Dec
4
2024

Ah, So That's What He Meant By "Lie"

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Our Amazon Product/Eye Candy du Jour features a quote President Dotard liked to deploy here and there. Little did we know…

Oh, heck: I knew. And I bet you did too.

Jeff Maurer turns his substack over to the still-President, who expands on his pardon announcement: Hey: You Can't DOUBLE Destroy Your Legacy!.

People are aghast at my pardon of my son Hunter. They’re stunned that after repeated, adamant, unequivocal denials that I would not pardon him, I did it anyway. Some feel that the choice is especially egregious because my campaign against Trump was based on character and respect for the rule of law. And some are saying that this move makes my words ring hollow, and that my reputation is irrevocably damaged.

I strongly disagree. I have not revealed myself to be a hypocrite, nor have I ruined my reputation. And that is because I already did those things. By staying around too long and fumbling the presidency back to Trump, I made it abundantly clear that I am a selfish old fool whose talk of putting country before self was total bullshit. And, if you don’t already know that, then — with all due respect — you’re really not paying attention.

No one could have choreographed a more perfect destruction of my legacy than what I achieved over the past year. It was perfect — first, I made it impractical for any real candidate to challenge me in the primary, unless you consider Dean Phillips a real candidate, which no one does. Next, I hid my condition until my big “Surprise — I’m way worse!” coming out party at the debate. Then, after a month of refusing to face reality like a toddler trying to negotiate their way out of bed time, I handed the reins to Kamala Harris, an undistinguished politician with “FILL-IN CANDIDATE” tattooed on her forehead. And I did all this while describing Trump as an existential threat! “I ended the Trump era” was my whole brand! It’s like if Raid introduced a new product that not only didn’t kill cockroaches, but made them grow to the size of ocean liners and become super intelligent — after that, Raid wouldn’t make you think “household pesticide” so much as “engineers of the insect apocalypse.”

We still have 47 days to go in Biden's reign, and who knows what lies [are] ahead.

In a more serious and insightful take, Nate Silver observes: The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency. Here he concentrates his fire on the "expert class of academics, journalists and like-minded types" that he dubs the "Village". (Not to be confused with the Village People.)

However, there has been an arc toward institutional decline. The failures of Biden’s presidency were not due to bad luck or “misinformation” among the broader electorate but rather were failures of its own making: overstimulating the economy, relaxing border controls amid a massive public backlash to immigration, and then trying to run Biden again. Plus, inefficient and sometimes corrupt governance in blue cities and states, which have steadily become less livable.

Village types thought they could pull a “gotcha” during the campaign by pointing out that, well actually, if you asked voters to consider whether they were better off four years ago — during that dreadful year of 2020 — they weren’t, because 2020 happened under Trump’s watch. But a lot of what people found objectionable about 2020 were the policies of the left, which had plenty of political and cultural influence: school closures advocated for by teachers’ unions, calls to “defund the police” amidst a crime wave, and a racial “reckoning” amid a pandemic that few people outside the Village wanted.

Glenn Reynolds reacts to Silver's article, saying: Welcome to the Party, Pal (cont'd). "Cont'd" because the Blogfather has been pointing to the decline of experts for years. He quotes extensively from a 2017 column he wrote for USA Today on The Suicide of Expertise. The intervening years have only buttressed his point.

By its fruit the tree is known, and the fruits of our ruling class, which has long based its authority on an assumed, and increasingly implausible, expertise have not been impressive. The election of 2024, as Silver rightly notes, represents a repudiation of those failures. As Joel Kotkin notes, the working class, having ceded much political power to the experts in the postwar era, is taking that power back. And there are signs that this may be happening elsewhere, as, for example, Germans grow restive under the economic calamities wrought by green energy policies that are popular with the laptop classes, but that wreck the fortunes of farmers and factory workers.

And it’s a good that the working class is taking power back. Leaving aside the undemocratic nature of technocracy, technocracy has failed the ultimate in technocratic tests: It doesn’t work. Putting “smart” – which turns out to mean “credentialed” – people in charge of everything, and letting them run things with no real constraints except the blinkered and self-serving opinions of other members of their social class, has turned out not to work very well. Whether in agriculture or in governance, monocultures are unstable, and our ruling class monoculture has been a narrow and increasingly incestuous one. Its performance has failed to justify its existence.

Goodbye and good riddance.

"Indeed."

Also of note:

  • Why don't we just send them some more solar panels? Bjørn Lomborg points out at the WSJ: Climate-Change Colonialism Keeps Poor Countries Impoverished.

    At the latest United Nations climate summit, developing nations slammed rich countries’ pledge to spend $300 billion annually on climate reparations as “crumbs.” The reality is much worse. Wealthy nations likely won’t conjure up $300 billion in new spending. Europe has been roiled by protests against radical climate policies and the 2024 U.S. election was an indictment of, among other things, aggressive climate regulations. Instead, wealthy nations will do what they’ve done before: raid development funds to the detriment of the people they claim to help.

    Members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development currently spend $223.7 billion a year trying to do good in poor countries through bilateral and multilateral aid and development spending. It is politically much easier for politicians intent on green spending to shift this money to climate purposes than try to get voters to go along with fresh outlays. Rich nations have diverted much of this funding to climate-change initiatives. OECD members spent one-third of their direct development aid on climate in fiscal 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available. Development banks have twisted their purpose even further: The World Bank last year sent 44% of its lending to climate causes, the African Development Bank 55% and the European Investment Bank 60%.

    This charade needs to stop. As part of President-elect Trump’s reforms to wasteful government, he should return development aid to policies that make a real difference.

    Lomborg notes that poor countries need (among other things) cheap and reliable sources of energy, which means, at least in this day and age, fossil fuels.

  • [Amazon Link]
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    It's getting difficult to tell 'em apart, but… David Harsanyi notes a significant difference between the two ends of the political horseshoe: The Left’s Conspiracy Politics Far More Successful than Right's.

    The Democratic Party’s closing argument for the 2024 campaign season had little to do with policy or good governance. Rather, it was a stark warning about semi-fascists led by a modern-day Hitler coming to strip minorities of rights, execute journalists, send people to camps, erect a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, and initiate a Christian theocracy. Scary stuff. Communicating through “dog whistles” and propped up by “dark money,” these Fifth Columnists had even cataloged their devious plans in a scary-sounding book called “Project 2025.”

    Over the past decades, the American Left and its institutions have ratcheted up political paranoia to the extent that its policy prescriptions — even what it views as our most pressing societal problems — are often tethered to groundless or sensationalized anxieties, myths, revisionist histories, pseudoscientific alarmism, and outright lies. For modern Democrats, every political loss, no matter how inconsequential, is a chilling threat to “democracy.” H. L. Mencken famously quipped, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” From the Russia collusion conspiracy to Jim Crow 2.0 to climate change, on the left, it’s hysteria and apocalypticism all the way down.

    Harsanyi has a new book covering lefty conspiracism at length, and it looks pretty good. Amazon link at your right.

  • The language continues to devolve. Lloyd Billingsley notes another milestone: Not Transgender Women.

    Actual women such as Riley Gaines, Paige Spiranac, J. K. Rowling, and the female Israeli soldiers Steve helpfully displays each week, just got the news from the New York Times that they should be known as “non-transgender women.” This drew flak from tennis great Martina Navratilova, British Olympian Sharron Davies, and Rep. Nancy Mace, among others. The dynamics going on here will be of interest to all people.

    NYT reporter [sic] has surrendered to to the Dictatorship of the Subjunctive Mood, institutionalized and enforced unreality. Under DSM a person can proclaim themselves to be anything, and everybody must follow along or stand accused of “transphobia,” “misgendering” and such. As Mace tweeted, “what bs,” but there’s more to it.

    Billingsley references Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language", but uses a different quote than the one we keep yammering about here. Check it out.

  • Another relic of America's flirtation with fascism. And it was unaccountably omitted from Reason's "Abolish Everything" issue. Veronique de Rugy says we should Abolish the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was created as an independent agency in 1934. It's been called the mother-of-all-securities regulator. This agency is remarkably good at killing trees to produce hundreds of millions of paper reports for shareholders and at employing bureaucrats who interfere in U.S. financial markets. p>It is not, however, very good at preventing the corporate fraud that it was created to stop.

    Despite its enormous annual budget of $2.5 billion, 4,800 employees, and vast regulatory powers, the SEC has failed to detect major frauds like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and Enron's accounting deceptions. It's not for lack of being warned. For instance, Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos testified that the SEC ignored his exhortations for years, focusing instead on smaller fry. In fact, the SEC has been accused of disproportionately targeting smaller retail investors while being lenient with large institutions.

    Hope Elon and Vivek are reading the Reason website.

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Last Modified 2024-12-04 10:06 AM EST