then and won’t back down just with just a show of force, no matter how many vessels we add to our fleet because the nuclear constraint just renders it a bluff.  But the courage of the Ukrainian people shows the path for Taiwan to defend their democracy.  The recent strangling of Hong Kong’s democracy by the mainland has hardened the Taiwanese public and its President Tsai Ing-wen's perception of China and Xi Jinping’s assertion of total power over all its regions. The invasion of Ukraine makes the threat clear and their valiant resistance gives the Taiwanese the steel backbone to organize and prepare.  On the other hand the poor performance of the Russian Army must give pause to the mainland.  Formosa is over a hundred miles away by sea. Like Hitler rejecting invading Britain, Xi Jinping may reject invading because of the high probability of losing and humiliating his regime. President Tsai must lead to re-enforce in every way she can that an invasion would be extremely costly and the Island’s occupation ungovernable. The United States should provide all the material help it can ahead of time to help the island to prepare and develop plans on how to resupply those fighting the invasion when it occurs, a much more daunting problem than Ukraine’s which has Poland next door as a resupply depot.

Zelenskyy’s courage must make the United States look back at its birth and appreciate the power of insurgency and make it a tool in our arsenal. Use it to keep conflicts local and the superpowers from mutually assuring our destruction. And our military budget should focus on what it takes to defend those with the courage to stand up to autocrats and deny it to those who impose their rule on others.

#Libertarian free market follower of Milton Friedman economics favors Child Care Support issued to parents in Build Back Better

    West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin did his party a favor by rejecting the Build Back Better wish list reminiscent of LBJ's Great Society because the government has no idea how to deliver satisfying promise keeping results. Yet Democrats still think they can make good enough approximations of unknowable health, education and welfare benefits that an individual considers. They can't accept that Washington’s programs gone wrong still reverberates within the American psyche, best expressed by Ronald Reagan’s quip about the seven scariest words; “I’m from the government. I’m here to help.” However, the $300 a month check for Child Care Support issued to parents in Build Back is one provision this Libertarian free market follower of Milton Friedman economics could support because it fits in the most efficient cell of his spending quadrant. It's the cell where spending does the most good at the least cost without the resentment caused by pointy headed experts from Washington telling people what's good for them.   

    Friedman's quadrant has two rows of two cells. The top row are purchases by one using their own money and the bottom row are purchases by one using other people's money.  So the upper left cell is a consumer buying a product for themself with their own money. It’s the optimal cell because the buyer has perfect knowledge to make the best decision of benefit over cost. The right cell is less optimal because the buyer of a gift for example can not completely know the benefit to the person they are buying it for. The second row is where it can get grossly inefficient.  The left cell can have a buyer selecting a Rolls Royce over a Chevrolet to maximize his benefit without regard for cost. It's suboptimal but at least the buyer is happy.  The right cell is the purchaser buying for another using other people's money. Unfortunately for the central government favoring Democrats this cell satisfies neither the buyer nor regard for cost. It's the least efficient because at a granular both benefits and costs are unknowable. This four cell spending quadrant is the genesis of Milton Friedman's national income scheme proposed fifty years ago and which Andrew Yang made popular during his 2020 primary run for the Democrat ticket. But the original proposal required replacing FDR's social safety net with a national income to push purchases of health education and welfare to the efficient cell and avoid the waste, misallocation of resources and the tyranny of experts coming from Washington bureaucracies. 

Fourth Frontier of The Hunters Gatherers Guide repudiates the evolutionary narrative of the guide

The Fourth Frontier chapter of The Hunters Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century repudiates the evolutionary narrative of the guide with prescriptions to manage what clearly can not be managed. Inditing economic growth like it does is like inditing the primal life force to eat, grow and reproduce. This chapter with its sloppy thinking and precepts repudiates what was written in previous chapters by denying economic growth as a force that pushes countries to value scarce resources and better stewardship of our environment. Japan, Switzerland and Scandinavia come to mind as good examples. On the other hand a satellite photo of the Hispanola island shows poor and politically dysfunctional Haiti as brown from every tree having been cut down in comparison to its verdant green politically functional neighbor Dominican Republic. 

Whom to believe in the era of Reductionism and Hyper-Novelty and The Tyrrany of Experts

Open Letter to Heather & Bret of Darkhorse Podcasts

Whom to believe in the era of Reductionism and Hyper-Novelty is a question that conjures the title to William Easterly’s book The Tyranny of Experts where hubris develops a policy with very little understanding over the circumstances to which it is to be applied. This conjuring then leads to Friedrik Hayek’s knowledge problem in economics. More conjuring over Hunter Gatherers Guide thesis that evolution has a cultural component fits in nicely with Thomas Sowell’s Knowledge and Decisions political argument over affirmative action’s uselessness.  

I have been pondering this Tyranny of Experts issue over various fields and feel I have a good grasp over the argument in economics and education but not in health, until now after reading your book and viewing your podcasts, particularly why Ivermectin is so matter of fact rejected by the Health Insurance and FDA complex (HIFDA is alternate yet similar to President Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex) whose high barriers to entry allows monopoly prices and poor service in American Healthcare where we spend much more per capita with mediocre result.  Ivermectin is rejected because there is no incentive, exclusivity patent, for a drug company to pay for a definitive study of its efficacy for Covid or any other condition. It probably never had a drug company’s sponsorship.  Vaccines on the other hand gave big Pharma the equivalent of a moonshot in funding from the government.

Examples for just how abusive the HIFDA complex is are the opioid epidemic whereby Purdue Pharma gets the FDA to approve their addictive painkiller and promote fifty (50) pill prescriptions that were sure to cause an addiction problem. And just recently Biogen just forced through a positive FDA decision, so controversial some FDA analysts resigned over it, to approve Phanul an early onset to dementia prophylactic and price it at $50,000 per year treatment with no real end for the patient receiving it other than death and force Medicare to pay for it even though it will probably be prescribed by Phanul mills promoted by Biogen’s sales team to prescribed to anyone walking in saying they are suffering from a brain fart.

Abuses aside, the HIFDA complex directs its expensively approved drugs as the solution and puts blinders on health professional’s view of health. I was diagnosed with Afib over ten years ago. My in network heart doctor concerned about my blood pressure suggested a Cumadin regimine to reduce the possibility of my suffering from a stroke. I discussed his plan with my out of network general practitioner who I knew to be resistant to the complex’s pharma solutions and he asked that I wait, moderate my drinking and replace my sugar intake with protein such as bacon and eggs instead of cereal for breakfast. And finally and most importantly he prescribed weight training three times a week with a trainer so that I didn’t hurt myself. A year later my heart doctor declared  “your trainer is putting me out of business” while reviewing my vitals and so my blood coagulates normally when I cut or bruise myself while practicing an active outdoor lifestyle.

Germany’s Climate Chancellor Angela Merkel grossly mis-allocated resources and failed the climate

The young Swedish Climate activist Greta Thunberg has a point with her blah blah blah criticism of global leaders talking a big game yet doing nothing or in some circumstances worse than nothing.  If carbon emissions are an existential threat then scarce resources must be allocated with sustainable level headed purpose.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's emotional reaction to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster was to summarily execute her carbon free ally, the seventeen nuclear power plants providing 30% of Germany’s overall power at the turn of the millennium. That decision let the climate boulder down and like for Sysphus made for a start from zero rather than progressing from a higher level. The hybrid mix of Wind and Solar projects though carbon free require fossil fueled backup power to fill in when the wind don’t blow and the Sun don’t shine. Backup that was met with old coal fired plants using bituminous coal, the world’s dirtiest, coming from politically influential union operated local mines. The result was that while the Climate Chancellor talked a good game she failed egregiously to meet her carbon reduction goals on the other hand the United States reduced its emissions by replacing coal powered plants with fracked gas ones despite Donald Trump publicly disparaging climate initiatives and resigning from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Today there is a natural gas shortage so that attempts to get off dirty coal for back up power falters. The fact is that natural gas is a fossil fuel and the hybrid combination on top of the Nuclear power Germany previously had would have required much less intermittent fuel. Besides, natural gas when poorly handled, as Russian sourced gas is likely to be, emits methane gas which is thirty times worse than CO2 for retaining heat within the atmosphere. For Germany to start reaching its goals it has to recognize what a poor decision it was to kill off its best ally.  Merkel’s replacement Chancellor Olaf Sholz has to make the politically difficult decision for the climate and Germany’s energy security to resurrect as many of the nuclear plants being dismantled as soon as practically possible.  

German climate minister says country set to miss 2022 emission reduction targets

    

 

Please help form a Town Committee for the Libertarian Party

Forming a town committee for the Libertarian Party would give Darien conservatives a way to show Edmund Burke's, the philosophical founder of modern conservatism, abhorrence of the mob. That Trump Republicans scoffed at the assault on our capitol with smirks and sneers forever denies them conservative support. On the other hand the Libertarian Party did have Gary Johnson and William Weld, both successful Republican Governors of blue states, on the party ticket for President and Vice President in 2016. Michigan Congressman Justin Amash resigned from the Republican Party in 2020 and joined the Libertarian Party. Expect others to be primaried or censured out as a major party dies off and a lesser one takes its place as did the Whig party after its loss of the election of 1852. Currently the Libertarian Party with core values of honoring the Constitution, rule of law, and small government best represents conservative principles with which to loyally argue against Democrat overreach.  As a minor party we have hard work ahead to let conservative values rise again.

Will you join us in forming a town Committee? The  committee would interview and recruit candidates for local offices, some could be resigning Republicans, during the next few months in preparation for a town convention in late July. After which the candidates would be submitted to the Secretary of State and would appear on the November 2021 ballot.