Bayou Renaissance Man

The news and social media are full of rumors that President Biden may announce his withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential election.  That doesn't mean he'd leave office as well, of course:  that could happen, but there's no certainty that he'd be prepared to bow out early.  I suspect he'd be more likely to continue in office until his present term expires in January next year.

That could be a very big problem.  Biden has already demonstrated on repeated occasions that he can be vindictive, nasty and vengeful to those he thinks have slighted him.  Just how much damage could a lame-duck president do in the final half-year of his term in office?  I suspect the answer is "A heck of a lot!"

It may be that Congress and the Senate could prevent or mitigate the worst of the damage, by refusing to pass enabling legislation.  However, presidential executive orders can operate without such support.  Biden could install his supporters in critical positions in the Executive Branch;  reallocate budgets to support his preferred agenda, even at the expense of defunding other parts of government that are just as (or even more) essential;  increase his efforts to dilute the electorate by bringing in millions upon millions of foreign "migrants", and getting as many of them as possible to register as voters, even though that's illegal (just as his administration and Blue states are doing right now);  and so on.  Sure, some of those steps may be actionable in court - but it takes time to get such measures on a court docket, and there's no guarantee they could be blocked or suspended in time to avert the damage they might do.  So much depends on the perspective of possibly biased judges that it's hard to make that call.

It might be better for the country if he were to leave office at the same time that he withdraws from electoral contention;  but we have no idea how well Vice-President Kamala Harris would perform in his stead.  Based on her track record, I think she'd get even less respect and cooperation, nationally and internationally, than would President Biden - and that might make her vengeful, bitter and retaliatory in her governance.

A lesson one learns early on the African plains is that an animal is never so dangerous as when it's wounded and weakened.  It'll lash out and try to kill those threatening it, no matter who or what they are.  (I've never forgotten the dik-dik - a tiny antelope - that charged a game ranger near Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town.  He was trying to see whether any young were in her bush nest, but she was having none of it.  Her short, sharp horns penetrated his thigh and punctured his femoral artery.  He bled to death next to the nest before help - only a few minutes away - could reach him.  I was nearby that day.)

Biden and/or Harris might demonstrate similar pugnacity.  If they're politically weakened to the point that they believe they can't win, and/or have nothing to lose, they could retaliate against Democrats, or Republicans - even the entire nation.  That's a prospect not to be taken lightly, particularly given President Biden's ever-loosening grasp of reality, and Vice-President Harris' growing (and, IMHO, probably justifiable) outrage at the lack of respect, verging on contempt, shown towards her by her own party's leaders.

We might all live to regret something like that happening.

Peter

That's the unspoken question posed by a cartel takeover of a Mexican port.

A sharp increase in drug seizures has been reported at Mexico’s west coast ports with caches discovered inside containers and vessels’ sea chests, said protection and indemnity club NorthStandard.

The alert follows the seizure earlier this month of 88 tonnes of chemicals needed for the manufacture of synthetic drugs at the country’s largest container port, Manzanillo.

Ports are a “critical part” of the criminal infrastructure of one of the most powerful cartels, the Sinaloa, which uses them to receive precursor chemicals and South American cocaine for trafficking into the US, according to a May report by the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

. . .

The DEA report said that the Pacific coast port of Mazatlan was wholly controlled by the Sinaloa cartel and they charged other drug trafficking organisations to use the port.

A long history of alliances with drug trafficking groups also gave the Sinaloa access to the port of Manzanillo, said the report.

The port is “strategically significant because of its location on the central Pacific Coast and its high volume of shipping traffic due to widespread use of the port by foreign countries to exchange legitimate trade goods with Mexico and to refuel”, said the agency in its 2024 national drug threat assessment.

There's more at the link.

It's all very well to go after criminals . . . but what if the administrators and bureaucrats controlling government functions (such as a port) are themselves criminals?  Remove them, and you'll have to appoint replacements - who will doubtless be threatened immediately with death or dismemberment, for themselves and/or their families, if they don't do precisely the same as their predecessors did.  "Plata o plomo", remember?

Also, how can any honest law enforcement agent or agency work with a port administration that's so clearly criminal?  Everything the latter learns about the "good guys" will undoubtedly be passed to the "bad guys", who will use the information to target law enforcement and operate with impunity.

Most worrying of all to me, we've just "imported" what are likely to be hundreds of thousands of cartel operatives and other criminals from South America, thanks to President Biden's border policies.  They're now inside our borders, and I'm sure some are already working in our harbors, airports, etc.  How long until they take over one of our transport hubs, and operate it for the benefit of their cartel buddies back home?

Peter

The phrase "the fog of war" has become a cliché, but it remains as true as it's always been.  It appears to have dominated Israel's initial response to the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks.  Ynet News has published an extended interview with the pilots of some of the attack helicopters who tried to respond effectively on that day.  Here's an excerpt.

Do you even have a battle plan for an attack like this from the south?

Lt. Col. E.: “Yes. Since the 2014 Gaza War, we’ve been training for infiltration incidents in our territory, but we never imagined a reference scenario of this magnitude of a number of communities being infiltrated simultaneously.”

To be clear: There was an infiltration scenario and firing at terrorists in our territory does exist. It exists in our understanding, but it’s very extreme in our understanding. To get there, you must know that this is your only option, because in a battle plan where a soldier encounters a terrorist, it’s better to shoot him than firing mortars with a 100 square meter fall out range. 

What do your pilots see at the Re’im gate?

“They see the battle going on there – people running back and forth between the gate and the trees. They construct a picture and realize that these are definitely neither civilians nor our forces. They shoot and hit a group of terrorists inside the trees next to the parking lot. They kill six or seven. Before finishing the battle, they’re sent to another incident taking priority, and they move south.”

The division doesn’t ask them to say and carry on firing at the terrorists?

“The division tell them to move, that there’s another incident taking higher priority. They transfer them to work with the Southern Brigade.” 

But if the division command falls, response capabilities are damaged

“Everyone’s goal is protecting the communities. I don’t know of a commander in the army who would put the division, brigade or outpost above the community. I just don’t."

This modus operandi, transferring helicopters every few minutes from one place to another, carries on all morning. “Every five or six minutes, we were receiving call-outs to another incident,” says Lt. Col. E. “You can’t construct a picture as to where the more urgent thing is, so you go where they tell you.”

In hindsight, is this system of going from one spot to the next an effective method?

“If we’d have stayed in the same place the whole time with other forces - and there were cases like that - we might have prevented something from happening. But it affects the overall aggregate of what was going on at each separate battle at the same time. You can’t foresee what you’ll prevent at a given point.”

His colleague from the 190th Squadron, Lt. Col. A. says this question is hard to answer before investigations are completed. “There were places that helicopters finished off the incident in an hour, while in other places, helicopters operated for hours without bringing the incident to an end. Why? Perhaps there were fewer terrorists there, or maybe it was harder to get our forces in.”

There's much more at the link.

Those who've been "up the sharp end" will recognize much of what the pilots have to say.  Another way of putting it is the old saying, "Order, counter-order, disorder".  An individual command post has a problem, so it orders forces to deal with it, not realizing that there's a bigger problem a few miles away and the forces it needs have just been ordered (by a different command post) to deal with that one.  The forces concerned can only do their best to deal with a hard-to-understand, fractured situation - and risk being court-martialed if they do it wrong, because most command posts (and individuals) are never going to blame themselves.  They'll use the fighting forces as scapegoats.

It's a problem that's been with any and all armed forces since the first organized command structure was developed.  It'll probably end with the heat death of the universe, but even that can't be guaranteed.

Peter

Yesterday I ran into an acquaintance who lives in Lawton, Oklahoma.  I'll call him Kumar (not his real name, for reasons of confidentiality).  He manages a hotel along I-44 in Lawton, one of several owned by his extended family around the country.  He was driving a brand-new Mercedes SUV, a big change from his normal run-down delivery van.

I asked him how he'd been able to afford the upgrade.  He smiled, and said "We owe it all to the New York municipal council."

"Come again?" I asked, puzzled.

"Oh, they've rented both of our family's hotels in the city - every single room - to house migrants, almost since they started arriving in New York.  We're making over a million dollars every month in gross revenue off the migrant surge!  Sure, the expenses are high, too, but overall we've doubled our net family income."

He may have been exaggerating, but a quick Internet search shows he's pretty much on the mark.

In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business.

As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.

. . .

Business owners in the surrounding neighborhoods have noted the decline in economic revenue for their businesses and others around them, as the tourists that would normally stay in such hotels and subsequently patronize their own businesses have been replaced by illegals who have no money.

“Our taxes are being used to pay for the migrants, and where are we supposed to make revenue?” asked William Shandler, manager at the Iron Bar located across the street from the Row hotel. “How as a business could we function?”

Republican Councilwoman Joann Ariola also criticized the gutting of the tourism industry in favor of illegals, pointing out that hotels were built to be used by tourists, “not for sheltering the masses of people pouring over our borders every day.”

“These locations were meant to boost the economy of this city,” Ariola continued, “but instead they’ve become a net drain and are costing us enormously.”

There's more at the link.

Kumar's family came here from India about 40 or 50 years ago, if I understand correctly.  His grandfather and grandmother slaved at any work they could find, and saved every penny they could, while pushing their kids to do well at school.  By the end of ten years, they'd saved enough to buy their first motel, near a major Interstate highway in Pennsylvania.  Grandpa and Grandma managed it, and made sure all the kids worked there before and after school, saving the cost of hiring workers.  By the time most of the kids had graduated high school, the family could afford to buy a second hotel, this one in New Jersey.  It went on like that until today, with three generations of the family involved, they own eleven hotels, all managed by family members, sharing their revenues so that the whole family enjoys the rewards of their hard work.

Well done to all of them - they've certainly demonstrated that the American dream is still within reach if you're prepared to work hard and go for it.  I'm just annoyed that in the process, they've illustrated how fundamentally corrupt our local and regional governments have become.  Look at the numbers cited above.  One city is spending almost $5 billion - so far - to house migrants who should never have been allowed across the border in the first place;  and all that money is coming from local ratepayers and businesses, most of whom desperately need it themselves!  The only upside I can see is that Kumar's family is spending a lot of that windfall income to buy more hotels, and spread themselves out further in this land of opportunity.  One can't blame them at all.  In the process, they're providing a needed service, and that's something we can all appreciate.

Pity one can't say the same about New York City and its demented spendthrift policies . . .

Peter

That's the message from a construction worker in a video that I came across on Twitter/X.  It's less than two minutes long, and worth watching.  PROFANITY ALERT:  The speaker isn't afraid to drop F-bombs all over the place, but that doesn't make his message any less worthwhile.

Basically, the construction worker shows us the shoddy materials and workmanship that can be found in almost all modern construction, due largely (he says) to the fact that better materials often aren't available.  As he points out, once everything's assembled and hidden behind siding, we'll never know how poor the quality is - until something goes wrong, or something fails, and we have to pay for repairs.

If he's right, the entire construction industry right now appears to be a giant rip-off.  I don't see how it can be that bad everywhere, because it would surely have become a national scandal by now;  but I'm prepared to believe that it's that bad in certain areas, or involving certain products.  That being the case, forewarned is fore-armed.

Go watch the video, and learn.

Peter

Welcome to the urban world of the 2020's, in at least some American cities.  An NBC affiliate reports:

Delivery drivers in the South Bay say they're increasingly worried about becoming robbery targets.

It's happening enough that at least one company, Core Mart, is now hiring armed guards to escort its drivers.

Darrell Cortez, a retired San Jose police officer who now works in corporate and retail security, said, "Unfortunately, this is what society has become now with armed guards guarding merchandise from the retailer because there seems to be a sense of lawlessness in our society."

There's more at the link.

And we're supposed to go into those stores in those cities and spend our hard-earned money there, despite the risks posed by thieves outside and inside, aggressive panhandlers, drug addicts looking for a quick score, homeless folks with unpredictable and frequently unsafe behavior living on the streets, and who knows what else?

It makes the old Budweiser tail gunner joke sound rather more real than funny!

Sorry.  Count me out.  I prefer to live and shop in safer climes.

Peter

That's from a 2013 article in Vanity Fair, examining why European elites unjustifiably feel so smugly superior to Americans and their country.  I thought it might be fitting, this July 4th, to bring it to your attention.  Here's an excerpt.

Enough. Enough, enough, enough of this convivial rant, this collectively confirming bigotry. The nasty laugh of little togetherness, or Euro-liberal insecurity. It’s embarrassing, infectious, and belittling. Look at that European snapshot of America. It is so unlike the country I have known for 30 years. Not just a caricature but a travesty, an invention. Even on the most cursory observation, the intellectual European view of the New World is a homemade, Old World effigy that suits some internal purpose. The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of Americans is not about them at all. It’s about us, back here on the ancient, classical, civilized Continent. Well, how stupid can America actually be? On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, only 4 are French, and Heidelberg is one of 4 that creeps in for the Germans. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The U.K., 119. France, 59. America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined. Of course, Nobel Prizes aren’t everything, and America’s aren’t all for inventing Prozac or refining oil. It has 22 Peace Prizes, 12 for literature. (T. S. Eliot is shared with the Brits.)

And are Americans emotionally dim, naïve, irony-free? Do you imagine the society that produced Dorothy Parker and Lenny Bruce doesn’t understand irony? It was an American who said that political satire died when they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. It’s not irony that America lacks; it’s cynicism. In Europe, that arid sneer out of which nothing is grown or made is often mistaken for the creative scalpel of irony. And what about vulgarity? Americans are innately, sniggeringly vulgar. What, vulgar like Henry James or Eleanor Roosevelt or Cole Porter, or the Mormons? Again, it’s a question of definitions. What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie. The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance. It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual. There is a belief that America has no cultural depth or critical seriousness. Well, you only have to walk into an American bookshop to realize that is wildly wrong and willfully blind. What about Mark Twain, or jazz, or Abstract Expressionism?

What is so contrary about Europe’s liberal antipathy to America is that any visiting Venusian anthropologist would see with the merest cursory glance that America and Europe are far more similar than they are different. The threads of the Old World are woven into the New. America is Europe’s greatest invention. That’s not to exclude the contribution to America that has come from around the globe, but it is built out of Europe’s ideas, Europe’s understanding, aesthetic, morality, assumptions, and laws. From the way it sets a table to the chairs it sits on, to the rhythms of its poetry and the scales of its music, the meter of its aspirations and its laws, its markets, its prejudices and neuroses. The conventions and the breadth of America’s reason are European.

This isn’t a claim for ownership, or for credit. But America didn’t arrive by chance. It wasn’t a ship that lost its way. It wasn’t coincidence or happenstance. America grew tall out of the cramping ache of old Europe.

There's much more at the link.

It's worth a read, if others' opinion about America bothers you.  Since moving here almost thirty years ago, I've become more and more proud to be an adopted American.  Despite all this country's innumerable problems, I wouldn't choose to be anywhere else.  I'd rather stay here and help fix my home.

A happy and blessed Independence Day to us all!

Peter

Yesterday I said:

I can only presume that the Democratic Party, knowing his health to be so poor as to preclude re-election, has been frantically looking for any way to remove President Biden from the election ticket, and possibly from his current office as well ... Biden's handlers almost literally threw him to the political wolves last night.

After reading many more comments about Thursday's debate, from both sides of the political aisle, I'm even more sure I was right.  I can't see any reason for the Democratic Party to allow a semi-senile President Biden to debate a former President Trump unless it was to provide a clear demonstration of the former's disastrous state of mental health.  Having exhausted most of their other options to replace him with a better candidate for November's election, they're now effectively providing the ammunition for his enemies - aided and abetted behind the scenes by Obama loyalists, who have in effect been running the Biden administration since its beginning - to remove him for them.

The trouble is, too many people seem to have forgotten one critical point.  President Biden has already won the Democratic Party's nomination to be its Presidential candidate in 2024.  That can't simply be ignored.  If he refuses to go, his party has almost no way left - in the time available - to legally replace him on the ballot with someone else.  If President Biden, angered and frustrated at the way he's being treated by his party, turns on them and rejects their demand that he resign, there's not much they can legally do about it in terms of internal party politics.

That leaves the available options as the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, and/or some other major health crisis.  Congress can order the President's removal under the 25th Amendment:  or, alternatively, if President Biden falls seriously ill or is injured by whatever cause, his Vice-President may be able to take over his office until (if?) he recovers.  That, in turn, might provide at least some legal justification to replace him as the candidate in November.

However, the latter case raises yet another issue.  I can't see Kamala Harris willingly resigning the Vice-Presidency;  and if she doesn't, she automatically becomes President if anything happens to her current boss.  That would, in turn, give her a relatively strong case to go into the November election as the incumbent, with all the advantages that provides to a candidate.  Sure, she's even more unpopular on a national basis than are most potential candidates to replace President Biden;  but she's got the inside track, and in the absence of a suitably tempting "carrot" to give it up, she probably won't be afraid to use it.

That brings up another factor favoring Kamala Harris.  We've never had a woman President.  If she succeeds to President Biden's office, she can claim to have "shattered the glass ceiling" keeping women out of the top spot (much as Hillary Clinton tried to claim during the 2016 election).  That might galvanize parts of the Democratic Party base who are currently wavering in their loyalty to the political establishment.  Yes, her personal unpopularity would still be a factor in the election, but (IMHO) less so in the presence of that reality.  She can argue that much of the former is due to men wanting to keep women down.  There might even be an element of truth in that perspective, given the sheer nastiness displayed by some of our politicians.

I have no idea what will happen.  I guess most of us don't.  However, behind the scenes, the unseen powers manipulating both political parties are making deals, calling the shots, and getting ready to impose their preferred solution on the rest of us.  I won't be surprised to see at least some of the following measures over the next month or two, not necessarily in this order.

• Biden digs in his heels and resists calls to resign.
• Congress invokes the 25th Amendment to force him out of office.  If confronted with a fait accompli, will Biden resign rather than be removed?  Is he still capable of making such a decision?  There's a distinct chance that things could turn nasty, and very publicly at that.
• While that's going on, frantic negotiations take place behind the scenes to select a more electable candidate for November.
• Kamala Harris might be allowed to take over the Presidency on a short-term basis (thereby "ensuring her place in history" by allowing her to claim that she "broke the glass ceiling" for all who follow her), but on the understanding she will not be the Democratic Party candidate for the position in November.  She'll demand, and almost certainly receive, a substantial quid pro quo for her cooperation.  Perhaps, if Gavin Newsom becomes the presidential candidate, she could take his place as Governor of California for a term?  I'm sure she'd also become considerably wealthier if she cooperated.  If she doesn't cooperate?  Well . . . accidents happen . . .
• While all this is going on, I'm sure there will be immense resources devoted to finding the most electable Democratic Party candidate for November 2024.  Who that might be remains to be seen.  I daresay that, of the names currently in (public) play, Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama are the front-runners;  but either will have to give up a lot of the power they've currently amassed among their existing supporters if they're to run.  Will they be prepared to do so?  And will enough Americans, already sickened and frustrated by the political corruption in both of their backgrounds, be willing to put aside their distaste and vote for them?
• Finally, can the security, fairness and honesty of the November 2024 election be sustained?  Many have their doubts.  Others insist that there's no evidence of any attempt to fiddle with the results.  I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Peter

President Biden's performance at yesterday's debate was pitiful;  a shambling wreck of a re-election bid that must have given great aid and comfort to this country's enemies.  After all, if you were President Xi of China, or President Putin of Russia, or Kim Seriously-Ill of North Korea, how could you not be encouraged to realize that the current President of the USA was supposed to be the person holding you in check?

I can only presume that the Democratic Party, knowing his health to be so poor as to preclude re-election, has been frantically looking for any way to remove President Biden from the election ticket, and possibly from his current office as well.  After seeing that debate, I don't see how a 25th Amendment motion to remove President Biden from office can be resisted, on either side of the political aisle.  Biden's handlers almost literally threw him to the political wolves last night.  (I've been saying for years that the way they've been manipulating him is nothing less than elder abuse.  Last night's exhibition simply made that even more clear.)

The question is, who might take his place in the Oval Office, and on the ticket in November?  None of the usual suspects appear capable of attracting enough positive attention and support to succeed.  Kamala Harris?  Hillary Clinton?  Michelle Obama?  They all have their partisan supporters, but they've also attracted so much vituperation, disgust and dislike that I can't see them as viable candidates.  So . . . if not them . . . who?

Wouldn't it be fun if the Democratic Party chose Stormy Daniels to run against former President Trump?  Bring on those debates, boys!

Peter

Back in 1966, speaking to the flower power generation, Timothy Leary popularized the mantra "Turn on, tune in, drop out".  It was goofy, nihilistic, short-sighted, and solved nothing of the problems then facing society.

Over the past few months, as I've had no choice (thanks to kidney issues) but to spend a lot of time sitting or lying down, I've had the opportunity to read, watch and listen to all sorts of discussions about the problems our country, and our world, are currently facing.  We've discussed some of them in these pages on numerous previous occasions, and I'm not going to repeat all that now.  However, the headlines - even in mainstream media - are growing more and more alarmist.  I give you these few examples from the past week.  If you're interested, click the links provided to read them for yourself.

It's way too easy to absorb all the doom-gloom-and-disaster flying around the news and social media.  We can get so tied up in "Look what they're doing now!", "What are we going to do if this, or that, or the other happens?" and "The sky is falling!" that we ignore the reality all around us.  Whatever the big-picture developments, we still need to earn our living;  families need to keep raising and educating their kids;  and life as we know it goes on, and has to go on, despite the foolishness of national and world leaders.  Will the Trump-Biden debate today change a single thing about the way we live?  It's unlikely, I think - so why obsess about it?

I think Timothy Leary's slogan might not be a bad one to adopt in the midst of all these pressures and tensions.  Think about it:

• "Turn on" - to what's happening around you, recognizing danger signs (e.g. inflation, shortages, etc.) for what they are.  Situational awareness is key.  What's my situation?  What's my family's situation?  We need to be "turned on" to those vital necessities far more than we are to hypothetical big-picture nastiness that may, or may not, affect us.  We can do nothing about the big picture.  We're small fry.  However, if each of us "small fry" takes care of what's put in front of us to do, our combined efforts might build up to a surprisingly influential weight in the scales of the big picture.  For example:  the nation is drowning in debt.  So are many families.  What can we, as individuals and families, do to pay down (and hopefully eliminate) our own debt?  It's no good yelling at our politicians for taking on more and more debt for the nation, if we're following their example locally.  Pot, meet kettle.  Kettle, pot.
• "Tune in" - to what's going on in areas where we can make a difference.  Support local food banks, thrift stores, centers for community education, libraries, and so on.  We can't make a difference to or in our local community if we don't know what's going on around us.  Instead of focusing only on national or international news, click on the "Local News" sections of your local news sources and find out what's happening.  I've been pleasantly surprised to find out how many ways there are for people to help people and build our communities.  I'd never have known about most of them if I hadn't looked for them.
• "Drop out" - of anything and everything where we can achieve nothing.  By all means be politically or socially active, but emphasize activities that can make a difference.  Demonstrating in the streets seldom does.  Writing angry letters to politicians achieves little, if anything - besides, our politicians almost never get to read our letters.  They're handled by lower-level functionaries.  Each of our congressional representatives, on average, has to look after more than a million constituents.  They can't possibly give individual attention to each of them - so trying to put individual pressure on them is a loser from the start.  Rather join others working to achieve reform, improvement, etc. in areas you think are important. In the same way, when it comes to preparing for hard times (something all of us will be well advised to do, as the headlines above give evidence), let's focus on things we will need locally.  Food, household products, fuel, a place to store our supplies, security for our family against societal breakdown, etc. - all of these have their place, and they're all important.  If we don't yet have the basics in place, we need to stop spending our money on less important things and get those basics right.  If we don't, the doom-gloom-and-disaster brigade will point and jeer at us and catcall, "We told you so!" - and they'll be right.  Drop out of what won't help us as "small fry".  Drop into practical, realistic, essential preparations for a hard time, whatever it may be.

The late President Theodore Roosevelt put it in a nutshell, as far as I'm concerned.

Truer words were never spoken.  We need to take his advice to heart, stop living in Panic City, and get on with it.  We can't change the world - we're small fry;  but we can change our small piece of it to resist most (sadly, not all) of the problems that threaten it.  Read those last three words again.  They don't read "in Washington, D.C." or "in your State capitol" or "in your city council".  They read "where you are".

Those are our marching orders.  We'll be very unwise indeed to disregard them.

Peter

We've spoken often in these pages about preparing for emergencies.  Food supplies, weapons, security issues, and a host of other topics have been covered.  However, there are several areas that are seldom mentioned in "prepping" circles:  threats that are so everyday, so routine, that we lose sight of how they might escalate into a real problem - or make preparing for a real emergency harder to afford, because of other drains on our wallets.  I've been discussing some of them with correspondents in recent weeks, and in this article, I'd like to tackle a few of them.

Let's take property and vehicle insurance.  They've gone up a lot over the past few years:  I've seen estimates that they're up more than 25% since 2020, and some estimates put it at over 40%.  Certainly, my wife and I have seen ours go up steeply, but that's partly because our insurer calculates the replacement value of our home at a considerably higher figure than we do.  I'm in the process of discussing that with our insurer, citing local costs and sales prices to prove our point.  That should help to bring our premiums back down, but it won't erase the higher costs completely.

How does one "prepare" for such increased costs?  It's important to watch your premiums closely, particularly notices warning you of an increase.  Your insurer will rate the value of your home according to a formula for your area, which might add too much value for your specific town or location (e.g. a valuation formula for "Northern Texas" is not as focused as one for "Arlington TX" or "Muenster TX").  Don't be afraid to raise such issues with your insurer, and negotiate the replacement value of your home down to a more reasonable level - one that'll cost you less in premium increases.  By doing that every year or two, the cumulative increase in your insurance costs over several years might be quite a lot lower than if you didn't.

Another option is to buy less expensive vehicles;  either a smaller, cheaper new car, or a used vehicle at a lower price than a new one.  Their insurance rate is calculated according to their value.  Buying the higher-end model might cost as much as $50-$100 more per month to insure than buying the entry-level model - and does it really make that much difference to drive the less luxurious version?  When considered along with all the other increases, those savings start to look attractive.  (Until recently, given the outlandishly high prices being asked for used vehicles, it was in many cases cheaper to buy a lower-priced new one such as Kia's Soul or Ford's Maverick light pickup.  Not only did they cost less than a used smaller SUV, but they offered similar interior space for passengers, and depreciation losses in today's market are minimal compared to years past.  I know a number of families who did that, and they've generally been happy with the deals they got.)

How about electricity bills?  They've been rising pretty steeply in our part of the world.  Even though we aren't major consumers of electricity, we're paying several hundred dollars a month for it, particularly now as the heat of summer makes big demands on our HVAC system.  There are many ways to save electricity, from shutting off major appliances like water heaters, not using ovens to cook, adjusting the internal temperature to levels that don't require as much electricity to maintain, and so on.

I'm seriously considering installing a mini-split air conditioning system for our main room in addition to the central HVAC system, because the former functions off a 120-volt circuit instead of 240, and consumes less than a quarter of the power needed by the central system.  If we shut off our central HVAC system when we're out and about, and run only the smaller unit for six to eight hours a day, it'll keep the central part of the house at a comfortable temperature but consume a lot less electricity.  I figure that in two years, the savings will pay for the entire mini-split system, including installation, and after that the savings are all gravy, so to speak.  I've not made a final decision yet, but it's a tempting thought.

If your HVAC system is getting old and you're considering replacing it, it might be worth your while to look at installing two or more mini-split or multi-split systems instead of one big central system.  The cost of installing the former can be half to two-thirds the cost of the latter, and their power consumption, even taken together, will usually be at least a third less than a central system.  Add up those savings and it becomes a rather attractive option, provided your home is constructed in such a way that the smaller systems can be "plumbed into" it relatively easily.

What about municipal and/or county rates and taxes?  It's worth checking on their valuation of your home, and contesting any sudden increases.  Too many counties issue bonds to construct new infrastructure such as schools, emergency services, etc. and then clobber residents with big increases in their rates.  These can be contested, particularly if actual sales prices achieved by comparable properties in your area demonstrate that the valuation is too high.  A lower valuation leads to lower rates, saving you money.

These are just some ways one can economize on one's overall household expenditure.  I'm sure readers have more they can contribute.  If you do, please share them with us in Comments.  We're almost all finding it hard to make ends meet these days.  Why not help each other to make our dollars go further?

Peter

A journalist and writer ponders what she calls "My last five years of work".

I am 25. These next three years might be the last few years that I work. I am not ill, nor am I becoming a stay-at-home mom, nor have I been so financially fortunate to be on the brink of voluntary retirement. I stand at the edge of a technological development that seems likely, should it arrive, to end employment as I know it.

I work at a frontier AI company. With every iteration of our model, I am confronted with something more capable and general than before. At this stage, it can competently generate cogent content on a wide range of topics. It can summarize and analyze texts passably well. As someone who at one point made money as a freelance writer and prided myself on my ability to write large amounts of content quickly, a skill which—like cutting blocks of ice from a frozen pond—is arguably obsolete, I find it hard not to notice these advances. Freelance writing was always an oversubscribed skillset, and the introduction of language models has further intensified competition.

The general reaction to language models among knowledge workers is one of denial. They grasp at the ever diminishing number of places where such models still struggle, rather than noticing the ever-growing range of tasks where they have reached or passed human level ... The economically and politically relevant comparison on most tasks is not whether the language model is better than the best human, it is whether they are better than the human who would otherwise do that task.

. . .

Many expect AI to eventually be able to do every economically useful task. I agree. Given the current trajectory of the technology, I expect AI to first excel at any kind of online work. Essentially anything that a remote worker can do, AI will do better. Copywriting, tax preparation, customer service, and many other tasks are or will soon be heavily automated. I can see the beginnings in areas like software development and contract law. Generally, tasks that involve reading, analyzing, and synthesizing information, and then generating content based on it, seem ripe for replacement by language models.

There's more at the link.

Hers is a timely article.  With more and more white-collar workers being displaced by artificial intelligence and expert systems, it's going to be an ongoing and increasingly important debate:  what will we do when there's no longer anything that we're needed to do?

This also calls for a re-examination of the much-derided concept of universal basic income.  If automation reduces the number of available jobs far below the number of workers available to fill them, who's going to provide for the unemployed workers?  They can't be abandoned to starve, so some form of UBI appears to be inevitable.  What form that might take is currently being debated world-wide, but that it will be required seems incontrovertible.

Food for thought - particularly for a wordsmith, blogger and writer like myself.

Peter

UnHerd has produced a masterly analysis of the trap into which government spending and subsidies has led much of American life today.  Here's an excerpt.

Democrats and Republicans alike, under the cover of good intentions, have been passing laws that undermine the economic well-being of American families. Even more disturbing, these policies have created a whole new class of robber barons, who rely on government policy to enrich themselves. But these new robber barons aren’t railroad tycoons or rapacious oil companies. Indeed, many of them are non-profits: they include universities and hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, K-12 school districts, and real estate investors.

. . .

This is how it works: Claiming to be the guardian of “quality”, policymakers put up barriers to entry, making it extremely costly, for example, to launch a new university or hospital. This is the restriction of supply. At the same time, in the name of “helping” consumers, they push billions of dollars into student loans or healthcare payments. This is the subsidisation of demand.

. . .

... all of the universities, including elite colleges in the Ivy League, have reaped billions of dollars in economic rents — excess profits — from student loan programmes, even as the value of many of their degrees has fallen dramatically.

At the same time, the universities operate an accreditation system which makes it extraordinarily difficult and costly to launch a new university that might compete with them. In fact, you usually can’t get your new university accredited until four-to-six years after you open. That means that your first students aren’t eligible for federal student loans — their subsidies — until you get your accreditation. It’s a huge handicap for anyone who wants to disrupt the current oligopoly of higher education.

These dynamics play out in all of the most important sectors of our economy. In healthcare, new hospitals in many states have to apply for a “certificate of need”. Often that certificate has to be signed by the other hospitals in the area — in other words, their potential competitors. Meanwhile, federal and state governments flood the healthcare system with subsidies that increase demand and drive prices up: almost 50% of health care spending comes from governmental entities in the US.

In housing, similarly, we restrict supply by making it harder and harder to build new units, especially in city centres where demand is the highest. Meanwhile, we subsidise demand by providing government-guaranteed mortgages and by offering huge tax breaks for anyone who purchases real estate, especially investors.

And in K-12 education, school districts around the country are trying to stamp out charter schools, which increase supply, while at the same time arguing for higher and higher per-pupil spending. The cost to educate one child for one year has increased 173% (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, and half the kids still can’t read.

The pathologies of these sectors all follow similar patterns. Politicians proclaim their desire to “protect” quality and “help” consumers. Industry lobbyists step up to write bills that restrict supply and subsidise demand. Prices go up. Providers become more and more reliant on the government for their profits. Consumers become more and more reliant on the government to afford homes, healthcare, and schools. Instead of investing in innovation, providers spend their money on political donations and lobbyists. Politicians become dependent on those donations. Consumers demand more and more help because prices are going up, and they’re getting ripped off. And the beat goes on. “It really is a self-reinforcing process,” says Kling. “People don’t understand that the subsidies drive up prices, so they keep demanding more.”

There's more at the link.

To all those negatives, add two more:

1. All those subsidies and other government programs add layer upon layer of bureaucrats to government to administer them.  In other words, government becomes a fulfilment machine rather than an administrator.  More and more of its money is spent on such subsidies and fulfilment programs rather than on the business of government.
2. The level of government involvement in such programs affects how government governs.  Lower-level governments - e.g. town and city councils - don't have enough money to subsidize such programs, so they push it up to state level.  State legislatures don't have enough money either, so they put pressure on their congressional representatives and Senators to get that money from the federal government.  The feds duly provide it, but have to increase taxes and/or borrow more money to pay it;  and they also have to hire more bureaucrats to administer it.  The state governments also need more staff to administer where the money comes from and where it goes, expanding state government.  Finally, at the "coalface" where the money is paid out, more government staff are needed to administer, account for and report back on how it's used.

The only way to stop this perpetual motion machine is, of course, to take away many of the things it currently does that were never envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  They'd be horrified if they saw the myriad things on which the federal government spends its money, things that were never envisioned in or authorized by the constitution, but which now consume the vast majority of government income and effort.

The problem, as always, is this:  how do we break the cycle?  If we cut off the subsidies, those deprived of them will scream blue murder, and vote against the politicians who acted responsibly by terminating them.  That means the politicians dare not tackle the monster they've helped to create.  Argentina is trying to do so by dismantling whole swaths of its national government, but that's because the problem had grown so great there that the state had become a behemoth that was strangling the country as a whole.  President Milei has only just begun the job, and there's no guarantee his opponents - now united against him - will allow him enough space and time to finish the job.  I wish him every success, but the odds are against him.

Do we have a President Milei who can do the same for us?

Peter

Yesterday Jeff Childers laid out the growing danger of fully autonomous robotic weapons, which have no conscience and no moral code, and can (and already do) kill without reference to a human operator or a controlling battlefield system.  I agree with him that it's a very disturbing element in warfare, one that threatens not only to make human combat more or less obsolete on the battlefront, but also pass an automated death sentence on anybody - combatant or civilian - in or near that battlefront.

Until very recently — so recently you will be forgiven lack of notice of the change — it was fashionable among elites to wring their hands over letting robots decide whether to kill people. Countless conferences were devoted to the subject, new UN departments were designed, and new job descriptions were drafted, spawning battalions of specialized military bioethicists.

Zing! What was that? That was bioethics flying out the window. Sorry, chaps, pack it in. All those new ethics experts and professors and opinion influencers just became redundant. They are moot.

. . .

On June 4th, 2024 — mark the date — the Washington Post quietly ran an unobtrusive “good news” op-ed headlined, “The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war.” To call it “just an op-ed” would do violence to its malevolent significance. First of all, the author, spy novelist and columnist David Ignatius, is one of WaPo’s most senior writers, and it’s a poorly hidden secret he is inextricably intertwined with the deep security state.

. . .

David’s op-ed began gently chiding the U.S. military for, with the very best of intentions, its antiquated ‘addiction’ to overly complicated, finicky, insanely expensive, super high-tech, human-directed weapons systems, rather than cheap, practical, reliable, and effective alternatives like the Russians are using to beat the Dickens out of Ukraine.

. . .

Most folks now agree the Russians’ pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach in Ukraine has decisively proven its battlefield superiority over our fancy, high-tech, acronymized weapons that took decades to develop: our top-tier M1 Abrams tanks, our PATRIOT air defense systems, our HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, our JDAMS flying bombs, and our networked cluster munitions.

They all literally or figuratively bogged down in the Ukrainian rasputitsa. In other words, stuck in the mud.

But the bigger problem is that all our defense systems, from the most modest mobile artillery unit to the sky-scraping F35 intelligent fighter jet, are all e-something, or i-something. They are all linked together, connected to the internet, in a networked global battlefield information system (GBIS). They were designed to be centrally controllable from the confines of an op center safely concealed under two hundred feet of granite below the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, the Russians — those ‘incompetent,’ slipshod, gas-station-with-nukes ice jockeys — somehow overtook us in electronic jamming technology. And then kept going, without looking back. The Russians are jamming all our toys!

Our Borg-like, electronically interconnected technology is dead in the water, or in the mud, if it can’t talk to the other parts of itself. Worse, Russian jamming cuts it all off from its handlers thousands of miles away in America. In other words, it’s damned useless, which is why Ignatius predicted it wouldn’t last five minutes against China.

Ignatius’ description of this perfectly foreseeable development understated the terror and panic on the part of U.S. generals. It all worked so well against Saddam Hussein’s disorganized army! But the generals are slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the fact our entire arsenal is close to useless against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.

In desperation, and because Ukraine uber alles, all those ethical concerns over autonomous weapons systems instantly became as obsolete as our trillion-dollar aircraft carriers. The ban on machines that kill on automatic has been swept aside.

It’s an emergency, dummy.

Then, Ignatius described the easy fix to the problem. The simple correction is truly autonomous weapons, weapons that can’t be jammed, weapons that don’t have to talk to each other, weapons that push the pesky humans right out of the picture. In the same way the military is now quietly moving aside the humans, David also glided right over the pesky ethical issues, which earned not a single syllable in his column.

. . .

Who’s responsible when the robot goes rogue and wipes out a village, or a wedding, or a whole city? Who’s tried for the war crimes?

Nobody, that’s who. You can’t expect technology to be perfect, dummy.

You can’t put a robot on trial. Come on, be serious.

The government knows full well that public outcry will only slow down the killer robot train. The military is now moving with mind-blowing, demonic, uncharacteristic speed toward building its dystopian, robot-armed future. The first fully autonomous killing machines have already been designed, built, and delivered to Ukraine.

. . .

Ignatius also assured us that the Air Force is, right now, building robotic fighter jets labeled with the grim euphemism “uncrewed.” The robots can keep on fighting, long after the human crews are gone.

Similarly, last month, the Navy formed a new squadron of hundreds of fully autonomous, uncrewed boats, a water swarm with the unwieldy name, “Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft.” GARC doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but maybe it echoes the last thing dying sailors say.

Instead of applying that awkward acronym, the Navy has nicknamed its new robot squadron the “Hell Hounds.”

. . .

It’s easy to blame Congress for failing to pull the plug, slow things down, or at least hold a public debate. But remember: attractive, well-spoken military analysts constantly deliver confidential, top-secret briefings to Congressmen, direly warning them China will win in five minutes unless we do something.

What can I say? It’s 2024. Here come the terminators, and nothing can stop it. We all knew this day was coming; we just didn’t think it would come from us.

Somebody track down that scrappy Sarah Connor and tell her it’s time to report for duty.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

(Also recommended is this article at Strategy Page, analyzing how drone operations are dominating the war in Ukraine, and assessing their impact.  It doesn't look at the autonomous aspect, but is nevertheless a valuable summary of the current state of the art.)

This is a very ominous development for all the reasons Mr. Childers has stated.  However, think of the wider implications.  Nations ruled by dictatorial elites now have tools at their disposal that can steamroller right over opposition movements, and suppress rebellion and civil war before they even get out of the starting gate.  An oppressive regime no longer needs battalions and regiments and divisions of storm troopers to control its subjects;  it merely needs enough autonomous robots that will do its bidding without moral considerations or ethical hesitation.  A town is rebelling against government authority?  Send in the robots and wipe out every man, woman and child in that town.  There's an outcry afterwards?  Blame the robots, which were "not properly programmed", and put on trial and execute a couple of sacrificial puppets who can be alleged to have been responsible for that erroneous programming.  There!  Problem solved! - and the regime is still in power.  After the third, or fourth, or fifth such town is "depopulated", there won't be many more willing to take a stand for freedom, will there?

If you remove humanity from society, it becomes an inhuman dystopia.  That's what modern warfare is becoming, at least if Ukraine is any example.  What if the rest of society follows suit?

Scary thought . . .

Peter

Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of the German Empire during the nineteenth century, said many things that have become quotations.  Two of them are:

Politics is the art of the possible

Politics is the art of the next best

The Socratic Method says of the first quotation:  "By recognizing that politics is fundamentally the art of compromise, Bismarck encourages leaders to chart a course that maximizes the achievable progress rather than becoming entangled in unattainable dreams."  That applies to the second quotation as well, of course:  if one can't get the best possible result, try for the next best.  (A modern version might read, "Aim for the stars.  Even if you miss, you might reach the moon on your way up.")

In terms of preparing for emergencies and hard times, I've been getting more and more disturbed by the amount of time and energy some people are spending arguing with each other, denouncing each other's points of view, calling each other names and disputing future forecasts, rather than focusing on what we can actually do, today and every other day, to achieve practical, possible, feasible results.  The latter is essential.  The former is a waste of . . . well, everything, really.  It produces nothing except hard feelings and bad language.

There seems (to me) to be little point in arguing whether we should be joining militias, or stocking up on arms and ammunition, or preparing lists of people who need to be targeted when things go to hell in a hand-basket.  Preparedness means, first and foremost, readiness to deal with the most likely emergencies that may confront us.  That could mean a power outage, a broken water system, an epidemic, severe weather conditions, or any combination of those factors.  We should make sure we're as ready as we can be to ride out those emergencies, along with our families and loved ones.  Only after we've got those preparations in place should we worry about more extended emergencies;  a breakdown in the rule of law, escalating crime, political turmoil leading to national chaos, and so on.  As individuals and families, we can do little if anything to affect those crises.  They're too big for us.  On the other hand, if we all take care of the "little things" - the smaller, local crises mentioned above, that we are in a position to deal with - then we'll be better able, as individuals and as communities, to respond to larger challenges as and when they arise.

I'll give you an example from my own family.  We have certain health issues that would make it very difficult if we were to lose power for an extended period.  We need to be able to filter allergens out of our household air, and keep the temperature at a bearable level.  If we can't, there may be serious consequences.  To help deal with that, we've spent money on sources of backup electrical power, so that even if we have to do without utility electricity for a month or more, we can nevertheless ensure that at least part of our home will be in a livable condition for us.

We're slowly but steadily, as we can afford it, continuing to extend the period that we could live without the electrical grid.  We're never going to be completely independent of it, but we're trying to ensure that if an emergency arises and we lose power, we can deal with it in the short to medium term.  That's possible.  That's practical.  Living completely off the grid is simply not possible for us, so we don't lose sleep worrying about it.  Equally, threats to the national grid - transformers wearing out, terror attacks, whatever - are something we can do absolutely nothing about;  so we don't waste time getting scared by them.  Why be afraid of what you can't control?  Rather concentrate on what you can control.

As the late President Theodore Roosevelt advised us:

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are

I think that dovetails very neatly with Otto von Bismarck's advice.  I think it also puts into perspective the shouting and tumult we sometimes find when individuals or groups attack each other's views and proposals.  Let's not waste time on that.  Let's spend our time on things that will build each other up, rather than break each other down.  There are more than enough people out there ready, willing and able to do the latter.  Why make their job easier?  Why do it for them?

Peter

We've examined the topics of IQ (theoretical and applied), education and ability on several occasions in these pages.  If you'd like to read the earlier articles:

Higher education and IQ

IQ, countries, and coping skills

IQ and potential, both individual and national

Karl Denninger warns that the flood of lower-IQ migrants across our borders threatens to lower our national competence to cope with issues and problems.  (WARNING:  He uses more profanity than usual in his article.)  Here are some excerpts.  Emphasis in original.

You won't like this and I don't care.

You're going to die if you don't take this to heart, or even worse your kids will die.

What am I talking about?

Quite simply its this: You need about a 115 IQ to build and maintain modern civilization.

Examples?  Too many to count.  How about Flint's water system?  It poisoned a bunch of kids, remember?

Why didn't it poison kids for the previous 80 years?  It had been there that long, with the same lead service lines, but didn't poison anyone ... The 115+ IQ people who built and ran the water plant at Flint all those years knew this, and knew how to keep it safe.  They drank out of the same lines and so not only did they know how they had plenty of incentive to not screw up -- and as professionals who were smart, they didn't screw up.

Then Shaqueena, or her analog with a <115 IQ took over.  And changed the water source.  And, at the same time, didn't check and make sure the chemical and pH balance remained correct because the intellectual firepower to do so was simply no longer there.  The result was a bunch of poisoned kids.

. . .

Why do I bring all this up?

Because if we do not stop destroying the incentives for those on the right end of the IQ bell curve to have kids it will not be all that long before you go to flush the toilet and it won't, your stove, heat and A/C won't work either because there's no power or gas and virtually everything we rely on in the modern world will either kill you or simply not function at all.

Its much worse when people who simply don't have the intellectual chops for a given task are passed in school and given credentials they didn't earn.

. . .

Those who built all these things we enjoy today and in fact are the reason we can have several billion people on this planet -- most of them created by white men, and all of them by persons of >115 IQ -- are going to die.  We all die; it is inevitable.  If we do not stop demonstrating to those who are of higher intelligence that the only reason to have kids is their own hedonism, and by doing so for hedonistic purpose they will screw their offspring as those kids will have a s***ty future said people will choose not to breed as they are choosing right now.  The data is clear in this regard -- those who are of higher intelligence are choosing not to have kids and since they are of higher intelligence it is obvious that they are capable of reasoning out the incentives and disincentives, weighing both for themselves and what they perceive as the future for any children they might choose to produce -- and that analysis, once complete, is unfavorable as they see it.

People often claim that as societies advance the people tend to have fewer children.  That's a true statement but did you notice that the "why" is never discussed?  As societies advance inevitably people are led to believe, often by active fraud peddlers, that you can have something for nothing and the more-intelligent discern that it is likely their children will get ****ed by this pattern.  Said persons have no means to stop it peacefully as they're out-represented (by definition > 115 IQ is at least one standard deviation out on the right side and thus they're out-voted roughly 6:1) so they simply choose not to have children at all.  This inevitably results in the average of the curve shifting leftward unless it it is stomped on hard.

There's more at the link.

Like Mr. Denninger, I and many others have warned that "If you import the Third World, you become the Third World".  We're seeing that in action right now.  Despite the progressive left's demonization of IQ as a First World approach that automatically reduces equality and diversity in our workforce, IQ remains the single best indicator of whether or not a nation, or a city, or an organization, can and will prosper.  Higher IQ = better chances of that happening.  Lower IQ = lower chances of that happening.  It's as simple as that.

Peter

Bird flu has been in the news a lot lately, with concerns about how America's poultry production (both eggs and meat) may be devastated if it continues to spread.  There's also speculation that if a strain of bird flu, or H5N1 as it's technically known, adapts to humans, the resulting epidemic could kill thousands.

What puzzles me is the insistence by the medical establishment of pushing "cures" such as Tamiflu or Relenza to treat H5N1.  Yes, they offer some hope, and may alleviate minor doses of the flu:  but there's another option that's been widely used in the Third World for years.  That's chloroquine, as well as its derivative hydroxychloroquine.  You'll doubtless remember their being advocated as a treatment for COVID-19 during the pandemic.  Many, including myself, believe it's because of the existing widespread use of hydroxychloroquine (as a prophylactic medication against malaria infection) and ivermectin (as a treatment for river blindness and other illnesses endemic to the continent) that prevented COVID-19 from gaining a foothold in Africa.  So many potential victims were already dosed with an effective treatment that the disease simply couldn't take root.

Unfortunately, the medical establishment is largely ignoring the fact that chloroquine has been claimed by some researchers to be a highly effective treatment against H5N1.

Yan, et al studied H5N1 infection in the laboratory and demonstrated that physiological relevant concentrations of chloroquine inhibited viral entry and damage to human cells. Additionally, when given as treatment and not prophylaxis, chloroquine reduced pulmonary alveolar infiltrates and improved survival in mice after a lethal dose of H5N1 from zero to 70%.

There's more at the link.

Hydroxychloroquine is freely available in the USA, and ivermectin is becoming more so.  (Here's one source of supply;  I think their price is ridiculously high, but there are others if you shop around, often less expensive.)  If you're worried about the possible crossover of the H5N1 influenza virus to the human population, I strongly suggest that you try to obtain some of each, and keep it in your emergency reserve supplies.  (I'm not being compensated in any way for linking to one supplier;  I'm doing so only because I know readers sometimes have difficulty finding a local source of supply.)

I no longer trust the medical profession to speak the truth about epidemics and illnesses - not after they made such a dog's breakfast out of COVID-19.  I'd rather investigate potential threats myself, obtain what information is available, and prepare accordingly.

Peter

I had to laugh at this report.

Almost two centuries after California's gold rush, the United States is on the brink of a lithium rush. As demand for the material skyrockets, government geologists are rushing to figure out where the precious element is hiding.

In September 2023, scientists funded by a mining company reported finding what could be the largest deposit of lithium in an ancient US supervolcano. Now public researchers on the other side of the country have uncovered another untapped reservoir – one that could cover nearly half the nation's lithium demands.

It's hiding in wastewater from Pennsylvania's gas fracking industry.

Lithium is arguably the most important element in the nation's renewable energy transition – the material of choice for electric vehicle batteries. And yet, there is but one large-scale lithium mine in the US, meaning for the moment the country has to import what it needs.

. . .

Expanding America's lithium industry, however, is highly controversial, as mining can destroy natural environments, leach toxic chemicals, and intrude on sacred Indigenous land.

At the same time, however, lithium-ion batteries are considered a crucial technology in the world's transition to renewable energy, storing electricity generated by the wind and the Sun. Finding a source of lithium that doesn't cause more environmental destruction than necessary is key, but a clean solution is complicated.

Pennsylvania sits on a vein of sedimentary rock known as the Marcellus Shale, which is rich in natural gas. The geological foundation was deposited almost 400 million years ago by volcanic activity, and it contains lithium from volcanic ash.

Over vast stretches of time, deep groundwater has dissolved the lithium in these rocks, essentially "mining the subsurface", according to Justin Mackey, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pennsylvania.

Mackey and his colleagues have now found that when wastewater is dredged up from the deep by fracking activities, it contains an astonishing amount of lithium.

There's more at the link.

Looks like the irresistible force is about to collide headlong with the immovable object, in environmental terms.  The US government and the tree-huggers want to eliminate as much fossil fuel as possible, and are therefore pushing electric vehicles as the solution.  On the other hand, if they want to do that, they have to have lithium for the EV's batteries:  and a major source for lithium now appears to be the fracking technologies they've been trying to ban for years, on the grounds that they're a major source of pollution and other problems.

Which do they want most?  Abundant batteries?  Or abundant gasoline as a derivative of abundant batteries?  Will they do without the latter, even though it means that obtaining the former will be more difficult and much more expensive?  Or will they fuel the vehicles of those of us who reject EV's as being insufficiently developed to be practical, in order to have more EV's to sell to those who want them?

Oh, the irony is delicious . . .

Peter

It turns out that re-scheduling marijuana to a lower drug classification has left the trucking industry with a big problem and few options to solve it.

The trucking industry is raising concerns about President Joe Biden downgrading marijuana to a lower level of drug classification — especially how the move could threaten highway safety.

The American Trucking Associations’ and Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s questions about reclassifying cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug include how it would affect carriers’ ability to test drivers for the substance.

“Absent an explicit allowance for continued employer marijuana testing of safety-sensitive workers, this change may have considerable negative consequences for highway safety and safety-sensitive industries,” the ATA said in a letter to three federal department heads.

There's more at the link.

It really is a big problem.  Marijuana can affect one's reflexes, concentration, etc. just as badly as alcohol, particularly when it comes to synthetic marijuana or a high-strength varietal.  Cops I speak to tell me it's already a very large problem in big cities, where the majority of drug users are to be found, and even in smaller towns it's making its presence felt.

I don't know how they're going to handle testing and disciplinary requirements.  If marijuana is officially no longer considered as dangerous, can drivers be fired for using it?  They (or their lawyers) could argue that if using it is not against the law, the drivers cannot be punished for using it.  And how does one measure the actual level of intoxication?  The alcohol content of blood can be measured, providing an objective result that can be used in court if necessary, but I'm not aware of any similar measurement that can quantify the "level of marijuana" one's smoked or eaten.

It's all very well to "liberalize" marijuana legislation to cater to society's changing views on its use, but if it adds (or makes worse) more danger on the roads, that's anything but OK.  It's yet another worry when one's behind the wheel . . .

Peter

As if we didn't have enough problems with our food supply already, it appears that the recent solar storms have created new difficulties for farmers.

The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season.

. . .

“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”

. . .

“Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic,” the dealership told farmers Saturday morning. “When you head back into these fields to side dress, spray, cultivate, harvest, etc. over the next several months, we expect that the rows won't be where the AutoPath lines think they are. This will only affect the fields that are planted during times of reduced accuracy. It is most likely going to be difficult—if not impossible—to make AutoPath work in these fields as the inaccuracy is most likely inconsistent.”

These automated systems have become critical to modern farming (often called “precision agriculture”), with farmers using increasingly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines with uniform spacing. Precision agriculture has greatly increased the yield of farms, and a 2023 report by the US Department of Agriculture noted that more than 50 percent of corn, cotton, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and winter wheat are planted and harvested with “automated guidance.” Many modern tractors essentially steer themselves, with the oversight of a farmer in the cab. If the planting or harvesting is even slightly off, the tractors or harvesters could damage crops or plant crooked or inconsistently, which can cause problems during the growing season and ultimately reduce yield.

There's more at the link.

I called a couple of farming friends and asked them about this.  All agreed that for the big commercial farms, it might be a very serious problem indeed.  It seems that big automated tractors and other machinery electronically map the location of the seed rows they plant, and use those maps throughout the growing season to navigate to them to spread fertilizer, pull weeds, and eventually harvest the crop.  If the initial maps are not accurate, then future work on those seeds might miss them by feet or yards, meaning that they won't be properly fertilized and protected during their growth.  The harvest from those rows might be reduced substantially as a result.

Can farmers compensate manually for this failure of their automated systems?  I have no idea.  I presume that once seeds start to grow, the plants can be seen with the naked eye and fertilized, weeded, etc. accordingly, but how many commercial farms are set up to work that way?  As far as I know, most of them reduce their workers to a bare minimum prior to harvest, because automated systems do most of the work formerly done by hand.  If they have to revert to the old ways to care for a proportion of their crops, is that even possible today?  Do they have enough staff and older-style equipment to do so?

Another question is, how many farms, and how many seed rows, have been affected?  If farmers planted (say) 10% or 20% of their crops for this year in an inaccurate fashion, will yields be reduced by a similar proportion?  That might be disastrous for contracts, futures trades, exports, and all sorts of other industries that rely on farm production as an input for their own business activities.  What's more, I don't know whether crop insurance, that would pay out if bad weather, drought, fire, etc. affected a farm's production, will pay out over navigational errors like this.  I don't think the problem has ever arisen before, so it's possible the insurance policies don't even mention the issue.

I suspect smaller farms won't be as badly affected, as they're less likely to be able to afford the (very expensive) GPS-guided farm equipment involved.  However, they also don't produce a large proportion of the crops in this country.  "Big Ag" might be in for a torrid time this harvest season - and what will that do to food prices and availability, not just in this country, but around the world?  Commercial farms all over the world use the same technology these days, so the issue is unlikely to be confined to the USA.

Yet another reason, IMHO, to make sure our emergency preparations include a reasonable amount of food in reserve, just in case.  I'm going to keep an eye on the cost of frozen and canned vegetables, flour, etc.  I suspect some may become a lot more expensive as shortages bite.

Peter