Europe's version of the burning of the Amazon rainforests

“Europe Sacrificing Ancient Forests for Energy'' is a damning expose of the unintended consequences of a subsidy developed and promoted by the Green movement that does actual harm to nature.  By some means of convoluted logic the European Union considers wood to be a renewable energy source  because  the carbon it puts into the air is recycled back into the wood of growing trees. Subsidies for wood have made its energy participation greater than wind and solar combined and is proudly noted by the EU as progress in reaching environmentally sound climate goals.  Apparently the New York Times article caused a rethink over the lunacy of subsidising the raping of beautiful habitats of tremendous biodiversity to make wood pellets to fuel home furnaces. “Cutting down forests for energy use is neither sustainable, nor does it help with our energy independence,” said Tiemo Woelken, a German member of the European Parliament who supported ending the subsidies. But there is an energy crisis and so Europe’s version of the burning of the Amazon rainforests will continue.

Years ago Matt Ridley criticized Britain for defining wood pellets as a renewable form of energy, just one not so friendly to a Woodpecker’s habitat pinched from a California forest he argued. The clinching example he used for the idiocy of clear cutting wood for energy was a satellite shot of the Island of Hispaniola with Haiti on one side and the Dominican Republic on the other.  One country was brown and the other green delineated by a clear crisp border. One country burned every piece of wood that could be found and the other subsidized the use of propane gas to save its forests. His point being that modern fuels have a place in saving the ecosystems of large swathes of geography for biodiversity.

John Muir the founder of the Sierra Club must be turning over in his grave with the thought of his beloved Muir Woods being whittled down to pellets for fuel. The Sierra Club is seriously out of tune to the danger to its mission “to practice and promote the responsible use of the Earth’s ecosystems and resources” by ignoring the policy of subsidizing the burning of wood.  Though the club is exclusively U.S. based it has a large international following.  It should  “educate and enlist humanity,” at least our European brethren, “to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment.”

Years ago when unlimited nuclear energy was thought to be a new and wonderful possibility the Sierra Club promoted a vision  of a nation of large natural parks with islands of densely populated city states powered by nuclear fuel.  It was a vision that France and Japan took up in the early 1970’s reaching 80% of their electric power needs and leaving great swaths of natural habitat between cities connected by high speed electric powered rail. Despite Japan’s Fukushima disaster, nuclear power is arguably environmentally sustainable and better than geography hungry solar farms pinching food from the world on the precipice of a massive global famine. Which brings up the  other biofuel lunacy, Iowa farms raising corn to feed automobiles!  

Libertarian Party Member but after the anti intellectual anarchistic takeover of the party at the 2022 convention now identifies as #ClassicalLiberal

F. A. Hayek explains in the foreword of the 1956 American edition of The Road to Serfdom that he uses the term “liberal” in the classical nineteenth century sense and is perplexed how the American left appropriated it for the advocacy of government control.  He finds it regrettable that true liberals must describe themselves as conservative because “Conservatism is not a social program; in its paternalistic,nationalistic, and power adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism with traditionalist, anti intellectual, and mystical propensities.”

The Libertarian Party was formed in 1972 and took its name as means of expressing the Classical Liberal laissez faire nineteenth century philosophy it stood for.  I am a registered Libertarian Party Member since 1992 but as of the anti intellectual anarchistic takeover of the party at the 2022 convention I can no longer call myself as one and now identify on Twitter as a #ClassicalLiberal.

Its innumerates (people who can't count) like Gavin Newsom that are the problem.

Its innumerates (people who can't count) like Gavin Newsom that are the problem. Now take his hero Angela Merkel, Germany's Climate Chancellor as an example of how bad an innumerate leader can be. She decided on an energy policy favoring Wind where there is little coastline for windmills and Solar where everyone goes to Spain to get sunlight.  By implementing that policy forcefully she diminished much wealth in utility assets and after Fukishima she panics and orders the decommissioning of nuclear power plants wiping out tremendously more wealth but which took many steps backwards on reaching the zero carbon emissions goal.  She further exacerbated the climate by extending the mining and burning of bituminous coal, the world’s dirtiest to compensate for diminished nuclear power and for the intermittency of when the wind don't blow. To add insult to injury she declares success by declaring zero emissions for active wind energy even though dirty coal was burning on standby. Finally she embraced Putin's drug dealer tactic of dependence on Russian energy which today puts Germany at the precipice of an economic depression and very cold winters for its citizens.

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Senator Joe Manchin is keeping Democrats from a disastrous result for our climate, economy and security

Angela Merkel, Germany’s Climate Chancellor, had the power to implement pretty much every initiative in Build Back America and accomplished a substantially worse outcome for the climate.  Her disastrous decision to kill off nuclear power generation and source domestically mined bituminous coal, the dirtiest least efficient, and Russian oil and gas to smooth out wind and solar intermittency not only has put Germany way behind in reaching its carbon reducing goals but also because of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has caused an economic crisis so severe that this winter German industry will be severely rationed and available energy used to heat peoples’ homes.

Senator Joe Manchin is doing Democrats a favor from implementing an innumerates’, people who can’t count, wish list that could lead to the same disastrous result for our climate, economy and security.

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Jurists should presume Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness over the Constitution formed to provide it

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito declared in his opinion annulling Roe v Wade that it did not pull at the thread that unravels decisions based on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, but Justice Clarence Thomas opined that, yes, it did. As the court’s ultimate strict construction originalist he didn’t see the right to an abortion in the Constitution nor for the use of contraceptives, Griswold v Connecticut, nor to a gay marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges.  Not to be cute but he didn’t mention the Loving v Virginia decision which makes his interracial marriage to Ginni legal. Maybe he has difficulty arguing that a document that defines him as three fifths human is sacred and to be followed to its letter.  Maybe he should consider a redirect to the spirit of our founding fathers’ motive which was to form a more perfect union that protected our inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Georgetown Law Professor and Political Philosopher Randy Barnett argues for redirecting legal opinion to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence  for which the  Constitution was devised.  His simple suggestion is that jurists presume in liberty and not in constitutionality as they presently do.

The 13th Amendment may have banished slavery but not it’s hegemony in law and opinion over a black man’s status. At the start of reconstruction the Republican victors of the civil war felt something more was required to counter slavery’s mean spirited legacy. The reaction was the 14th Amendment which defined citizenship and attempted to counter the denial of the right to happiness accorded to a citizen in a general manner which in later years through its equal protection clause opened the way to define identity and happiness in ways alien to our forefathers when devising the original Constitution.

The 14th Amendment failed in it’s first test made famous by Justice Harlan’s sole and blistering dissent in Plessy v Ferguson where he decried how slavery’s legacy had prevailed in the “separate but equal” decision and weakened the spirit of the new law trying to keep out hard hearted sentiments. The suggestion that a Jurist should first presume liberty would do much to reassert the 14th Amendment’s spirit and question poor interpretations made from it since its enactment. Professor Barnett argues presuming liberty will leave many legal threads untethered but for the sake of a more perfect union, they should be.

For Justice Thomas presuming liberty would liberate him from the quagmire of what he called uncommonly silly law such as in his dissent of Lawrence v Texas (2003) where he could find no right to privacy in the Constitution. It would liberate him to concentrate on his career long and noble fight for economic freedom or as enshrined in Lochner v New York (1905), another 14th Amendment decision, as “freedom of contract.”  A decision reviled by today’s Jurists of the Administrative State who don’t want to understand that the Lochner decision frees all men from doing their master’s bidding. 

Lochner v New York is cited eight times in the recent opinions of Dobbs v Jackson as an example of the kind of decision that should be reversed or ignored because it substituted the court’s judgment for that of a duly elected legislature, a clear usurpation of the Constitution’s separation of powers. From the perspective of believers in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, denying it, as in an abortion, requires more than the threads drawn from a legal decision reviled by the Warren Burger court yet convenient to formulate an expert’s solution it had no power to do.

Dobbs - Jackson decision reversed what was thought to be settled law. It showed that “settled” isn’t so just because it is stated to be so,  after all Dredd Scott settled the law amid a period of growing belief that slavery was immoral despite millenia of stated approval as written in the Bible and so a horrific civil war was fought over it.  Today we are accepting many behaviors once considered immoral and there are those who want to divide us by enforcing their unchanged values with law.  With the anti-abortion victory the court must now gird itself for a series of uncommonly silly laws as the moral majority exercises its power to stop changes in the perception of what is moral.  The court needs the presumption of liberty to quickly and repeatedly swat away these laws and disabuse the public of the idea that the court is there to restrict rather than enhance our natural rights.

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Presuming Liberty would do much to redirect decisions back to 14th Amendment's original intent.

The constitutional interpretation known as originalism seeks to identify the original meaning of its provisions but if the Constitution was devised to form a means of delivering the Declaration of Independence’s ideal that all men are created equal with the inalienable right to  Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as argued by Law Professor and Political Philosopher Randy Barnett, then the original had much to be remedied. He suggests Jurist presume Liberty and not Constitutionality as they presently do.

The 13th Amendment may have banished slavery but not its hegemony in law and opinion over a black man’s status. At the start of reconstruction Republicans felt something more was required to counter slavery’s mean spirited legacy. The 14th Amendment which came as a reaction defined citizenship and attempted to counter the denial of the privilege of happiness accorded to a citizen but from the start with Plessy V Ferguson decision establishing "separate but equal" the hard hearted bastardized its intent. Presuming Liberty would do much to redirect decision back to its original intent.

 

War Game scenario to deter China from invading Taiwan

With first strikes on U.S military bases in Japan NBC’s China invading Taiwan war game reveals a fundamental flaw which is that China knows that without a pretext for engagement, such as military strike on its territory, the U.S. has no authority to defend a province of a country from its central government and our mighty Navy’s presence is only a bluff because U.S. public opinion would not allow an engagement that starts superpowers down the path of nuclear conflagration.  No, Team Red would start the invasion with a months long blockade encircling the island and keeping all material from entering or exiting by sea and air. It would spend time before the invasion with an air war that softens the target and causes the rapid expense of irreplaceable resources.  How should Team Blue assert American power without crossing the nuclear threshold?

Geopolitical Analyst Peter Ziehan postulates that since the end of World War the global reach of the U.S. Navy has kept the seas secure for international trade. China in particular has been the chief beneficiary of the trade made possible by our Navy. Being a resource poor nation, a trade benefit it counts on is the steady supply of oil coming from the Middle East in supertankers crossing the Indian Ocean.  What if Team Blue took a tactic from our history when an Island nation was being armed with nuclear weapons that threatened our security but had not yet made a first strike, of course it’s President John F Kennedy’s 1962 blockade around Cuba that is being referenced, and corrals those supertankers in the middle of Indian Ocean the moment that China blockades Taiwan. Naturally The Navy would provide humanitarian support to crew members as they float sequestered at idle for months.  Vessels passing through wishing to offload at ports other than Chinese could do so under flight supervision, not that a lumbering tanker would not make a spectacular but distressingly easy target should it decide to make a run for it.  China’s Navy on the other hand could not interfere with the corral because their vessels only have a thousand mile range leaving diplomatic outrage as their only counter. Mainland China on the other hand would run out of fuel for its economy and Navy before a well stocked Taiwan and force it to discontinue its assault.

The primary purpose of war games is to flesh out various tactics that promote a strategy toward our security.  War games that have a whiff of a nuclear exchange always seem to end in conflagration so that the players should think of alternatives. Alternatives that  showcase what a Navy ten times bigger than the rest of the World combined can do to assert American power in a nonthreatening way and so overwhelm any notion of defying it that it deters China from invading Taiwan in the first place.