Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

January 2024

2024

IT’S A CONSERVATIVE EPOCH:

Does the Rise of Nikki Haley Mean Trouble for Joe Biden? (Brad Bannon, 1/14/24, The Messenger)

She appeals to swing voters who can’t abide the president and his predecessor.

It took a conservative president — Richard Nixon — to travel to China and open a relationship with the communist regime. Might it take a conservative woman — Haley — to break the presidential gender barrier and rise above the glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton failed to crack?

Biden has been running against Trump since 2020. The president would need to do a complete 180 to retool his reelection campaign for a race against Haley. Her service in the Trump cabinet gives the president the opportunity to tag her as a Trump clone. But Trump is a true believer, while she’s flexible and subtle enough to avoid the extremist tag.

She found a way to run against Biden and Trump at the same time with her “New Generation of Conservative Leadership” message.

The nomination of any conservative–as opposed to MAGA–candidate would drive Joe from the race.

Health

HYSTERIA IS NOT HEALTH CARE:

Why our fear of cancer is outdated — and harmful (David Ropeik, January 8, 2024, Washington Post)

We now know that tens of thousands of common breast, prostate and thyroid cancers that are detected early never go on to do any harm. People “overdiagnosed” with these types of cancer are understandably frightened and usually choose more aggressive treatment than their clinical conditions require. Such “fear-ectomies” cause great harm, leading to side effects that range from moderate to severe and include death itself. We spend an estimated $5.2 billion a year on such clinically unnecessary treatment, 3 percent of the total spent on all cancer care annually.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2017, nearly 16 million people were screened for cancer even though they were younger or older than those for whom screening is recommended, based on who is more likely to be helped or harmed (by false positives, the side effects from follow-up diagnostic tests, and aggressive treatment for clinically non-threatening disease discovered in screening). We spend a minimum of $9.2 billion per year on this overscreening.


A majority of people believe that most cancer is caused by environmental carcinogens. Yet we now know that cancer is principally a natural disease of aging, which allows DNA mutations that cause uncontrolled cell growth to accumulate. More than half of those diagnosed with cancer in the United States are at least 65 years old, while 87 percent of those who die of it are 50 or older.

Yet governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to reduce the risk from environmental carcinogens, vastly more than on any other environmental health threat, including fine-particulate air pollution, which kills more than 100,000 people a year. We spend billions on organic foods, vitamins and supplements, as well as many other products that promise to reduce our risk of cancer but don’t. The public has voted against fluoridating the drinking water in public supply systems serving 30 percent of Americans, despite a lack of evidence to support the fear that fluoridation is a cancer risk. Fear of ionizing (nuclear) radiation, a vastly smaller cancer risk than commonly believed, has driven the cost of building nuclear power plants so high that this source of non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy struggles to compete in the energy marketplace.

Immigration Religion

THERE IS NO “OTHER”:

Nathanael’s Epiphany (Malcolm Guite, January 13th, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)


The Gospel reading for this second Sunday of Epiphany (John 1:43-51) takes us to one of the most mysterious and beautiful moments in the New Testament. As the disciples begin to gather around Jesus, Philip finds Nathanael and says “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law, and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (John 1:45) Nathanael’s unpromising response is ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Nathanael is not alone in having this kind of bigoted and prejudiced attitude to ‘other’ places and people…

Energy

ALL COMMODITIES ARE FUNGIBLE:

China’s Solar Dominance Faces New Rival: An Ultrathin Film: As renewable energy becomes a geopolitical tool, Japan looks to recover its technological edge (George Nishiyama, Jan. 11, 2024, WSJ)


In the U.S., the Biden administration is seeking to build a domestic supply chain for solar panels. Japan, also looking for a homegrown solar solution, is focusing on what are called perovskite solar cells that don’t use any silicon.

Invented by Japanese scientist Tsutomu Miyasaka, the cells use minerals forming a crystal structure called perovskite, which can be used in a device to turn the sun’s rays into electricity.

A key element in manufacturing perovskite is iodine. While hardly a resources powerhouse, Japan happens to be the world’s second-largest producer of iodine after Chile, accounting for around a third of global production.

“Look at what China is doing with semiconductors. That’s bullying,” said Miyasaka, referring to Beijing’s export restrictions on the rare elements gallium and germanium used in chips. “With perovskite cells, the components can be made domestically.”

Republican Liberty

THE TEXT IS A STUBBORN TASKMASTER:

Is Donald Trump Disqualified from the Presidency? (Matthew J. Franck, 1/11/24, Public Discourse)


I doubt that any academic article on the law has moved so rapidly from its circulation among scholars to the adjudication of the merits of its argument as “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. Initially posted to the Social Science Research Network in mid-August 2023—with publication still forthcoming in the pages of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review—Baude and Paulsen’s 126-page case for Donald Trump’s disqualification from the presidency has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and figures prominently in the reasoning of the Colorado supreme court’s decision of December 19 that Trump’s name cannot appear on the state’s primary election ballot. (It is not cited in the December 28 ruling by Maine’s secretary of state to the same effect, but one might say that Baude and Paulsen’s fingerprints are visible.) Other scholars reached the same conclusion both before and since their article’s appearance—and still others vehemently disagree with their conclusion. Some states have considered the question and permitted Trump to remain on primary ballots. The question is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The “Section Three” of Baude and Paulsen’s title is the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, crafted by the Thirty-ninth Congress after the Civil War and ratified in 1868:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The case against Trump, then, is that, having sworn the oath of office as president on January 20, 2017, he then on January 6, 2021 “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the constitutional order that was the subject of that oath. Thus, he is now ineligible for any office, state or federal, in the United States, or for service in Congress or any state legislature or as a presidential elector.

Energy

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

90-seat Elysian airliner: 800-1,000-km range on batteries alone (Loz Blain, January 11, 2024, New Atlas)


A Dutch startup says everyone’s hugely underestimating the potential of battery-electric aircraft – that it’s possible to build large battery-electric airliners covering distances most assume we’ll need hydrogen for. Elysian plans to prove it.

The company doesn’t believe it’ll need some giant leap in batteries to do it, either; it says it can take 90 passengers some 800 km (497 miles) using a pack with 360 Wh/kg. Amprius, meanwhile, was shipping 450-Wh/kg cells back in 2022, and Chinese giant CATL launched a 500-Wh/kg “condensed” battery last year. Assuming some improvements, Elysian says it’ll hit 1,000-km (621-mile) range figures, at which point the E9X aircraft could feasibly cover around 50% of all scheduled commercial flights.

Energy

GEOMETRIC GROWTH GENERALLY ADDS UP FAST:

Chart: The US grid battery fleet is about to double — again: America’s energy storage industry is on a tear, installing batteries to store clean wind and solar and make the grid more reliable. (Julian Spector, Maria Virginia Olano, 12 January 2024, Canary Media)

The U.S. energy storage industry has its New Year’s resolution ready to go: double the capacity of batteries connected to the American grid.

And it looks achievable for the youngest sector of the power industry. The analysts at the federal Energy Information Agency predict that the total battery capacity installed on the U.S. grid will rise from 17.3 gigawatts at the end of 2023 to 31.1 gigawatts by the close of 2024. That scenario represents 80% year-over-year growth.

Dragon Has No Teeth End of History

ILLIBERALISM DOESN’T WORK:

China’s Long March Back to Stagnation (DEBIN MA, 1/12/24, Project Syndicate)

As the world grapples with the implications of ominous shifts within China, MIT economist Yasheng Huang, an astute long-term observer of the Chinese economy, has produced a well-timed book. In The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, he combines a close examination of contemporary China with an ambitious (sometimes overly so) assessment of the country’s recent and distant past.

Like Huang’s other writings, The Rise and Fall of the EAST has a crisp, punchy, and occasionally satirical tone. Unflinching in his criticism of the current Chinese regime’s failings, Huang champions China’s great reformers, including politically fallen ones.

Given the current political climate in China, it is a courageous book. Huang shows, with great conviction, that China owes its economic miracle to its embrace of market forces and the private sector, which formed the core of the “reform and opening-up” that began four decades ago, following the death of Mao Zedong. By retreating from those earlier policies and commitments, Chinese leaders created the conditions for the setbacks and stagnation that we are seeing today.

It’s remarkable how much damage a regime can do by rejecting the End of History.

Energy

MAGA HARDEST HIT:

Clean electricity is driving down US emissions (Maria Gallucci, 10 January 2024, Canary Media)

A record-shattering number of solar power projects and utility-scale battery installations contributed to the drop in U.S. power-sector emissions, which fell by 8 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year, analysts said in a preliminary report released on Wednesday. Renewables helped accelerate the long-term decline of coal-fired electricity generation, which hit a record low last year. Electricity from fossil gas — which emits relatively less CO2 than coal but is high in methane — also increased substantially.

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