The Witness Chronicles, a Grasshopper Sub

The Witness Chronicles November 29, 2023

Republican money is drying up, Biden and inflation, and shifting awareness of climate change

Nov 29, 2023

burning firewood in fire pit — Stay warm! Photo by Mauro Sbicego on Unsplash

Bit of a light week writing-wise with the Thanksgiving holiday, so things are just a bit less bonkers. Apparently GOP donors are keeping their powder dry, which may indicate changes in how they see 2024 unfolding. The Washington Post did a good piece on the phony Biden inflation kerfuffle but gave the piece a title I found misleading at best. And I ruminate about living with climate change and how we are changing gradually in response.

Right now lake effect snow is blowing in off of Lake Ontario and it is cold, but the snow won’t amount to anything here, though go 80 miles west and they are getting 1-3” per hour. Ugh. Honestly that’s fun to watch if you’re inside and warm, but then you have to deal with it after.

But here in Rochester we dodged most of that last winter and the pattern looks the same. Fingers crossed.

Republicans and Money: It’s Not Flowing

Maybe donors got tired of paying Donald Trump’s legal bills

Or maybe he is just scaring them off with his crazy.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is almost out of money on the eve of a Presidential election year, and as we all know, big money greases the wheels of national politics. This brings up so many questions it’s hard to know where to start.

First, what does it tell us about how strong Donald Trump’s support is among the nation’s wealthy? Are they starting to have doubts? Despite the Trumpian belief that court appearances are political gold, they also have the effect of making people question his competence.

The NY civil case, which many on both sides dismissed as weak, is proving to be the opposite. First, he has already lost based on the judge’s decision months ago. The circus we are witnessing now is only about the fines and other penalties.

But if I’m a big money GOP donor, presumably a business person, seeing how he and his sons ran their business is pitiful. Their testimony only reinforces our suspicion that Don Jr and Eric are not the brightest lights on the planet.

And their father’s obsession with a court clerk, a weak distraction tactic at best, is now starting to look deranged. He may think he is funny threatening the families of the judge and other court officers, but I’m guessing it has turned off a lot of donors who are starting to see him as a jerk.

And of course, the longer this circus goes on, the bigger those legal bills get. And we know Trump is notorious for refusing to pay legal bills. He is either digging in the mud to find lawyers or being forced to pay huge upfront fees.

In other words, the guy is an incompetent deadbeat and lousy businessman.

And this is only the beginning of the endless court dramas playing out in the next year. But those on the horizon are criminal cases involving things like national security, insurrection, possible treason, and attempts to subvert election laws.

His co-defendants are folding left and right and cutting deals to protect their tattered reputations. It didn’t help that ‘billionaire’ Trump won’t pay their bills either.

So, that circus goes on and on and it’s not leaving town for an election year.

Then there is that little problem in the Republican controlled House of Representatives. They are not just dysfunctional, they are climbing over each other to stay alive. You gotta love Freedom Caucus firebrand Chip Roy literally begging his colleagues to pass something for him to brag about back in Texas.

Something, anything. Didn’t happen. The Republican grip on the House is beyond frail, in part because a lot of these politicians can’t stand each other. Nothing gets done without the Democrats, who are remarkably consistent in sticking together and voting as a bloc.

Then there is what looks like the root cause of this hesitancy to donate, the utter incompetence of the RNC and its leader Rona McDaniels, who remains a steadfast Trump believer, despite all the evidence that things like his endorsements are turning out to be the kiss of death.

The RNC officially stopped issuing any policy positions during the Trump presidency, reinforcing the appearance that they have nothing positive to contribute to the country’s future. The party of do nothing is not a catchy slogan.

But it is the actual reality.

Then there is the abortion issue, the most no win win the party has ever experienced. It puts every member in a bind they cannot escape. Doctrine says they must be anti-abortion, but reality says this issue is killing them. There’s a lot of two-faced squirming going on, reinforcing the image of them being incompetent and spineless.

And there is the polling, the saving grace that tells them Trump is beating Biden despite all this. There’s a lot of wishful thinking built into this belief, a lot of creative interpretation and cherry picking, and the reality that polls got some really big things wrong in 2022.

But the GOP has a wild card in their deck, a real get out of jail free card. Joe Biden is old. Remember, Joe Biden is old. Say it again and whisper that he is losing it. But whatever you do, don’t look too close at his work in Israel and Middle East where hostages are coming home.

Bringing hostages home got Ronald Reagan elected. That and a shady deal with the kidnappers, but that’s old news.

If I’m sitting on a big checkbook and I am a Republican*, I’m keeping my powder dry and keeping the pen in my pocket. Maybe that big check I wrote Ron DeSantis is leaving a bad taste in my mouth as he flames out, a victim of his own enormous ego. And those cowboy boots.

*Not, ever.

Or maybe I own Disney stock and I don’t like my party going after big business. That’s not the Republican way, but the Republican way is lost right now and that may be the number one reason donors are holding back.

Trump doesn’t care about the Republican way, he cares about the Donald Trump way. And figuring out a way to pardon himself, because it sure is looking like he is guilty.

Paying the legal bills of a guy who is guilty is not good business.

The prevailing belief is that Trump will somehow hang in there and that his numbers are real. But the real test of his staying power is his ability to raise money and right now the conservative money is not voting with their checkbooks.

Watch the money.

No, Joe Biden Did Not Make Your McDonald’s Meal Cost $16

This is ridiculous.

Everything is someone else’s fault, usually someone you disagree with politically, or you read about on social media.

A reminder: TikTok is a Chinese company that probably is collecting your data and the data of millions of Americans. Same for Temu.

Maybe you should think about that instead of McDonald’s. Maybe Mickey Dee is just jacking prices to make more money.

Joe doesn’t have anything to do with gas prices either. Take a look at oil company profits in the past three years. They are many times higher than any time in their history.

America is suffering from a victim mentality. Everyone is doing something to us whenever anything changes. Media manipulators know this and they love it. They can go to someplace like the Republican National Committee and say, we can blame Biden for the cost of hamburgers.

We can even get the oil companies to keep raising prices and making money and blame him. They’ll even donate some to your guys.

If you bitch about these prices maybe you should spend two seconds considering how prices work, not automatically looking for someone to blame. There’s blame, but because some yahoo on tv says Joe did it, doesn’t make it true.

Maybe your guy did it to win an election. Maybe you are the stooge.

No, it had to be the guy I don’t like. Did you ever consider the possibility that the only reason you don’t like them is because some pundit on TV or social media told you to?

Or that maybe some dictator like Putin paid them to do that so Americans would stay at each other’s throats?

Are you just plain dumb?

I don’t think so, but a lot of you are acting pretty stupid and the rest of us are sick of it. Not everyone is doing things to you. Not everything is someone else’s fault. That’s the simple and dumb way to cope with reality.

So, if you are not a dumbass, why are you repeating dumbass stuff like blaming the President of the United States for burgers being expensive?

Warning: sometimes you may be required to think logically. For example, who has more to gain from high gas prices, Joe Biden or Exxon Mobil?

This is not a trick question.

Conspiracy theories basically start with someone trying to prove something absurd is true by making up some weird theory and then making up ‘facts’ to support it.

This Biden Hamburger thing came up in a Washington Post article. Here’s the headline:

“The viral $16 McDonald’s meal that may explain voter anger at Biden”

The article is actually about social media manipulation of what people think and why, not Biden causing burgers to cost $16. But most readers will just see that headline and remove the word ‘may’. Now it reads:

‘The viral $16 McDonald’s meal that explains voter anger at Biden’

You’re not a chump. You’re not a rube. You’re not a sucker. You know who uses those derogatory terms? Grifters, con men, slick talking phony billionaires promising you a beautiful life like theirs.

Probably not Joe.

But I know, you have inside information, the real skinny. You heard half a headline on TV and it stuck in your head.

It was designed to do exactly that.

By the way, that Post article is pretty good reporting. But it is not about how Joe Biden made your lunch cost more. It’s about making chumps out of the American public.

Because there’s big money in it.

Managing Mental Climate Change

Complaining is getting us nowhere, fast

We’ve had forty years to get angry about global warming, to point fingers and identify the bad guys while communities burned and homes were swept away. It’s time to stop and reassess, because this thing is real, it’s here, and it’s not going away.

There’s a reason it’s called ‘climate change’. It is constantly evolving and, whether we know it or not, so are we, and fast. Faster than I would have thought possible even a few years ago. Did all our anger change things? Maybe, but more powerful forces worked behind that anger to shove deniers into reality.

Economics, for one. Actually it’s the big one, the reality the fossil fuel people with their bags of money couldn’t gloss over. Two big economic realities, macro and micro, stand out as agents of change.

The macro is (surprise!) the weather. Its severity and the reach of its effects accelerated way beyond those ridiculous schedules the oil people bought to convince us this thing was always on the horizon, never here.

Even they could not stop the weather from storming over that horizon like the fantasy backdrop it always was. The scenario planning scientists working for the oil companies always had the worst case situations in their pockets, never to be revealed. They knew.

No matter. The storms and fires came anyway and they triggered awareness in ways no amount of lobbying could hide. Whole towns burned, cities were devastated, some places dried up and others experienced torrential rain. A lake formed in Death Valley and the Mississippi River dried up, halting vital shipping.

And then economics stepped in and they came from a mundane but critical place, home insurance. And property insurance. I’ll be honest, after years of watching this crazy runaway train, I never saw that coming, yet it has changed the markets across our country and the world.

No insurance, no mortgages. No mortgages and no insurance means those who have it must risk their cash to live in these places. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos with money to burn, you’re not buying (and, as the cliche goes, he did not get rich burning away his money).

But what about that micro effect, the one we see every day? Gas prices. In my lifetime they increased well over 1000%, far beyond inflation. In California, you can pay well over $6/gallon and Europe has seen those prices for years. Yes, there are lots of taxes built into that price, and there should be.

But there are also astronomical profits for the oil and gas producers, profits so greedy that they tell me one thing: those guys know the game is almost over and they are squeezing out every penny they can get. Because with all that cash they can move on to other energy businesses.

New monopolies.

But those prices are something we see every day and they are hitting us right where it hurts, our day to day budgets. The oil companies can profit but that profiteering means consumers are being forced to change our behavior.

One odd and unexpected result is the rise of electric bicycles, which are projected to save more energy than electric cars with far lower environmental impacts. Why? They deal with the ‘last mile’ issue, getting us through short hops far more efficiently than jumping in the car.

And recycling a bike is minimal compared to even a small car.

Think I am exaggerating when I talk about bicycles? Go to Manhattan and cross any street. You better pay attention because the scariest thing you might face is getting run down by delivery riders zooming everywhere. No joke. But very little emissions too.

Home insurance and bicycles. Who saw that coming? And solar farms and windmills spinning quietly on every building, small, but churning out free energy nearly constantly.

Yes, there is good news, not as in our faces as the burning of Lahaina on Maui or the hurricanes in the south, but out there all over the US.

Climate change sucks. Thousands of species face extinction and beautiful areas are becoming unlivable. That’s on us and younger generations have the right to be angry, but only as they adapt to change and channel that anger into the future. Let’s get macro again.

Have you followed population growth lately? Probably not, because it is another statistical thing, fun with numbers. People worldwide are having less children, notably in China and here in the US. That’s about as macro a response as imaginable. We’re not having kids because of cost, uncertainty, and our possible inability to help them in the future.

This filters down throughout a society. You don’t need a three row SUV if you have one or two kids. You buy less groceries. McMansions start to lose their glow.

All of this is climate change. It’s societal change, the new reality, this time not planned by cabals of oil executives. Nor is it driven by crunchy granola commune types. It’s more likely to be things like indigenous tribes in the Amazon realizing what those oil guys and their kind did to them.

Replanting forests.

Evangelical right wing Christians may believe God made the planet for man and we can do whatever we want with it, because He will bail us out. But they still have to buy gas and groceries and they are thinking twice about that third kid.

Maybe God is bailing us but not the way they thought. Maybe his miracle looks like a solar farm or that delivery bike that almost ran you down in Manhattan.

It’s time for a mental reset when it comes to doom and gloom. We messed this up, but it was probably inevitable because greed and selfishness are Darwinian traits. But that same greed, aka, business, is driving us into solutions left and right, because they are profitable.

So, what is our new mental mindset? To me, it is optimizing these things to create the best possible planet for all of us. A cleaner, quieter, calmer place. Because we still have choices and if we learned anything it might be that the better choices are not always the most profitable in the short run.

By the way, if you must live on a beach, rent.

That’s my mental health tip of the day.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

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