My god! That title is practically poetry. Give me a thumbs-up if you want me to communicate everything in rhyme from now on.
So, the long-awaited, hyper-hyped Frick and Frack debate is in the books. I think calling these things debates should be considered a crime against humanity. I admit I got a bit more out of this one than I have most of the regular blather orgies the media subjects us to. But the structure of this one was even more crazy.
A minute for each respondent. Then the same question to the opponent. Well, it didn’t take long for that idea to turn to shit, did it? And while one minute is enough for a political ad, it certainly isn’t space for a thoughtful position statement. It’s barely enough for a decent elevator speech.
Along with too much participation from the moderator, and the inevitable interruptions by the opponents trying to squeeze out more time, I believe these so called debates do more to contribute to the dumbing down of American civics than reading The Onion as a news source.
I can say, with complete confidence, that the viewing audience, regardless of party, is stupider at the end of any modern debate. I will say, for this debate at least, their was a mild attempt to get the participants to answer the questions asked.
DeSantis didn’t seem to have much trouble with this. But Newsome, especially with the first question, seemed to think the moderator asked him to drool non sequiturs onto his podium. So intent was he to appear to come out of the gate swinging, he made a complete ass of himself. Sadly, this resulted in Hannity awarding him more time to try again. Newsome failed again. But he filled the air with standard liberal tropes and outright bullshit for an extra minute or so.
And what of that moderator?
I used to be a Sean Hannity fan. Years ago he had a producer/ co-host on his radio show. I think her name was McGlaughlin. She was excellent at banter and seemed to be the influence that kept Hannity’s foot nailed to the floor.
After she left the show became kind of annoying. Hannity was notorious for asking a diatribe of a question, allow his guest about half a sentence then launching into another filibuster. It was infuriating. Even if the guest was someone I held in contempt, I wanted to hear their points to consider them for myself.
Sean also spent the entire Obama tenure in office yelling, “What about Bill Ayers? What about the reverend Jeremiah Wright?” Granted, both characters are beneath contempt and you could fill volumes with their offenses and hypocrisy. But they are not the answer to EVERY liberal foible.
So you can imagine that I was not too pleased that it was Hannity who came up with this debate idea. I also assumed it was intended to be a DeSantis showcase. I never did see the point of the exercise.
But about Hannity, I was wrong. Take a screen shot in the text below. You won’t see that sentence very often. The host did a fair job and wasn’t overly self-congratulatory.
Conclusion? As modern “debates” go, this one was not too bad. But I wouldn’t call it an enlightening or uplifting experience.
Wouldn’t it be nice?
Would it be possible to have real debates? Could an outlet create an in-depth series dedicated to political aspirants coming to a podium and addressing A QUESTION. For example, How is an open border impacting the United States and what should be done about it?
The question is provided to participants well before the debate. By flip of a coin or drawn straws the first participant stands to the podium and makes an argument for 5 to 10 minutes. Then sits down! Then the opponent is given the same amount of time to counter. Then there is rebuttal. If you want a half hour show, perhaps you do two questions.
Could the American attention span survive? Perhaps not at first. Too many of us expect to be entertained. Too many want to see a personal rhetorical punch landed (to no valuable result). We’ve grown used to low-rent bickering while an audience cheers mindlessly. [see “decorum” below]
But, with exposure and the with the ejection of audience members who interrupt speakers, I believe a viewing audience could grow. With the example set, we could possibly start to see a change in how we interact ourselves. Wouldn’t THAT be nice?
Here’s the best part. We don’t need the MSM to pull this off. Their ratings are tanking anyway. It could be hosted online. As an example, Meta could host Democrat debates and X could host the GOP. That would cancel out anyone screaming about party favoritism anyway. Live and online audiences would be polled immediately to gauge results.
To be certain, we’d be able to weed out the weak candidates pretty easily. If we had perhaps 12 weeks of one on one debates matching various candidates, perhaps even playoff specials the polls would surely gel around just a few.
People are glued to Battlebots doing this, for Chrissake!
Anyway, that’s my contribution.
Presently…
What our present debates, and our reactions to them, prove is our desperate need to bring civics back to the class room and some semblence of decorum back to public discourse.
There are so many forces opposed to teaching civics. The teachers unions would consider it just another tool of indoctrination. Left leaning politicians would fear it, because true civics and an understanding of our Constitution would put their politicians out of a job in just a few years. An educated (not indoctrinated) electorate is dangerous to the ruling classes.
And decorum along with honest participation, in other words, making sure all views are aired, is rare in this country. We are too eager to shout down and too lazy to carry the argument. And now, Big Brother is watching what is said in public meetings, which has either a chilling effect or aggrivates whatever existing resentments may be in play.
What are you prepared to do to make a difference without causing rancor? Are you even prepared to participate in local, state or national issues? Or are you ready to punch out now and watch kitty videos? Would I be better off grabbing a beer and talking baby talk to my dog? How many planets are there, really? Why can’t I stop asking questions? Is there a way out of this segment? Do you love me? Cue the damn stinger!
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Will pixie dust power our green new world?
Panama just closed a copper mine. Investors were unprepared for the news. I saw that on Bloomberg a few days ago. It got me to thinking about mineral resources and what that means to our re-industrialization and the Green Scams that will interfere with that.
Let us pray.
The world’s newest religion is the Church of Climate Alarmism (CCA).1 It is heavily modeled on the worst of fundamentalist Islam or the early Christian Church.
It comes with all the trimmings of intolerant religions. They have the Inquisition, for example. If you disagree with what these perpetually offended, inexperienced, naive people say, even as a matter of degree, you get cancelled. Look at Michael Shellenberger. He’s a 100% believer in man-made GW/CC. But he disagrees with the “solutions” the religion insists on. They see him as the enemy.
Adherents will slam you in public. Sometimes, offenders get dox’d. But the intention is to punish. The label for disagreeing with ANYTHING they say is the modern equivalent of “heretic”. Their term is “climate denier”. This is a super cheese-dick term. It means nothing real to anyone but the CCA adherents themselves.
But it is indicative of what lowlifes these CCA people actually are. In searching for a term to slap on anyone who doesn’t follow the true faith, they stumbled on a term used for people who try to deny Hitler’s treatment of European Jews, the handicapped and (the irony is so thick you can smell it) other people who disagreed with NAZIs.
Truly, to be a holocaust denier is to mark yourself as a social bottom feeder. The CCA cynically hijacked the term and try to label opponents as “deniers”, trying to draw a moral equivalent to holocaust deniers, thinking that will shut down discussion.
It’s remarkably stupid and exploitive. To advanced an empty, almost pointless agenda, they have taken the third saddest period in modern history2 and hitched their shit to it. So they lack brains and dignity.
As a side note, it’s truly instructive that 99.99% of the people vandalizing and screaming, “From the river to the sea…” are among the very same people who populate the CCA. And few, if any, have a clue what that chant means. But the killing of Jews is the key point of the chant.
Like I said, they’re not the brightest bulbs in the marquee.
CCA Prophets
The religion has their religious icons who speak holy writ the followers MUST accept and preach, if they themselves don’t want to be labeled deniers.
They have prophets.
There’s Michael “hockey stick” Mann, who used two algorithms together, inappropriately, to create his silly graph upon which the CCA is based. He later stood on his head to hide his work and admitted he created the hockey stick because he needed something shocking to bring his faith to the masses. He’s like an Elijah character.
Then we have Saint Al of Gore. He made, and continues to make, dozens of prophecies. All those whose time frame has passed, polar de-icing for example, have never come true. Not nearly so. Saint Al, peace be upon him, doesn’t care. He simply invests in green scams the CCA and government cronies have strong-armed governments for, and he makes a killing! Dude! It’s better than Amway!
Please support the P4B. Keep it free for everyone! And I’m running out of coffee and gas station sandwiches.
Then there is Greta Thumberg, the new Joan of Arc. While being exploited and brainwashed by her parents and other CCA followers, she made a few speeches worthy of Academy Awards. “How dare you…!” Then she would launch into a bunch of stuff that just ain’t so, and scold the people who gave her a comfortable life, in a culture that allowed her to spew her parent’s spurious crap and not be arrested.
Now she’s livin’ large and flying private to attend CCA church services all over the world. Other high priests and priestesses also fly private and they all have their fat asses carted around in limos.
What they have in store for YOU!
These are the people we are spending TRILLIONS to please. They infest our government. Those in government are preyed upon by cronies like BlackRock, Vanguard and other Davos/WEF types, who see the dollar signs in creating industries around the non-critical thinking the CCA spawns.
They have already pocketed hundreds of billions of the trillions of dollars GIVEN to them in the last two green scam bills out of Congress.3 And they have the CCA adherents in the MSM and Social media preaching the holy word and punishing non-believers and heretics.
The money is being spent on electric cars most of you can’t use, energy programs that have no hope of working, and developing the concept of “smart cities” where you will be watched over by Big Brother 24/7/365 to make sure you do not act or speak in a way that contradicts the holy word of the CCA or the Nanny State. If you do, they’ll cut off you digital money.
But where will it all come from?
The CCA preaches many things that range from silly to dangerous to impossible. But the government is spending YOUR MONEY on all of it. They must believe that all the things they want will come from pixie dust, because we don’t have enough of the real stuff.
For example, if you want to have 50% electric vehicles by 2030, we have to 3x our existing copper supply. Remember the mine I mentioned in Panama? And Chile’s mines are nationalized. We would have to 7x our supply of lithium. The same it true for cobalt and all the other weird, toxic crap we need for EVs that we don’t need in real cars.
The world has never even doubled it’s supply of metals or rare earth crap inside of 20 years - ever. Not only is this difficult and expensive to smelt or extract, we don’t even have a handle on how much exists.
When you get into wind and solar nonsense the supply problems become even crazier. Just the copper required to move power from wind turbines, which must be in the great wide open, to distant cities will be immense and expensive! Add to that the need for transformers along the way because the cables running for many miles represent a load, or a significant loss of power.
And the damn things don’t work as advertised! They are much more effective at killing birds4 and driving people around them crazy from the weird noise…and being ugly…than they are at providing reliable energy.
And all that draws resources from the real energy systems we do need and will for many decades to come. This is especially true in the near term - the next decade. We don’t have the time or money to waste on tinker toys right now. NONE of the CCA’s answers to energy are ready for deployment and will need a great deal more work before we employ them at scale, if ever. And wind farms are ugly and self-defeating.
And the smart city idea is especially comical. Through central planning, by government incompetents, everything you will be told you need will be crammed into sectors you can walk across in 15 minutes (so they say). There will be cameras EVERYWHERE.
How much power, how many resources would be required to do this? Added to the things a crowded urban area needs right now, how much power will have to be devoted to the servers controlling everything, including where you will be permitted to spend every single dime based on your ESG score?
Whenever you see smart cities touted as the future, the illustrations are bright, shiny, clean, safe places. But lets get real. How will they be inhabited? Who will the NICE ones be for? Are they going to canvass all of West Philly and offer a shiny, new condo in a high rise to every citizen? Of course not.
The worst of our cities will be left as the worst of our cities. The central planners will just add cameras and a few mandated services (run by the government) and call it done. No one will be permitted to leave those areas unless the central planners approve. If you leave without an approved purpose, your car and your cell phone will shut down.
And how, without coercion, will you get people to give up a house in the burbs to live in these new urban dystopias? And what becomes of their present houses? I’ll deal with the second question in a bit.
The fact is they can’t get people who already sacrifice to live in the suburbs to move voluntarily in any great numbers. They will do it through denial of services and support. They’ll do it through policies that make life outside the dystopias as difficult as possible. High taxes, denial of business and building permits, and propaganda will figure critically here. (Watch for a Potemkin smart city to be built on Maui. The praises from the CCA and central planners will be endless - and absurd in the extreme.) Home improvement and restoration outside smart cities will become evils concepts. Talking heads will disparage those fixing up their house as greedy parasites using up critical material needed for expanding the smart cities.
Then the burbs will be abandoned - for what? This is one of the key concepts that makes the CCA’s dreams ridiculous. We live where we chose to live, limited only by our income. For the smart city to be more than a silly plaything, you’d have to bulldoze MILLIONS of houses. But yes, I think about half of our governing class would be stupid enough to try it.
But to that second question…
The nice houses will not be bulldozed. They will be purchased, for pennies on the dollar, and inhabited by the governing class, the wealthy with good ESG scores and cronies. The beautiful people, as they already do, will live the good life while keeping you as penned in as possible and feeding you bugs.
All of this is avoidable. It depends entirely on how many people read my work or that of dozens of other writers and realize that the CCA’s version of the future is not possible without imprisoning you.
Not everything is avoidable.
For at least a little while, until a realignment of where we get EVERYTHING and how we cobble it together to make our lives possible, you will soon see a world different from the one you live in now.
The Regime is doing everything it can to forestall that day. They are presently carrying China and trying to convince CEOs who have already turned their backs on the CCP to get back in there. This won’t help very much. And the companies involved WILL pull out as soon as they find places like Mexico ( where labor is now less expensive and better educated than the Chinese) to move their operations.
But there will be a lag as the “boomers” around the world age out of their productive years. You can’t conduct international trade when there aren’t enough people to grow or make the stuff.
Raw materials, as mentioned, are going to be harder to acquire. Things are going to get more expensive. For the first time in generations, that won’t be because of government spending. But in light of what IS COMING, we need to SLASH government spending now.
The issue of food becomes interesting. For all of my adult life I have been able to walk into a super market and get just about anything I want to eat 365 days a year. That’s going to change. What isn’t in season in some semblance of proximity, will not be available. For a time, certain food will just vanish from the shelves. It will take herculean effort just to mitigate this.
Solutions
The most obvious solution to survive what is coming in a healthy way is to first defeat the CCA on all fronts. These are not people who care about you or the United States. They are fanatics who think the WORLD IS BOILING! Their words. Their response to this pretend crisis will destroy this country.
The second solution is not in your hands except that you can pressure your government to make it happen. We need to start negotiations yesterday with the British and the entire commonwealth to become their most valuable trading partner.
This will provide a more stable supply of the goods we’ve become accustomed to and in some cases need.
The price will be an about-face on something we’ve been quietly doing for a few years. Our naval presence around the world is shrinking. Since Bretton Woods, the mission of the United States Navy has been to keep the sea lanes open to protect international trade, not just our trade - everybody’s. We’ve been leaving areas of the world unprotected for a while now.
To reinvigorate this presence, we don’t need to rebuild our 600 ship fleet. With the Commonwealth of Nations and other friendly nations in this hemisphere, we can coordinate patrol of the sea lanes needed for these members. We should treat solid trading partners as we’ve treated the world since WWII. They can be responsible for protecting the shipment of goods they need from countries outside the new trading organization.
While this represents an alliance, not a pursuit to be taken lightly, it is more about trade and what we already do anyway. It isn’t a military alliance like NATO. We shouldn’t entertain military engagement for these countries unless it is in our compelling national interest to do so - ours and no one else’s.
There are many more things that need to be done. You can find the big ones by searching/browsing this Substack for articles about THE 11 POINTS. But the two I just mentioned are among the most urgent and productive. Contact the politicians who work for YOU, and discuss these things. Make them respond just to get you to stop calling. …But then don’t stop calling. The P4B will always give you lots of issues over which to ping your elected servants. It’s what I do. And you are welcome.
The trans fad religion is newer, but more of an offshoot, peopled by many of the same adherents.
In terms of human slaughter, Hitler ranks third behind Stalin and Mao by tens of millions of victims.
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Green scams, both.
Wait until you see what they will do to pelicans, egrets and cranes along the East Coast if they ever build these things as planned!
One State, Two State. Red State, Blue State