Some obvious things

Lessons from the politicalization of Covid

Fauci's recent failure to testify aligns with his diary entries to demonstrate something of immediate relevance to the Iran war and the midterms. In the covid case the left enthusiastically embraced mis-information, censorship, and authoritarianism to pursue their hatreds of both both Mr. Trump in the United States and Mr. Johnson in the United Kingdom. Fauci, like many others, knew the thing came from the Wuhan lab, knew that its lethality decreased exponentially with each new generation, and knew that masking, social distancing, and lockdowns would make the economic and social damage much worse than it needed to be, but consistently (and apparently without a second thought) put a combination of ass-covering, partisan politics, personal animus, and money ahead of his duty.

We're seeing much the same thing today with the left's response to the bombing of Iran. In reality, American actions there have very probably averted a nuclear holocaust because the mullahs were apparently within weeks of assembling a simple but functional fission weapon, would certainly have used it, and are probably trying to continue that work in secret right now with both Washington and Tel Aviv in their crosshairs.

In reality the left doesn't care about dead Americans, Israelites, or anyone else - but they do see political opportunity in prolonging the mess past November and are throwing everything they can, from vociferous media defeatism to third party financial support, at encouraging IRGC leadership to just hang in there.

It's covid all over again: this time "everyone knows," but no major media figure will say, that the American strategy is to minimize damage to Persia while exerting maximum pressure on the Arabs holding Iran - or that the Iranian Army's younger echelon is eventually going to take on the IRGC, end this, and bring Iran into the light as a major, westernized and pro-American, player.

In the meantime there is one positive thing: those who think they can manipulate politics through oil prices by refusing to move cargo are losing their shirts every time Trump goes through a "peace-in-our-time --ooops, bombs away" cycle - much the point of the process, I suspect.

Shopping is Power

Travel has nearly always been a prerogative of the elite - limited during feudal times to the nobility, but now open to almost anyone with cash and time to spend. Since people tend to regard their own lot in life as normal - and therefore what they see elsewhere as abnormal - elite travel from rich countries to poor ones tends to have two effects:

1. first, it elevates the person's self-regard because the tourist industry depends on making the traveler feel important - and an American waitress is just a person working as a waitress, but a European or Asian one is a peasant, not a person; and,
2. second, it prepares the traveler emotionally to embrace first Malthusian mythology and then its political consequence: fascism and the return to feudalism everyone knows socialist reality leads to.

   A westerner stepping out of the Intercontinental in Mumbai leaves a clean, quiet, cool environment where the obsequious servants carefully keep their distance to enter a world full of crowds, noise, and stinks in which it is impossible not to believe that humanity is such a plague upon the earth that we all deserve to die from over crowding, hunger, and pollution.

Thus one reason, I believe, that western academics and bureaucrats tend to be far left of the populations they serve is simply that these people have the time and money to travel but not the brains or knowledge needed to understand that it's all chimerical. First, Thomas Malthus himself never engaged in any of the end-of-the-world fantasies discredited to him by (mostly German) "thinkers" who didn't understand what either he, or Charles Darwin, actually wrote but adapted what they wanted from it to serve their own needs. Second, and much more importantly, the impression our hypothetical academic or business traveler gets on that sidewalk in Mumbai is totally overwhelming, but completely wrong. Go half an hour into the countryside and you see thousand plus acre estates with a handful of people on them - about 92% of India is not urbanized and about one third of the population, including many of the poorest and least educated, clusters in the five largest cities.

Data centers

I hear about these almost every day - big topics about power and water use. Right now there are four (two of them running up real costs for somebody) multi-billion dollar data centers in the planning process for various places around Alberta. It's weird: politicians running around with their hands out, environmentalists up in arms, community organizers out in force, because it's all humbug: just hot air and grift - none of these are ever getting built because (a) SpaceX; (b) as the chips get smaller, they become more energy efficient - and as the underlying ideas and code mature they'll require less and less of the computing resource; and, (c) those that are built will be built where the developers can find people to staff them - and anyone here who's qualified to do that can get twice the salary at half the tax rate in the U.S.