Talk about great timing! If you caught yesterday’s posting (Fifty Years of Crying Wolf), you would think that I had inside information regarding the column in today’s Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead (see link below). The recent global environmental conference, attended by 30,000 world “leaders”, national beggars, press, etc. ended with the usual false promises (they have a wonderful record of not achieving promised goals), demands for hundreds of billions of dollars for dubious projects, silence on why they have not been able to achieve any of their previous promises, etc.

How long will we who pay the bills for these gabfests have to put up with being told how we have to cut back on our standard of living while we fail to see any of the attendees lead by example? Private jets, limos, umpteen course dinners served in the finest locations, etc. are the norm for the “elite,” and the “best and the brightest” who seem to believe that the average citizen has no memory about past failed conferences.

Isn’t it time we demanded real accountability from those who live off the public trough?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-the-global-age-of-shams-cop26-glasgow-agreements-crisis-emissions-globalism-11637010052?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

For fifty years we have heard Presidents, scientists, spoiled children, professors, etc. telling us that we have only ten years to save the planet. Fifty years of hand wringing, spending trillions of dollars on wind and solar power, creating carbon credits, etc. have apparently not been successful as the claims of pending disaster continue unabated. Let us look at some of the predictions over the past half century:

• 1972: “We have ten years to stop the catastrophe” said UN “environment protection boss.
• 1982: The opening of the second UN conference as reported by the NY Times was not a happy meeting. Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the UN environmental program stated at if action were not taken, in 2000 we would face, “an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.”

Similar warnings were issued in 1998, 1989 and 1990; always disaster within the next ten years. Massive crop failures, even “nations wiped off the face of the Earth” were predicted. The year 2000 came and went and we survived. In 2004 it was reported that the Pentagon told President Bush that climate change would “destroy us”. Among the disasters was Siberian winters in Britain, major European cities sinking beneath rising seas, etc.

A massive biography which covers the first half of Wellington’s life. Not being the first son, he was relegated to joining the military (under British custom, the first son inherited the title, the second went to the military and the third son entered the Church of England).

As was common at the time, Wellington had an unhappy childhood and like many men of that time, he made his mark and fortune in India. His military victories and diplomatic skill in India allowed him to assume command in the Peninsula during the Napoleonic wars where he reorganized the army of Portugal and created the famous defensive lines which the French under a number of Napoleon’s generals refused to attack. In a series of brilliant maneuvers, he out generaled every force sent against him as he slowly pushed the French out of the entire peninsula. That does not mean that he had an easy time as Napoleon poured men and material into the fight, but his real struggle was with various politicians and powers in London who were jealous of his successes and who kept Wellington’s forces on a strict leash.

In theory, the beauty of science is objectivity. The search for the truth, for the correct answer. We live in a world, unfortunately, where objectivity in science is the greatest threat since the false science under Stalin and Trofim Lysenko.

In the two articles listed below, there is evidence that applicants at major universities in the field of science must provide proof of their fealty to “Explicit evidence of commitment to diversity and of advancing understanding and outcomes for underrepresented groups.”  Additionally, applicants should “mention your (their) willingness to contribute to pre-existing (DEI) programs….”  Like the political commissars of the old Soviet Union, ideological purity is key.

The two articles referenced below should make each of us ask: “Can you name a nation governed by the left which has more freedom than before they turned left?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/first-step-glenn-youngkin-to-stop-leftist-tyranny-diversity-dei-statements-11636302471?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

https://quillette.com/2021/11/02/tales-from-the-gulag/

Imagine that it is about 1850 in the United States and the British, who have the finest army in the world, invade the U.S. through the East Coast. The citizens of the area who have not been threatened by any enemies since the war of 1812 are more interested in trade and welcome the invaders who promise more states rights and low taxes. Additionally, the great slave holder families of the South provide monetary and physical support to the British invaders. Meanwhile, in the West, the small U.S. army faces an uprising of all the Indian tribes but this time they are united and number two hundred thousand. Additionally, the Mexican army joins the Indians and begin a campaign of pillage and murder across the southwest U.S. Only small groups of soldiers remain faithful to the central government, but they form the basis for a national renewal that eventually drives the British out and pushes back and punishes the Indian and Mexican forces. Large parts of the nation are desolated with farms destroyed and hundreds of towns and villages burned to the ground. Now switch this scenario to the Polish Commonwealth in the mid-eighteenth century.

Instead of the British invading, you have the Swedish army, the finest in Europe and victors during the terrible Thirty Years War. Instead of the Indians, you have the Cossacks, and the Mexicans are really the Tartars who are invited in by the Cossacks. Tens of thousands are killed as Ukrainian peasants join the Cossacks, attack the Poles, and slaughter the Jews who are seen as oppressive minions of the Polish overlords (in fact, until the Holocaust of 1939-45, this time was remembered in Jewish history as the greatest Jewish tragedy since Biblical times). Meanwhile, the Tartars capture a hundred thousand Ukrainian peasants and march them off to the Crimea where they were sold as slaves in the vast slave markets. To make matters worse, the most powerful Lithuanian prince helps the Swedes while the Russians stand on the border, ready to invade when the Poles are finally defeated.

Mark Carney has worked hard to get the major banks of the world to support the Green Movement. A former head of central banks in Canada and the U.K. has been knocking on bankers’ doors, trying to raise some of the trillions needed to cut carbon emissions and transform the way we produce and use energy. He is not asking bankers to pledge their personal wealth to his cause, but to pledge the assets of their banks.

His pitch to the financial community is aimed at getting them to part with some of the estimated one-hundred fifty trillion dollars ($150,000,000,000,000) over the next thirty years as the entire global power infrastructure must be revamped. To achieve this, he follows the fourteen-page protocol created by the U.N. which outlines how companies are to be rewarded or punished through lending, regulations, etc. if they adhere to or resist the dictates of the protocol.  There has been resistance from the banks as concerns over law suits due to failure to fulfill pledges or meeting targets.

Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton are names which will stand for the Allied victory in Western Europe during World War II.  But who were these men, what were their backgrounds, how were they picked to hold their commands and finally, how secure were they in those commands.  Mr. Jordan does an excellent job in answering these and other questions in a concise and excellent manner.  These men did not suddenly appear with stars on their shoulders with full knowledge of their craft; they served decades in backwater posts, seemingly forgotten, grinding out their lives (and the lives of their families) believing that they might never practice what they were learning.

Then came World War II, but more importantly, a man by the name of Marshall, George C. Marshall.  He was charged with creating from a puny, ill equipped army a force that could fight around the world, something that no one and no country had ever done.  Breaking the careers of several hundred generals, Marshall had the ability to reach into corners of the military and find individuals who had spent up to twenty years in obscure posts due to tight budgets, their thinking outside of the military “box”, etc.

The ideologies of sexual revolution and feminism promised all of us wonderful things and there have been positives which have come about over the past fifty-years. There have also been costs and we have ventured into areas which could not be imagined at that time. How are we to judge the plusses and minuses, the gains and losses, the freedoms gained and their costs? Like most movements, no one can ever declare victory and let the movement rest on its laurels; there are too many people who have profited from the movement that has become either an industry or religion. Indeed, it has a momentum of its own and to question any aspect of the path being travelled earns the title of “hater,” “homophobe,” “misogynistic,” etc.

“As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.”

― fran lebowitz

When I was a little boy, my Grandmother will tell me stories of when she was a young woman in Warsaw Poland; how the young girls would flirt with the Russian soldiers who occupied the city, how she hesitated to go out at night as the Cossacks made it a habit to ride down the street, striking anyone with their nagaikas unless they were really drunk in which case they used their swords on anyone in their way, etc.  One thing she especially remembered, was that a chapter of Sienkiewicz’s epic novel, With Fire and Sword was serialized in the Warsaw newspapers and there was always a rush to purchase a copy; it was the Netflix of its day.

Sienkiewicz would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 for his novel which took place in seventeenth century Poland, when Poland was the largest country in Europe. Sweeping across the steppes, it is an adventure story centered on the Cossack revolt which was led by Bohdan Hmyelnitzki (also spelled Khmelnytsky). The Cossacks aligned themselves with the Tartars and Great Khan of the Crimea and the revolt which lasted off and on for several years, was only one of numerous wars fought in what is today the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and what was prior to World War II, eastern Poland. It was the bloodiest of the revolts and was responsible for the largest number of Jewish deaths until the Holocaust. The Cossacks encouraged the native Ukrainian population to join the revolt and Poles and Jews alike were hunted down and killed in their tens of thousands. While the Ukrainians were used as cannon fodder by the Cossacks, who looked down on the Ukrainians, the Tartars were given free rein to capture as many Ukrainians as possible who were then forced to walk to the slave markets in the Crimea and beyond.