A bit of this and that

Linked by Celebritocracy

The Three Horsemen of the Celebritocracy

This is probably the best time that Newfoundland and Labrador has ever had to secure a reliable transmission grid that is transparently run and accessible out of Labrador to other parts of Canada and the United States.

Best.

Time.

Ever.

So the Wakeham government has decided to sit it out alongside Quebec, using the excuse that until there’s a decision about the Churchill Falls deal participation in such an agreement would be premature.

Not only is this absolute nonsense, but it tells you that Premier Wakeham and his team have absolutely no energy policy. They are stuck with the ideas left them by a gang with no ideas. To be fair, there’s been no coherent provincial energy policy since 2003 but that’s really more excuse than explanation. In this case, the government’s weak position makes it all the more likely that whatever comes out of the review, Premier Wakeham would eventually signa warmed over, slightly tweaked version of a deal that is fundamentally wrong.

If Premier Wakeham wants to know how he should be thinking about things, let him simply look to Quebec. That provincial government hasn’t signed onto the federal MOU on the national energy grid either but its reason is significantly different from that of Newfoundland and Labrador. In Quebec, they are simply waiting to see what emerges. And here’s the key part: they’ll wait to see if it’s in Quebec‘s best interest and does not challenge or undermine Quebec’s control of its own future.

Quebec doesn’t need the grid but Newfoundland and Labrador does. That’s why the Quebec position - best interest and control of the future - would lead Newfoundland and Labrador to join the national agreement. The Churchill Falls deal and the national grid are related, but they’re not identical. Newfoundland and Labrador has an opportunity to develop other hydroelectric and other electrical generation resources in Labrador and on the island. The national grid paid for largely by the federal government and run on a fair basis offers Newfoundland and Labrador the opportunity of using its renewable resource resources to create a steady supply of renewable income. Not participating, which is what we’re doing already, is phenomenally shortsighted and binds us into the same thinking that lead to Andrew Furey’s ridiculous agreement.

In the context of the Churchill Falls deal, even in a slightly altered version, we would only need one change to make it work. That would be to get rid of the Furey pledge to sell our electricity only to Quebec. With a reliable and accessible grid, the 2,000-ish megawatts of generating capacity that comes to Newfoundland and Labrador under the Churchill Falls extension would be worth about $750 million at average export rates of about six cents a kilowatt hour. If Newfoundland and Labrador took 65% of the plant output after 2041 - as the majority shareholder - there’s a lot more cash available from those same exports. Even if we wound up selling Churchill Falls electricity to Quebec for more than the pennies Furey accepted or just signed the deal as it was (except for the exclusivity clause), we’d be cash ahead and there’d still be capacity to export electricity from wind or other hydro developments.

The Four Horsemen of the American Celebritocracy

Donald Trump is a transactional kinda guy. One and done. He only understands things to the extent they deliver a single, quick result, usually tied to his personal promotion and enrichment. He surrounds himself with people who think like that or support his own goals. That’s Celebritocracy, and you thought it was just a local thing in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Trump got into Iran based on exactly that simplistic level of understanding. No thought. Just vague impressions. And the self-delusion that blowing up speedboats and whatever happened in Venezuela could just happen again. Great visuals. Big hit on the nightly news. And he is glorious, even when he is not.

His skull is a glass box and to understand him, you just have to look. Good example was a question last week about tariffs. Wonderful things according to Trump. He won tariffs, whatever that means but you - some unidentified other people - just got a bad decision, meaning the one from the US Supreme Court. He’s right and everyone else is wrong.

That’s like Dwight Ball’s tendency while he was in politics to make up a fictious version of himself from the past so he can never be wrong in the present. He loved Muskrat Falls from the start - by his own words - and never changed but when the project wasn’t popular, Ball would say he’d always opposed it. When confronted on television, live, with the contradiction he invented on the spot another story to try and make the two fit. Ball did the same thing on at least one other topic in public but that sort of psychological feature is really amazing to see in action..

That transactional nature and Trump’s mental transience is how the United States got into Iran and why Trump is now - barely a week into a long war - already looking to get out. His short attention span was taxed after the first day. On Tuesday, the war was almost over and just beginning at the same time. The only truth - a weird glitch in his skull wiring - was Trump admitting that his comment about a missile strike on a school was wrong because he didn’t know much about those things. That’s another feature of Trump that makes it hard for folks to deal with him. He treats news interviews with contempt. He lies and doesn’t care about it, safe in the understanding that in the publicity machinery of American news, they will make of it what they need. They will treat lies as truth or parse hidden meaning in lies and nonsense to fill space.

In Iran, Trump is about to lose badly and obviously. The United States does not have the political will or the weaponry for a long fight or a big fight and a big, long fight like the Second World War is twisted fantasy. Those uniforms the American army adopted, the stuff from the Last Great War They Won, those are pure nostalgia.

Iran will not change. Nothing will change no matter how wildly John Bolton - his walrus moustache makes him look like a character from an old Disney cartoon - wants it. Iran will not change because the United States does not have the weapons or will to make it change .

Strategy is not complicated. It is actually very simple. Iran opted for lots of drones. Cheap one-way things they can produce in volume and that get through. Not all of them, but enough. For every dollar Iran spends, its enemies must spend $20 to $30 to shoot them down. The genius is economic, not technical or tactical, as Wes O’Donnell described it this week on CNN. “… Iran doesn’t need to win every exchange. It just needs to keep the exchange rate favorable until the other side runs out of interceptors or political will, whichever comes first.” Wes explains the Americans’ strategic problem in simple but stark language.

For the United States, especially under this administration, will and weapons are both in short supply. The more Pete Hegseth blusters the more you know his knees are trembling behind the podium. Words are cheap so Pete flings them everywhere, the more grandiose and ludicrous the word the better. Pete is like Donny. A bully. Which means he is a coward. An insecure child playing at being an adult. Actions are expensive because they matter and Pete and Donny are not just skinflints or cheapskates, they are flat broke.

The real damage to the United States is that the whole world can see all this too, not only Donny’s glass skull but the Potemkin village of American military power left to rot, as in the United Kingdom or Canada by successive administrations from the left and the right. The Russians, Chinese, and others did not need to be told but now everyone can see the abysmally low stocks of ammunition, the chaotic leadership, the inability to see how things are connected, the willingness to sacrifice anything to escape a transient problem.

That’s Trump telling people the war is almost over while a tanking stock market was still open so there’d be a rally, then going back to it could be a long war once the bell had rung for the day. That’s letting Russia sell oil to India and other places, which emboldens the weakening Russians in Ukraine, threatening Europe, simply because - predictably Trump’s war caused gasoline prices to skyrocket - as they did - and with predictable public unhappiness in what looks increasingly like the untied States of America.

Untied. Unhinged. Incoherent. Chaotic. How else could one describe the demented demonic Lindsay Graham, a caricature of every grifting GOP Southern lunatic Bible-thumping Senator, promoting his own jihad in hopes of The Rapture, threatening European leaders, and offering to personally, himself, sign treaties with Gulf states if they’d join the war he helped start?

Kristi Noem out - artificial not only in intelligence but after so much plastic surgery she is plastic, literally. Markwayne Mullin in - Jethro Bodean but without the intellectual depth. Pierre Poilievre - wannabe Trumpian gauleiter of the General Government - traveling Europe as his party’s popularity tanks, making videos about Runneymede and Magna Carta, or imaging pipelines everywhere from Alberta but never explaining how he could do what no one else does. Meanwhile, his caucus at home, suffering from TDS - Trudeau Derangement Syndrome - scrums anyone, anywhere to tell Canadians they love Trump more than Lindsay Graham ever could and want Canada on the frontlines in Iran, yesterday, even though Canadians make it plainer every day they want none of this murderous, lecherous, larcenous Trump crew.

This is the United States of America under Donald Trump and his goons, buffoons, and poltroons. The untied state of America. Baffling to many, but “sometimes, as happened last Tuesday, you can see the Big Illusion and immediately see the illusion behind *that* for what it all is.”

“It would be unsettling had I not had the experience before,” admittedly on a smaller scale.

If this is your first time seeing the illusion and the one it is nested inside and the many illusions nested inside like endless matryoshka dolls, try not to be scared.

Try.

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