The California power outages everyone is railing against

The New Neo Posted on by

A year ago, right after the terribly destructive fires in northern California, PG&E was heavily criticized for not having cut the power sufficiently when the winds blew.

Now they are criticized for cutting the power when the winds blow and not having managed in the past year since the fires to have fixed everything that was wrong so that cutting power wouldn’t be necessary. To me this seems an unreasonable set of demands. The magnitude of the problem is huge, and the money (and perhaps even the time) it would take to fix it enormous.

There is no question that the power outages are a hardship, especially for the disabled and/or elderly who rely on various devices that might be electrically powered. But a devastating fire is worse.

And I have no trouble believing that PG&E is poorly managed. But I don’t think that changes what I’m saying.

Last year after the fires in early November I wrote several posts on the subject, but this one has the most information in it. I’m going to quote from it now:

You might say that the victims of the fire should sue PG&E, which may or may not be responsible (or at least partially responsible) for the conflagration. But there’s a catch, because no power company can be 100% successful at preventing these events and still provide power to the public. If PG&E had to pay out to all the fire victims, it goes bankrupt or passes the whole thing onto its customers in a huge rate increase. And what would replace it?

This is how California has recently decided to handle it (from September 2018, prior to the Paradise fire):

“In California, utilities are responsible for fires traced to their equipment whether or not they are complying with regulations. PG&E faces about 200 lawsuits on behalf of 2,700 plaintiffs stemming from last year’s fires.

“…This [recently passed bill] would soften that standard by having regulators determine liability based on whether equipment was reasonably maintained and operated. It would also let utilities issue bonds to help pay damages, with a surcharge on ratepayers’ bills helping to cover interest payments.”

PG&E’s priority right now is to prevent fires as well as the huge liability that comes from them. How can it pay for the upkeep necessary for more meaningful prevention, and who is going to pay? Their equipment is part of the issue, but so is forest management, and the state can’t decide what is that best way to deal with that.

If you think the answer to that last problem is a simple one, and only lack of will and leftist politics makes it seem difficult, I beg to differ. Yes, lack of will and politics are in there, too, but the debate is also real. Among my gazillion post drafts I have one provisionally entitled “The great eucalyptus wars,” and it consists only of links to eleven fairly lengthy arguments on the subject of forest management for fire prevention in California. I read them all last year but never wrote the post because the subject was so overwhelming.

Right now I’ll quote a bit from one of those articles. The following passage just scratches the surface of one small element, but it’s interesting in that it describes a dispute that’s primarily among conservationists on the left, which is rather common in California:

There is, to put it mildly, widespread disagreement about what to do with [Bay Area eucalyptus trees, otherwise known as the blue gum]. The argument is as complex and tangled as the bark streamers that hang from the blue gum’s trunks. In the most general terms, there is a faction of environmentalists that want to see many of these eucalyptus trees removed, because they are a fire hazard close to homes, or because they are non-native and make poor habitat for native species, or both…This faction also includes the local chapter of the Sierra Club.

There is another faction of environmentalists that dispute that the trees are more of a fire hazard than what might replace them, see them as decent or even very valuable habitat, and want to retain them to sequester carbon, provide shade, beauty, and recreation, and to avoid the use of the herbicides that are generally necessary to thoroughly kill them off. This faction includes a longtime correspondent of mine, Mary McAllister, and allies in different groups, including the Hills Conservation Network and the small-but-fierce Forest Action Brigade…

This fight is many years old. There have been lawsuits and there have been letters to the editor pro and con. There have been protests and postcard campaigns and blog posts and newsletters and lots and lots of official public comment on management plans for various eucalyptus forests and groves. It is a classic Bay Area dispute: greens vs. greens, experts vs. experts, and committed amateurs vs. committed amateurs. And it has gotten very hot…

So which side does science support? Well, it is complicated…

And that’s just a tiny topic that’s part of the huge topic of forest management to try to prevent catastrophic California fires. Controlled burns is probably the best answer, but even that prescription has its dangers:

The biggest objection to prescribed fire is not the smoke, but the possibility that it will escape—as Shew says, “the fire doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a prescribed fire.” In 2012, a prescribed fire southeast of Denver, Colorado, escaped and burned 16 houses and killed three people; more than a decade earlier, an escaped fire entered the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, destroying some 300 homes and buildings. There have been dozens of other escapes and near-escapes each year over the last few decades, occurring in roughly one percent of prescribed fires. The potential for unintended consequences can make the practice a hard sell to the public, says Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley fire ecologist. “Any time you do something like that,” he says, “there’s risk.”

The risk of runaway fires is part of the logistical tightrope that the “burn bosses” I talk with say they must walk in lighting a prescribed fire, as they try to hit the meteorological conditions that will promote a fire that carries without growing too powerful, get approval from air quality districts, and secure both the money and personnel to carry out the work; the fire crews I meet, now lighting fires, had just come off weeks of fighting fires across the western U.S. Legal liability, too, is a constant worry.

Despite these hurdles, prescribed burning seems to be gaining support in California.

And it’s not as though there aren’t already prescribed fires in California; there are:

Look around, and you’ll find plenty examples of people lighting prescribed fires—in the North Bay alone, land managers at Point Reyes National Seashore, state and county parks, and land trusts have all employed fire to manage fuel loads and encourage native flora and fauna. Some 18,407 acres have been burned in the Bay Area over the last decade, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The problem is scale. The current enthusiasm for prescribed burning is digging out of a deep hole. This fiscal year, Cal Fire aims to treat 20,000 of the 31 million acres in its purview with prescribed fire, and even more in the future. This is a drastic improvement over years of burning only 2,000 or 3,000 acres, but it regularly burned 60,000-plus acres as recently as the 1980s. As Pimlott says, the new numbers may “not sound like a lot, when we talk about needing to burn three or four million acres across the state.”

During the March hearing, Pimlott also noted that although the number of wildfires had grown substantially between 2015 and 2016, the agency had still achieved its goal of keeping 95 percent of non-prescribed fires on the lands it manages to less than 10 acres. As David Shew told me, that goal “kind of flies in the face of the natural ecology of the landscape”—a fact that Cal Fire is well aware of. Although the Forest Service and other federal land managers have been able to walk back somewhat from all-out suppression, sometimes leaving fires burning under preferable conditions, Cal Fire is more constrained, says Daniel Berlant, the department’s assistant deputy director. “The majority of the land we protect is privately owned,” he says, “inhabited by homes, structures, and infrastructure.” In the North Bay, 81 percent of the fires were on private property. Choosing to let those fires burn wasn’t an option. As the wildfire season stretches, he says, the amount of time that Cal Fire’s seasonally employed fire crews have for prescribed fire and other vegetation management, as well as defensible space inspections, shrinks. The state’s leading firefighting body is trapped in a cycle of fire suppression.

That was written in early 2018, and last year’s fires came many months later. I’m not sure what has happened since (my guess is that the rate of prescribed fires has probably increased), but the problems remain. And in the meantime, PG&E is trying to be careful during the riskiest time of the year.

And my guess is that the position I’m talking here might be an unpopular one.

Trump, Congress, and Turkey

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting take:

But one thing no one is looking at is the position Trump is in, with no prospect of support or even reasonable collaboration from the House of Representatives. For the sake of the Americans in uniform on the front lines in Syria, and in the rest of the Middle East, Trump can’t afford to wrangle the policy of force on an unprecedented premise and an overstretched tether. He can’t let Congress hold his policies over a barrel by turning U.S. troops into congressional-approval hostages.

That could very well be the outcome if Trump tried to shift from a policy of collaboration with Turkey – a NATO ally – to a policy of confrontation. Such a move would be uncharted territory for everyone involved. None of us looking at this problem has been alive long enough to have sentient memory of the time before the Truman Doctrine, and the incorporation of a secular, Western-oriented Turkey in a Eurocentric security scheme. It would be hard enough to navigate this trackless wilderness with an enthusiastic, focused, supportive Congress. But that’s not what Trump has. He has a Congress one chamber of which is dedicating itself entirely to putting him out of office, or at least making his and the country’s political life hell for the next 15 months…

We don’t know if Erdogan would be pressing as he obviously is for his move into Syria, if Trump were not under such intense political assault domestically. We also don’t know what appetite or vision Trump might have to seek an adaptive form of continued engagement with the Kurds’ safe zone in northern Syria, if Erdogan were pressing a bit less and Trump had more leeway. We don’t know that because Trump never tells us those things – and that’s on him. It’s one of my chief criticisms of his policy posture. In geopolitics, a superpower can hold things too close to the vest. Statements of national interest can obviate years of unnecessary conflict if deployed intelligently. Obama never did this at all, much less well, but it’s a shortfall for Trump too (if for a different reason).

But to the extent that Erdogan has been emboldened by Trump’s political woes at home, it is not too much to say that what we saw Sunday night was the wages of impeachment, settling like a cloud of locusts on foreign policy. Trump would be stupid, under these circumstances, to set himself up for holding the bag on a force policy he can’t write the checks for. Feel free to assume he’s thinking only of himself; that’s up to you. There is good reason to believe he’s thinking about the troops.

Do you think this will ever happen?

The New Neo Posted on by

I have grown very cynical. So Rand Paul’s call to investigate the four senators will probably go nowhere:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) called for a probe into four Democratic Senators on Sunday over a letter that they sent to Ukraine in 2018 that threatened to withhold aid from the country if it did not continue to investigate President Donald Trump.

But their actions certainly seem to be an obvious case of a quid prop quo of the type of which Trump was accused and which served as the original supposed pretext for the latest impeachment inquiry.

Speaking of going nowhere – I noticed this related piece at American Thinker that makes this point:

Without doubt, a criminal cabal is an extraordinarily complex organization, and understanding who did what, why, when, and how is a challenge to the mental faculties of anyone. But, what happens if the full scope of activities is never clear? Does everyone get off? Does complexity confer immunity?

In engineering, there is no perfect answer to anything, so changes are made incrementally, addressing the problems as they are recognized. Each step brings a clearer view of remaining problems, which are then addressed, each in its turn. The completed project is still flawed, but the solution is practical and productive.

So it should be with a grandiose scheme like the Russia Hoax. The ringleaders don’t have to be handled with kid gloves. They don’t even have to be handled at all. Just start with the low-hanging fruit, and get as far as possible…

A DOJ that fails to move loses its credibility and its honor. The foundation of the Republic is placed at risk. Without the rule of law, what do we have?

At some point, deferral of prosecution is dereliction or abetting. Has it reached that point?

In other words, as the title of the essay asks, “Will We Ever Prosecute?”

If you take a look at the comments there, the answer from the right is a resounding, sorrowful, and angry “no.” I believe that for most people on the right, two events in particular began to solidify this feeling. The first was the lack of consequences for Lois Lerner. The second, of course, was Comey’s rather remarkable performance in trying to explain why Hillary Clinton would be skating in regard to the emails.

By now, the right has grown tired of waiting, and the last week or two of the renewed and energized impeachment push from the left has only deepened the right’s cynicism about the end results. It also seems rather obvious that part of the impetus for the impeachment “inquiry” is to drive home the idea that any prosecutions of the Russiagate perpetrators that might be forthcoming would only be a baseless tit-for-tat retaliation by Durham et al against the noble left’s determination to bring the corrupt Trump to “justice.”

The Louisiana governor primary

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems like good news:

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, fell short of the majority of the vote needed to clinch reelection in Saturday’s all-party primary and will face Republican businessman Eddie Rispone in a one-on-one general election next month.

Edwards was unable to pass the 50 percent threshold; he received 46 percent of the votes cast, according to the AP, with 96 percent of precincts reporting. Rispone, meanwhile, held off a fellow Republican, Rep. Ralph Abraham, 28 percent to 24 percent, to capture second place and earn a head-to-head shot against Edwards on Nov. 16…

The outcome of the primary sets up a potentially very competitive general election…

…[N]ational and state Republicans made a heavy push in the closing week of the race to hold Edwards below 50 percent. President Donald Trump held an election-eve campaign rally in Lake Charles on Friday night, standing alongside both Rispone and Abraham as he urged Louisianans to vote for one of the GOP candidates and deny Edwards the outright victory.

“Customer service” of the Orwellian type

The New Neo Posted on by

It costs money to hire people to answer phones, even if they live in Bangladesh or wherever they tend to be these days.

So websites that pretend to have customer service actively discourage phone calls.

The first way they do it is to hide the phone number at the site. Click on “contact,” and first they want you to read their “relevant” articles, wasting time because the articles are nearly always completely and utterly irrelevant.

Or, they encourage route you to email, getting robotic “help” messages in several frustrating back-and-forths that are unintelligible and also irrelevant and annoying.

Then when you finally locate the phone number at the site (after trying several places to click, like a treasure hunt) the message on the phone says that “due to high call volume there will be a wait, so use our chat instead.” But that’s often a lie told just to discourage you. The last time I called and then heard that message, it said that the wait time was about 2 minutes and yet it actually was about one minute. This is very typical and even understated. I’ve had it say the wait was fifteen minutes and it’s less than one minute.

Of course, what happens after that, when you actually get to talk to a human being – well, let’s just say that that experience can be very frustrating too.

[NOTE: By “Orwellian” I mean that it isn’t “service,” it’s the opposite. No, they don’t sic rats on you. But the entire process from start to finish is just very very annoying, and I suspect it is meant to be.]

Moving that Overton Window: Cornell law professor says those who defy Congress should be jailed

The New Neo Posted on by

Josh Chavetz is a law professor at Cornell, and he has written an opinion piece in the NY Times entitled “The House Can Play Hardball, Too. It Can Arrest Giuliani: Two ways that Democrats in the House can match the White House’s aggressive tactics.”

Let’s just pause for a moment and reflect on the irony of the title, which ignores how incredibly aggressive the House and the Democrats in general have been, and the fact that much of the “aggression” the White House has mounted has been in understandable self-defense.

Self-defense is, of course, not allowed to Republicans, and one of the things about Trump that so enrages them is that he fights back in no uncertain terms. And sometimes, yes, he’s not even fighting back, but is on the offensive. Apparently that’s only permitted to the Democrats.

Here’s Chavetz:

Refusal to comply with a duly authorized subpoena from Congress constitutes contempt of Congress. Contempt of Congress is a crime, and there is a mechanism for referring such cases to federal prosecutors. The problem, of course, is that federal prosecutors answer to the attorney general and, through him, to the White House, and they refuse to prosecute contempts committed by executive officials. In recent decades, congressional houses have sought a court order requiring executive officials to comply with their subpoenas, but that has all the problems described above.

The House should instead put back on the table the option of using its sergeant-at-arms to arrest contemnors — as the person in violation of the order is called — especially when an individual, like Rudy Giuliani, is not an executive branch official. Neither house of Congress has arrested anyone since 1935, but it was not uncommon before that point (and was blessed by the Supreme Court in 1927). Indeed, on at least two occasions, the second in 1916, a house of Congress had its sergeant arrest an executive branch official. (In that case, the Supreme Court eventually ruled against the House, not because it did not have the power to arrest for contempt, but rather because the offense — writing a nasty public letter to a House subcommittee — could not properly be understood as contempt of Congress.)

Facilities in the Capitol or one of the House office buildings can be made into a makeshift holding cell if necessary. Of course, arrestees will ask the courts to set them free, but the case should be relatively open-and-shut against them: They will have committed a contempt in refusing to turn over subpoenaed materials, and the House has the power to hold contemnors.

And so on and so forth.

It seems the left doesn’t mind going backwards in time close to 100 years in order to get the results they want, despite the fact that this tool has not been used in all that time for a good reason having to do with escalation and overkill.

And despite the fact that, even back when it was used, it was never used in an open-ended impeachment “inquiry” in which the president and his aides were barred from presenting any defense, and his party prevented from having any say in the matter or asking any questions.

I am not 100% conversant with every case in which this imprisonment power was used, but my guess is that it was never used that way, and that if the GOP had ever tried such a gambit that the likes of Josh Chavetz would be among the first to write an op-ed protesting it in the Times, as well as appealing it to SCOTUS [please see my subsequent discussion and partial correction of this, based on some earlier writings of Chavetz as well as the differences between those cases and this one].

Note that this op-ed follows hard on the heels of Rashida Tlaib’s statement last week:

Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Democratic lawmakers were trying to figure out how to arrest White House officials who ignore congressional subpoenas.

Tlaib told constituents at her “Congress, Coffee, and Conversation” event in Detroit on Tuesday that lawmakers were focused on how best to take members of President Trump’s cabinet into custody.

“This is the first time we’ve ever had a situation like this. So they’re trying to figure out, no joke, is it the DC police that goes and gets them? We don’t know. Where do we hold them?” she said, according to the pro-Trump America Rising PAC.

Tlaib was caught on video speculating what might happen to Trump administration officials held in contempt of Congress.

Tlaib — a member of “The Squad” along with fellow freshman Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley — said she and her fellow Dems were “trying to tread carefully” in this “uncharted territory.”

She then joked that anyone taken into custody could be held in Detroit.

“I will tell them they can hold all those people right here in Detroit. We’ll take care of them and make sure they show up to the committee hearings,” she said.

As I’ve stated before, there is no reluctance anymore to say things that even ten years ago would be shocking and the vast majority of the public would understand that it’s a dangerous thing to do. As it is, only a few commenters to that op-ed at the Times indicated opposition to what Chavetz wrote, but purely on the practical grounds that it could cause a backlash. The idea is that it might end up helping Trump because the public isn’t quite ready for it yet.

[ADDENDUM: Also please see this article about whether these are subpoenas. I don’t know whether the information contained there is correct, however.]

Erdogan threatens to send in the migrants

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Erdogan:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to overrun Europe with “millions” of illegal immigrants if the EU dared to criticize his invasion of Kurdish-held northern Syria. “Hey EU, wake up. I say it again: if you try to frame our operation there as an invasion, our task is simple: we will open the doors and send 3.6 million migrants to you,” Erdogan threatened Thursday.

He’s got Europe’s number, hasn’t he? Here’s what passes for tough talk from the EU’s outgoing president Donald Tusk:

“Turkey must understand that our main concern is that their actions may lead to another humanitarian catastrophe,” Tusk said at a press conference in Nicosia and on Twitter.

“And we will never accept that refugees are weaponized and used to blackmail us,” he added, referring to an EU agreement with Ankara on refugees, struck in March 2016 as a result of a wave of migration to the bloc.

“President Erdogan’s threats of yesterday are totally out of place,” he added.

“Totally out of place”? I bet that makes Erdogan tremble. As well as “we will never accept,” particularly when coupled with “our main concern is that their actions may lead to another humanitarian catastrophe.” If that’s the EU’s “main concern,” Erdogan seems well aware of it, and that’s what motivates his threat.

The spread of leftism

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that it wasn’t all that long ago when the vast majority of Americans believed that the sort of behavior seen on the streets of Minneapolis by “demonstrators” “protesting” the Trump rally would be completely unacceptable, and that those blocking egress and/or throwing excrement at people should be arrested:

They battled police officers. They attacked Republicans leaving Target Center. They set bonfires and burned patriotic regalia. They carried the flag of the defunct Soviet Union.

They spat on peaceful Trump supporters. They assaulted an uncounted number of normal citizens leaving the Target Center. They struck a woman across the head with a piece of lumber. They waved a sign that said, “Blue Lives Don’t F@$king Matter.” The Minneapolis Chief of Police reported, “Objects containing liquid believed to be urine were hurled at some of my officers along with bottles and rocks. Police horses were also assaulted by protesters striking them with sticks.”

Flying the Soviet flag? Fine; that’s a protest (also an abomination, but acceptable as free speech). And as long as the fires aren’t against city ordinances, it’s okay to burn “patriotic regalia.” But attacks and all the rest? Arrests for some and dispersal for others should have been the order of the day, and all but the fringiest fringe groups should be agreeing on that, no matter which political side was “protesting” and which side being attacked.

But no [emphasis mine]:

A sitting Democratic State Representative, Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis), was seen among the fascists, dressed in black like an Antifa hoodlum. And Minneapolis’s boy Mayor, Jacob Frey, who expressed regret that he could not legally prevent President Trump from visiting Minneapolis, and then tried to do it anyway, issued an order to the Minneapolis Police Department not to use chemical irritants on the mob of criminal Democrats. [UPDATE: We have a disagreement between Boy Mayor Frey and the mob: Frey denies issuing such an order, putting him at odds with fellow Democrat Gomez.] And not a single local Democrat has condemned the violence and disorder that took place last night.

Therefore it is likely to continue and probably spread. One of the main goals is to discourage attendance at Trump rallies. We’ll see if that happens; perhaps not.

Another goal (as was true during the melee at the 1968 Democratic Convention) is to try to provoke the police into an overreaction and violence against protestors. Failing that, the idea would be to provoke the Trump supporters into violence in self-defense, which the MSM would then frame as instigation and thuggery on the part of the Trump supporters, justifying a more violent reaction on the part of the leftists.

Way back in 2006 I wrote about the violence connected with the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. In that post, I quoted a piece by David Horowitz but the link to it is now broken, unfortunately. Here is part of what Horowitz (a leftist in 1968 who later converted to being on the right) wrote about the event in retrospect:

In fact the predictable reaction of the Chicago police was an essential part of Hayden’s calculation in choosing Chicago as the site of the demonstration in the first place…

In a year when any national “action” would attract 100,000 protestors, only about 10,000 (and probably closer to 3,000) actually showed up for the Chicago blood-fest. That was because most of us realized there was going to be bloodshed and didn’t see the point. Our ideology argued otherwise as well. The two-party system was a sham; the revolution was in the streets. Why demonstrate at a political convention? In retrospect, Hayden was more cynical and shrewder than we were. By destroying the presidential aspirations of Hubert Humphrey, he dealt a fatal blow to the anti-Communist liberals in the Democratic Party and paved the way for a takeover of its apparatus by the forces of the political left, a trauma from which the party has yet to recover.

I don’t know when Horowitz wrote that, but it was not after 2006, when I wrote my post that quoted him. At the time it seemed as though the Democrats were still influenced by the left; that’s what the “has yet to recover” was referring to. But since then, as we all know, the left has surged in the Democratic Party – or revealed itself – to be influential to such a degree that it would be folly to deny that they are in the driver’s seat and now constitute the majority of the Party. And by “Party,” I include almost the entire MSM, the educational system, entertainment, sports, and many religious groups as well.

And I mean leftists, not liberals. Liberals still exist in the Party and I know quite a few, but for the most part they are not alarmed at what has happened and is happening and/or don’t even recognize what it is.

This may be true but does it make a whole lot of sense?

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest is that the so-called whistleblower (who is really a leaker, IMHO) worked with Joe Biden during the Obama administration. That seems odd, because the allegations of the whistleblower have the potential to hurt Biden as much as they do Trump.

But perhaps the whistleblower isn’t keen on Biden either, although (or maybe because) he worked with him.

Perhaps the whistleblower thinks it’s worth sacrificing Biden in order to take down Trump.

Perhaps the whistleblower is now a big Warren fan.

Perhaps one day we’ll learn more about the whistleblower and his (or her?) actual ties, backers, helpers, and motives. Perhaps not.

Caroline Glick on Trump and the Kurds

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s complicated, and to even begin to understand it you have to go back in time. But most of us here probably remember this:

In 2014 Obama was negotiating his nuclear deal with Iran…

Given its goal of embracing Iran, the Obama administration had no interest in harming Assad, Iran’s Syrian factotum. It had no interest in blocking Iran’s ally Russia from using the war in Syria as a means to reassert Moscow’s power in the Middle East…

Obama’s decided to work with the Kurdish-YPG militia in northern Syria because it was the only significant armed force outside the Iranian axis that enjoyed congenial relations with both Assad and Iran.

Obama deployed around a thousand forces to Syria. Their limited numbers and radically constrained mandate made it impossible for the Americans to have a major effect on events in the country. They weren’t allowed to act against Assad or Iran. They were tasked solely with fighting ISIS. Obama instituted draconian rules of engagement that made achieving even that limited goal all but impossible.

During his tenure as Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton hoped to revise the US mandate to enable US forces to be used against Iran in Syria. Bolton’s plan was strategically sound. Trump rejected it largely because it was a recipe for widening US involvement in Syria far beyond what the American public – and Trump himself — are willing to countenance.

In other words, the claim that the US has major influence in Syria is wrong. It does not have such influence and is unwilling to pay the price of developing such influence.

If the Iraq war during the George W. Bush administration taught us anything, it was that the US is unwilling to pay the large price of the sort of effort and sacrifice (both monetary and human) required to intervene successfully in that area of the world, except in a relatively superficial and temporary way. You can argue the merits of that, pro and con, but that’s what the war revealed about the American public and about both sides of the political coin. And talk is easy when it’s your opponent advocating a course of intervention or of withdrawal, and most people are inconsistent depending on who’s doing the advocating.

The war in Iraq began before I started blogging, and at the time the war began I was wary about it but felt it was necessary based on what seemed like the best intelligence of the time. But once we were in, I expected us to have a greater commitment to it, and over time I realized that the requisite commitment was simply not there. And yet, when Obama completely withdrew, it seemed tragic to me because most of the hard work had been done, the country was relatively stable, and only a small force would have been required to remain to keep it so.

That was not to happen.

I happened to catch a couple of minutes of Trump’s speech last night in Minneapolis, and I heard him sau something that ties into this [emphasis mine]:

But from now on, we want to fight where it is to the benefit of the United States of America, not to the benefit of other countries. And we will only fight to win. We’re only going to fight to win. We don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. The Turks have been fighting with the Kurds for two centuries…

That’s the pure Jacksonian approach to war:

When other countries are not threatening the U.S., Jacksonians prefer a course of “live and let live.” They believe in honoring alliance commitments but are not looking for opportunities for military interventions overseas and do not favor grandiose plans for nation-building and global transformation.

In war, the fiery patriotism of Jacksonians has been America’s secret weapon…

When war does come, Jacksonians believe in victory at any and all costs. Jacksonian opinion has never regretted the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a war of self-defense, Jacksonian opinion recognizes no limits on the proper use of force by the U.S.

Social scientists and urban intellectuals have been predicting the death of Jacksonian America since the turn of the 20th century. Urbanization and immigration were the forces that observers like Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann hoped would transform American popular culture into something less antagonistic to the rule of technocratic intellectuals ensconced in a powerful federal bureaucracy. This did not work out as planned.

Yet.

Let’s go back to Glick:

Despite the compelling, ever growing body of evidence that the time has come to reassess US-Turkish ties, the Pentagon refuses to engage the issue. The Pentagon has rejected the suggestion that the US remove its nuclear weapons from Incirlik air base in Turkey or diminish Incirlik’s centrality to US air operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. The same is true of US dependence on Turkish naval bases.

Given the Pentagon’s position, there is no chance that US would consider entering an armed conflict with Turkey on behalf of the Kurds.

The Kurds are a tragic people…

The Kurds in Iraq are far more capable of defending themselves than the Kurds of Syria. Taking on the defense of Syria’s Kurds would commit the US to an open-ended presence in Syria and justify Turkish antagonism. America’s interests would not be advanced. They would be harmed, particularly in light of the YPG’s selling trait for Obama – its warm ties to Assad and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The hard truth is that the fifty US soldiers along the Syrian-Turkish border were a fake trip wire. Neither Trump nor the US military had any intention of sacrificing US forces to either block a Turkish invasion of Syria or foment deeper US involvement in the event of a Turkish invasion.

Apparently in the course of his phone call with Trump on Sunday, Erdogan called Trump’s bluff. Trump’s announcement following the call made clear that the US would not sacrifice its soldiers to stop Erdogan’s planned invasion of the border zone.

But Trump also made clear that the US did not support the Turkish move. In subsequent statements, Trump repeatedly pledged to destroy the Turkish economy if Turkey commits atrocities against the Kurds.

Much much more at the link.

Ye olde Blogger blog has returned

The New Neo Posted on by

I explained in a couple of recent posts (see this and this) that my original Blogger blog was going haywire and would not display properly. Not only that, but when I signed in, I couldn’t see the old posts at what’s known as the back end, and was therefore unable to edit or change anything.

Well, I’m happy to say that the problem has been fixed. For now, anyway.

Thanks for all the suggestions. But the winner turned out to be (drum roll, please) this one from commenter “brdavis9.” He provided the key. But I still had to find the lock myself by figuring out how to get to the more complete back end. I had one of those “aha!” moments and managed to get in there, and then I followed his instructions. I had to change more than that one setting to make the comments show up properly, but I think it’s done, or at least done well enough.

Take a look for yourself. I used the “http://” URL there in order to show that, when clicked on, it now converts automatically to “https://” and displays the blog more or less intact. Even going to the archives works, and the comments are there as well – for the most part, that is, but for certain random posts they are missing.