The problem with the mangled two-party system in the US is (ok, besides too much money) that the "best and brightest" do not rise to the top. I also thought Obama was an exception to this, but he was hopelessly lost without enough back-up.
There are just way too many self-interested fools at all levels of the federal government (and many states, too, thus filling the pipeline for years to come).
I don’t know if that’s as much a problem with the system or a problem with the voters. Or at least the bases who turn out for primaries, conventions, caucuses, etc. We had a “dissembled convention” with ranked choice voting here in Virginia last year, and ended up with a fairly moderate, by Virginia GOP standards, gubernatorial candidate who went on to win the general (thanks to the Democrats nominating a corrupt retread who acted very petulantly on the campaign trail). The ranked choice ballot “disassembled convention” gave Virginia Republicans the benefits of a convention, without the attrition of successive ballots of a normal convention, and a the high turnout of a primary. So we got the first consensus GOP candidate since Gov. George Allen in 1993.
Of course, Gov. Youngkin has had a heckuva time filling the executive branch because there just aren’t enough sane, educated, and competent people willing to work for a Republican administration anymore. Trump not only had the problem of not being able to staff his administration; he’s also made it impossible to find qualified appointees for Republican executives around the country.
But you see, that's the "system." Instead of ranked choice (which I agree, gave Virginia a decent candidate), the first past the post system entices donors-- and the base-- to throw everything behind one candidate, and rules out potentially sensible people along the way.
Why would voters turn out for someone they don't want? And that's the slate one so often has. An unlikable D no one really likes and an R no one really likes, except for the whipped up frothers on either end of the spectrum and the money men (intentionally gendered there) who just want to have a pliable winner. How often in the last 25 years have we heard that people "vote against" the opposite candidate, or choose "the least harmful" option. That does not sound like faith in the American democratic system, does it.
Obama’s smart; he just doesn’t care about foreign affairs. Biden should know better after decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he just doesn’t get it. And our two major political parties are pacifist and isolationist, respectively.
The Paulestinians have taken that concern and run with it. I don’t think the average Republican voter is isolationist, but the talking head, activist, and consultant classes certainly are, and they influence the GOP “leadership.”
Claire, your dad has become a favorite with CG readers. We hope he’s keeping cool and has air conditioners cranking on high.
“(NB WigWag: This is what the World Bank actually recommends to farmers in developing countries. Read the whole thing. You won’t find so much as a hint of the suggestion that they do without fertilizer. Quite to the contrary.)”
I will read it, happily, but note that the World Bank is just one of many globalist institutions. The WEF specifically recommended that Sri Lankan farmers adopt organic farming techniques. It was a calamitous recommendation for Sri Lankans. Of course, the WEF experts who made this recommendation had no skin in the game. They’re doing just fine.
I did some searching and found no exact match for this, but some close items. The Sri Lankan president did publish a 2018 article in the WEF about his proposals to make SL prosperous. The WEF apparently deleted this article from its site for a while. It's back up. I suspect this article is the source of the false claim that the WEF publicly pushed organic farming on Sri Lanka. (Of course, we don't know what happened in private.)
These two articles, by the Indian farmer and from agronomists writing at FP, are top-notch and highly recommended to get a concise yet full picture. Read what the FP article says in the middle -- it's a whole tutorial on how modern agriculture works and where it came from and why it's vulnerable to being wrecked by economic and technological illiterates. (Hint, hint, they're trying to do something similar to squeeze natural gas here in the US, which will badly reduce synthetic fertilizer needed to feed modern society -- malign ignorance at work.)
These are excellent resources, thank you. I'm always impressed by the quiet, unread reports put out by humble drones in our Deep State--like the USDA brief. That's so much more serious and informative than most of the journalism out there, isn't it? When people say they want to get rid of the Administrative State, I'm always perplexed: To judge from their reports, they're by far the most serious part of our government and probably the only reason we're not a complete basket case, given the absolute hopelessness of our elected politicians.
That could sound as if I'm expressing a WigWaggian enthusiam for unelected governments, and perhaps I am: I think we should have elected officials, but I also think a competent civil service--one *not* beholden to electoral fortune--is absolutely essential to running any kind of modern nation state. And the USDA report shows exactly why.
I half-agree with you. My late parents were civil servants, or public employees. They had high levels of technical competence and knowledge, apart from their political views. They were of a generation that rarely let the latter interfere with what they actually *knew*.
However, I have to say, in our media-saturated world, increasingly people at the higher levels the civil service and especially at the political appointee level, have become real problems, not just with their disagreements with elected officials, but their own agendas, often ill-informed.
Then the media encourages the self-appointed pseudo-expert. For the first year of COVID, much public health wisdom, coming from the top public health schools in the country, was attacked by such people and subject to censorship by very non-experts from Google and Facebook. Traditional public health practices were set aside in many countries in favor of lockdowns that soon clearly did not provide much benefit or silly mask mandates for younger kids (strictly theater, from everything I've seen, heard, and read). It took a couple of years for the CDC, for example, to really admit the role of nutrition, lifestyle, obesity, and other conditions and the real but limited value of the first generation of COVID vaccines. (Don't worry, more iterations coming. It takes at least 4-5 years to develop a really solid vaccine, and it's an open question whether a partially sterilizing vaccine should be taken by everyone. It seems to encourage the variant critters.)
In the case of Sri Lanka, it's pretty clear, the real experts knew the truth, but were largely ignored by the political-level people (not just elected officials, but ideological activist groups with axes to grind and media types). The president and his organic farming allies had little idea of what they were talking about. The organic world still hasn't learned anything and wrongly believes their methods can be applied at scale to feed the world.
This is why I'm so happy to see the rise of Substack blogs like Doomberg, an anonymous collective of writers from the commodities and natural resources world. They explain, for example, the nuts-and-bolts of how modern agriculture works, why we should be moving toward natural gas and nuclear for energy, and why the world won't be fully electrified any time soon (not enough input resources or industrial capacity).
Cats like it hot. My mother had a cat that cooked her ears under a copper foil lined lampshade. From that point on, the tips of her ears were bald. It can be 110 degrees outside, and our cats will sleep in the cat tree in the window on our unairconditoned side porch. And in the Winter, they sleep on the radiators. I’m sure your kitties are fine.
China’s playing diplomatic chess, Russia checkers, and the US tiddlywinks.
The problem with the mangled two-party system in the US is (ok, besides too much money) that the "best and brightest" do not rise to the top. I also thought Obama was an exception to this, but he was hopelessly lost without enough back-up.
There are just way too many self-interested fools at all levels of the federal government (and many states, too, thus filling the pipeline for years to come).
I don’t know if that’s as much a problem with the system or a problem with the voters. Or at least the bases who turn out for primaries, conventions, caucuses, etc. We had a “dissembled convention” with ranked choice voting here in Virginia last year, and ended up with a fairly moderate, by Virginia GOP standards, gubernatorial candidate who went on to win the general (thanks to the Democrats nominating a corrupt retread who acted very petulantly on the campaign trail). The ranked choice ballot “disassembled convention” gave Virginia Republicans the benefits of a convention, without the attrition of successive ballots of a normal convention, and a the high turnout of a primary. So we got the first consensus GOP candidate since Gov. George Allen in 1993.
Of course, Gov. Youngkin has had a heckuva time filling the executive branch because there just aren’t enough sane, educated, and competent people willing to work for a Republican administration anymore. Trump not only had the problem of not being able to staff his administration; he’s also made it impossible to find qualified appointees for Republican executives around the country.
But you see, that's the "system." Instead of ranked choice (which I agree, gave Virginia a decent candidate), the first past the post system entices donors-- and the base-- to throw everything behind one candidate, and rules out potentially sensible people along the way.
Why would voters turn out for someone they don't want? And that's the slate one so often has. An unlikable D no one really likes and an R no one really likes, except for the whipped up frothers on either end of the spectrum and the money men (intentionally gendered there) who just want to have a pliable winner. How often in the last 25 years have we heard that people "vote against" the opposite candidate, or choose "the least harmful" option. That does not sound like faith in the American democratic system, does it.
Very true!
Obama’s smart; he just doesn’t care about foreign affairs. Biden should know better after decades on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but he just doesn’t get it. And our two major political parties are pacifist and isolationist, respectively.
The Paulestinians have taken that concern and run with it. I don’t think the average Republican voter is isolationist, but the talking head, activist, and consultant classes certainly are, and they influence the GOP “leadership.”
Claire, your dad has become a favorite with CG readers. We hope he’s keeping cool and has air conditioners cranking on high.
“(NB WigWag: This is what the World Bank actually recommends to farmers in developing countries. Read the whole thing. You won’t find so much as a hint of the suggestion that they do without fertilizer. Quite to the contrary.)”
I will read it, happily, but note that the World Bank is just one of many globalist institutions. The WEF specifically recommended that Sri Lankan farmers adopt organic farming techniques. It was a calamitous recommendation for Sri Lankans. Of course, the WEF experts who made this recommendation had no skin in the game. They’re doing just fine.
Could you share the link to the WEF's recommendation to Sri Lanka with me?
I did some searching and found no exact match for this, but some close items. The Sri Lankan president did publish a 2018 article in the WEF about his proposals to make SL prosperous. The WEF apparently deleted this article from its site for a while. It's back up. I suspect this article is the source of the false claim that the WEF publicly pushed organic farming on Sri Lanka. (Of course, we don't know what happened in private.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220711030637/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/
Here's a good summary of the whole situation:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sri-lankas-green-new-deal-was-a-human-disaster-gotabaya-rajapaksa-borlaug-synthetic-fertilizers-hunger-organic-agriculture-11657832186
And a good summary and prescient warning from the USDA:
https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Sri%20Lanka%20Restricts%20and%20Bans%20the%20Import%20of%20Fertilizers%20and%20Agrochemicals_New%20Delhi_Sri%20Lanka_05-14-2021.pdf
UPDATE: An industry newsletter on what happened, a farmer from India :
https://www.agweb.com/opinion/we-must-learn-sri-lankas-man-made-organic-agriculture-disaster
The Establishment speaks! (and does not approve of ill-conceived organic farming schemes applied rapidly and coercively)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/
These two articles, by the Indian farmer and from agronomists writing at FP, are top-notch and highly recommended to get a concise yet full picture. Read what the FP article says in the middle -- it's a whole tutorial on how modern agriculture works and where it came from and why it's vulnerable to being wrecked by economic and technological illiterates. (Hint, hint, they're trying to do something similar to squeeze natural gas here in the US, which will badly reduce synthetic fertilizer needed to feed modern society -- malign ignorance at work.)
These are excellent resources, thank you. I'm always impressed by the quiet, unread reports put out by humble drones in our Deep State--like the USDA brief. That's so much more serious and informative than most of the journalism out there, isn't it? When people say they want to get rid of the Administrative State, I'm always perplexed: To judge from their reports, they're by far the most serious part of our government and probably the only reason we're not a complete basket case, given the absolute hopelessness of our elected politicians.
That could sound as if I'm expressing a WigWaggian enthusiam for unelected governments, and perhaps I am: I think we should have elected officials, but I also think a competent civil service--one *not* beholden to electoral fortune--is absolutely essential to running any kind of modern nation state. And the USDA report shows exactly why.
Hi Claire, you are welcome!
I half-agree with you. My late parents were civil servants, or public employees. They had high levels of technical competence and knowledge, apart from their political views. They were of a generation that rarely let the latter interfere with what they actually *knew*.
However, I have to say, in our media-saturated world, increasingly people at the higher levels the civil service and especially at the political appointee level, have become real problems, not just with their disagreements with elected officials, but their own agendas, often ill-informed.
Then the media encourages the self-appointed pseudo-expert. For the first year of COVID, much public health wisdom, coming from the top public health schools in the country, was attacked by such people and subject to censorship by very non-experts from Google and Facebook. Traditional public health practices were set aside in many countries in favor of lockdowns that soon clearly did not provide much benefit or silly mask mandates for younger kids (strictly theater, from everything I've seen, heard, and read). It took a couple of years for the CDC, for example, to really admit the role of nutrition, lifestyle, obesity, and other conditions and the real but limited value of the first generation of COVID vaccines. (Don't worry, more iterations coming. It takes at least 4-5 years to develop a really solid vaccine, and it's an open question whether a partially sterilizing vaccine should be taken by everyone. It seems to encourage the variant critters.)
In the case of Sri Lanka, it's pretty clear, the real experts knew the truth, but were largely ignored by the political-level people (not just elected officials, but ideological activist groups with axes to grind and media types). The president and his organic farming allies had little idea of what they were talking about. The organic world still hasn't learned anything and wrongly believes their methods can be applied at scale to feed the world.
This is why I'm so happy to see the rise of Substack blogs like Doomberg, an anonymous collective of writers from the commodities and natural resources world. They explain, for example, the nuts-and-bolts of how modern agriculture works, why we should be moving toward natural gas and nuclear for energy, and why the world won't be fully electrified any time soon (not enough input resources or industrial capacity).
Cats like it hot. My mother had a cat that cooked her ears under a copper foil lined lampshade. From that point on, the tips of her ears were bald. It can be 110 degrees outside, and our cats will sleep in the cat tree in the window on our unairconditoned side porch. And in the Winter, they sleep on the radiators. I’m sure your kitties are fine.