In IMPRIMIS from Hillsdale College JULY/AUGUST 2023 | VOLUME 52, ISSUE 7/8 (link below)

Imperialism: Lessons From History

Victor Davis Hanson

Wayne and Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on the Regent Seven Seas Mariner on June 30, 2023, during a Hillsdale College educational cruise from Istanbul to Athens.

The word “imperialism” comes from the Latin word imperium. It refers to a nation or a state implanting its rule on other states, treating them as subordinates and in an inferior fashion. Some suggest today that America is behaving imperialistically—we do, after all, have some 600 military bases around the world. So it is worth recalling some historical examples of imperialism to understand what the idea entails.

Looking at empires through history, we can identify several things that most of them have in common. One is that their leaders often say or seem to believe that their imperialist policies have little to do with self-interest.

We can see an example of such denial in Pericles’ famous funeral oration as recorded in the second book of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. The speech was delivered in 431 B.C., at the height of the Athenian Empire. Athens was expropriating tribute from its subject states and had built the Parthenon, the Propylaea, and soon the Erechtheion on the Acropolis. In other words, the Athenians were diverting a good portion of their allies’ tribute paid to them—which was supposed to be devoted to mutual defense—to enhancing their city. And what does the imperialist leader Pericles have to say of his grand visions? He calls Athens “the school of Hellas” and proclaims that it will enjoy “the admiration of the present and succeeding ages.”

Athens won’t need a poet like Homer to memorialize it, Pericles continues. Why? Because, he says, “we have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring, and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.” In other words, Athens is proud of its mission to uplift the other Greek city-states—by force.

Likewise with the Roman Republic and Empire. Caesar went into Gaul in 58 B.C. and in a nine-year period killed perhaps one million Gauls and enslaved another million. And yet in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and in later Roman literature, we read that Rome brought civilization to Gaul. The elite of Gaul were to wear purple togas, enjoy habeas corpus, and have aqueducts, so it was all for the good.

Similarly with sixteenth century imperialist Spain, which variously sent a force of 1,500 soldiers into Mexico in 1519 under Hernán Cortés. In two years they destroyed Tenochtitlán, ancient Mexico City, wiping out probably 200,000 people. And was the purpose to gain land, gold, and riches to help in the fight against Protestantism and Islam in Europe? Not exactly, according to Bernal Díaz, who was on the expedition. Rather it was more to convert souls to Christianity and to stamp out sodomy, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. To be sure, the conquest had these effects. But were the death and destruction really all for the sake of the conquered?

“The White Man’s Burden,” a long controversial poem by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1899, was addressed by a citizen of imperial England to the United States, which was currently fighting what many saw as an imperialist war in the Philippines. One of the poem’s stanzas reads, “Take up the White Man’s burden / In patience to abide / To veil the threat of terror / And check the show of pride / By open speech and simple / An hundred times made plain / To seek another’s profit / And work another’s gain.” This sense of duty sums up the common imperialist mindset: imperialism is a burden, undertaken reluctantly and for the good of the uncivilized. There is little self-serving about it.

Another trait empires have in common is obviously their dependence for enforcement on some type of superior military power—most often a navy. True, the Spartans controlled a land empire, as did the Soviet Union; but those empires were confined with self-imposed limitations. If a state becomes a naval power, as Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out in his classic works on the influence of sea power on history, then it can move troops around to the rear of an enemy, impose boycotts, or modulate trade and supplies to help allies or hurt recalcitrant colonies.

The greatest empires have always been maritime. The Mediterranean, which the Romans referred to as mare nostrum or “our sea,” has been the seat of empires throughout history because of its geography—it is a convenient sea for imperialists in the middle of three land masses. The British Empire, of course, was entirely a result of British naval superiority.

A third characteristic empires share in common—perhaps the most interesting and thoughtworthy—is that for all the supposed advantages to be had through imperial rule, a historical case can be made that it has never quite penciled out. The costs of control seem to outweigh the benefits, even though—human nature being what it is—the imperialists tend to be oblivious to the expenses, perhaps because of the power and grandeur that come with empire.

One reason imperial policy seems superficially advantageous in terms of costs and benefits is the seduction of absolute power, as implied by the Caledonian (Scottish) nationalist Calgacus in 85 A.D. As recounted in Tacitus’s history, Calgacus complains of the Romans in addressing his troops: “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.” In other words, if imperial powers can’t conquer a country and bring it into the fold peacefully, they wipe it out as a signal to others. So much for benefits to either the imperialist power or its subjects.

One corollary to the unprofitability of empire is that it tends to corrupt the character of the imperial power.

The Athenian Empire was based on the idealism of 180 subject city-states being offered the advantages of democracy. City-states conquered by Athens were required to become democracies—and what can be wrong with that?

But in 415 B.C., a large Athenian naval force went to the island of Melos and demanded that the Melians submit and begin paying tribute. Thucydides recounts what ensued, the famous Melian Dialogue, in the fifth book of his history: You’re either with us or against us, the Athenians threatened, and if you are against us we will destroy you. The Melians countered that they should be able to remain free and to maintain neutrality in Athens’ war with Sparta. The Athenians rejected the idea of neutrality. The Melians further argued that destroying Melos would result in anti-Athenian sentiment in Greece. The Athenians replied that it would instead result in fear and awe at Athens’ power. In the end, the Melians refused to submit. Following a siege, the Athenians massacred the adult men of Melos and enslaved the women and children.

As an aside, when I was 18 and just beginning my study of the classics, I was astonished when I read in Thucydides that when the Peloponnesian War broke out, most of the Greeks wanted Sparta to win. Was not Athens a democracy and Sparta an oligarchy? Athens was the home of Socrates, Pericles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Sophocles. Sparta was rural and backward with no navy or beautiful temples or walls. It represented Doric severity as opposed to the Ionic cosmopolitanism of Athens. Why would the Greeks prefer that Sparta win? I didn’t understand the anomaly when I was 18, but the simple answer soon became clear: Sparta was not then imperial—or at least not as imperial as Athens. Empires like to think of themselves as having a lot of friends, but they are often naive in forgetting the depth of the ill-will they incur.

As if the destruction of Melos wasn’t enough to show the hubristic corruption of imperial Athens, the following summer, Athens sent a force of 40,000 troops to Syracuse to conquer or destroy the largest democracy in the Greek world. The Sicilian Expedition, as it came to be known, was a complete disaster. Thucydides says at the end of his seventh book, “they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.” For all practical purposes—although the Peloponnesian War would go on for another nine years—the Sicilian debacle marked the end of the Athenian Empire and illustrated the follies of unchecked imperialism.

It can be argued that the Roman Republic underwent a similar kind of imperial corruption. In historian Arnold Toynbee’s two-volume work, Hannibal’s Legacy, he argued that the period in which Rome fought the three Punic Wars—an era during which Rome achieved mastery of almost the entire Western Mediterranean—was ultimately calamitous for Rome because it undermined Rome’s republican habits, virtues, and character.

The Roman people, Toynbee argued, especially the independent yeoman farmers, were sent off for long periods to fight as legionaries in places like Spain and Numidia (present day Libya). Their places were taken by some two million slaves from conquered provinces who were shipped back to Italy. Huge amounts of money extracted from conquered lands poured into Italy and enriched an elite class, whose members consolidated the farms of the soldiers who were fighting abroad and forged them into large estates worked by slaves.

In time the troops overseas—whose successes had been due to the Italian virtues of hard work, independence, autonomy, and agrarianism that one sees emphasized in Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics—became accustomed to plunder. When Carthage finally fell in 146 B.C., its population of 50,000 (down from 500,000) was enslaved, and the city was razed to its foundations. That same year the Romans looted and destroyed Corinth, the cultural capital of Greece.

The Rome of Virgil, Catullus, the younger Cato, and Cicero was now busy obliterating defeated cities that posed little threat to Rome’s security. The success that made Rome an empire, Toynbee argued, destroyed Rome by degrading the elements that made it great. Toynbee may not have been right in every respect, but there are certainly parts of his argument that ring true about corrupting the center through incorporating the periphery or diluting a republic by imperial ambitions.

This might remind us also of Britain, whose empire probably reached its peak sometime between 1850 and 1860. But if we read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, published in 1852, we see that at the heart of the empire in London, there were vast numbers of people who were in poor-houses at the same time the country was spending its resources far and wide on its great imperial civilizing mission.

This in turn might make us think of present day San Francisco, where people are injecting themselves with drugs, fornicating, urinating, and defecating on the streets, and downtown businesses are closing in large numbers; or Chicago, where the murder and crime rates are making life there unbearable for so many. Our major cities are going to rot at the same time we are pledged to giving $120 billion to Ukraine, already making its military budget the third largest in the world.

And the decay goes beyond the large cities. Think of those gruesome scenes in East Palestine, Ohio, after the train crash that enveloped the town in a toxic chemical cloud. East Palestine is full of working-class people whom few of our establishment political leaders were willing to go visit. The people of East Palestine form the demographic that died at twice the numbers of the general population in our overseas wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet few in our leadership class—many of whom had made one or more recent trips around the world to Ukraine to visit the Ukrainian people and pose for photos with Mr. Zelensky—went to East Palestine. I don’t know if one can properly call the United States an imperialist power, but this phenomenon of neglected and hollowed-out cores coupled with widespread overseas investments and commitments tends to be characteristic of empires.

Looking outward, we can see two clear manifestations of imperialism today. One is the Chinese brand of imperialism. China de facto now controls 15 of the major ports in the world—ports that the Chinese have leased, rebuilt, and refashioned. The Chinese are very farsighted, so these ports are not just random acquisitions. They control the Panama Canal. They monitor the entry into the Mediterranean at Tangiers and the exit at Port Said. The two largest ports in Europe, Antwerp and Rotterdam, are in the hands of the Chinese, as are the artificial islands in the South China Sea, a gateway for 50 percent of global oceanic traffic.

In other words, the Chinese control 15 points at which, in a global crisis, they will be able to shut off trade and access to commercial goods, oil, and food, not to mention the influence they have gained over local governments. China has also invested in concessions of rare earth mining, oil, and other natural resources in Africa. And due to the naive policies of the current U.S. administration, the Chinese are developing very close ties not only with Iran, but also with Saudi Arabia.

China today is creating something very much like the British Empire, although the Chinese are more like the imperialists of the Ottoman Empire than those of the British, in that they are neither apologetic nor shy about what they are doing. If the Chinese have an imperial enclave in Africa, they rope it off and don’t allow Africans nearby. Nor do they allow colonial peoples, for the most part, to go to Beijing and be educated or integrated. Like the Ottomans who conquered Constantinople in 1453, China has a monolithic culture and makes no apologies for its ambition to be a global imperial power.

The other imperial power we see on the rise today is more insidious. George Orwell’s nightmare dystopia in 1984 was a world in which there were no nation-states, but rather three powers wielding absolute control over three land masses into which everyone had been aggregated. Something like this is the dream of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and his fellow globalists (many of them American) who meet annually in Davos. Their vision is of a transnational ruling class, consisting of elites drawn mostly from the business, political, media, and academic worlds, with the power to issue edicts on climate change, public health, diversity, human rights, and even taxes, that override the will of national majorities.

If Chinese imperialism follows the tradition of the Ottoman Empire, the globalist vision of Davos imperialism is in the tradition of utopian empires gone astray. I think of Alexander the Great, who fought his first great battle with the Persians in 334 B.C. at Granicus on the coast of Asia Minor. When he died a decade later, he had probably killed over two million people in creating what he envisioned as an everlasting Hellenistic age based on an idea of the brotherhood of man. Alexander never thought of himself as a mere killer. He was an idealistic conqueror. And to this day, if you were to go to Greece and criticize Alexander, you would earn a hostile reaction. Alexander was an effective propagandist, as is the Davos crowd with their argument that the totalitarian rule they want to impose is for our benefit and the larger brotherhood of man.

Let me close by saying that in 1897, Rudyard Kipling was asked to present a poem at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, marking her 60th year as queen. The British Empire, admittedly the most civilizing and humane of any empire in history, was in full bloom—it had 420 million people under its sway and covered 12 million square miles of territory, seven times the area of the Roman Empire. Kipling originally planned to present “The White Man’s Burden” at the event, but he decided instead to present “Recessional,” a bleak poem that includes this stanza: “Far-called, our navies melt away / On dune and headland sinks the fire / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet / Lest we forget—lest we forget!”

“Recessional” is a poem of lamentation in which Kipling, known to be a great supporter of the British Empire, seems to be warning that it is destined to fail. Maybe he had been studying history.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/imperialism-lessons-from-history/

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“Mimi Liu, an attorney representing the U.S. Virgin Islands, made the shocking revelations during a court appearance on Thursday in Manhattan, the outlet reported.

During testimony, she claimed that JP Morgan Chase, the largest of all U.S. banks, notified the Department of the Treasury about the transactions after Epstein died, which adds more intrigue and complexity to a legal battle that was already heated.

“Epstein’s entire business with JPMorgan and JPMorgan’s entire business with Epstein was human trafficking,” she claimed outright, according to the outlet, which added:

The huge bank is being sued by the Virgin Islands government for allegedly facilitating sex trafficking by Epstein of young women when he was a JPMorgan customer from 1998 through 2013.

The attorney, referring to a $9 million block of transfers to women and suspicious withdrawals from Epstein’s accounts at JPMorgan, said it related to “facilitating” more than 20,000 sexual acts, given Epstein’s habit of paying several hundred dollars for each sexual encounter.

“JPMorgan was a full-service bank for Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” Liu argued during the hearing.

“The only reason that JPMorgan after 16 years reported the $1 billion in suspicious transactions was because he was arrested and then he was dead,” she noted further. “This was a CYA [cover your a–] reporting after 16 years of all of the monies flowing in his JPMorgan accounts after he was dead.” “

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Highlights From Viktor Orban’s Interview With Tucker Carlson: Trump, World War III, Putin, and More!

In a riveting interview with Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban touched on a range of topics that have global implications.

Orban offered a strong endorsement of former President Donald Trump, praising his foreign policy initiatives such as the Abraham Accords, which brought a new era of peace between Israel and several Arab nations.

He also lauded Trump’s diplomatic efforts with North Korea, Russia, and China, suggesting that Trump’s approach could bring peace to the Western world and beyond.

But Orban didn’t stop at U.S. politics; he also delved into the geopolitical tensions currently gripping Eastern Europe.

He expressed his dissatisfaction with how Hungary, a NATO member and U.S. ally, is treated by the United States, going so far as to say that his country is “treated worse than Russia.”

This is a significant statement, especially in the context of the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and it raises questions about the U.S.’s alliances and foreign policy strategies.

Orban’s comments also come at a time when Russia has threatened to restart nuclear testing, adding another layer of complexity to the geopolitical landscape.

Donald Trump’s response to the interview was a succinct but telling tweet: “Thank you Viktor Orban!”

This acknowledgment not only shows Trump’s appreciation for Orban’s endorsement but also serves as a nod to his supporters, reaffirming the global recognition of his policy successes.

So, what does this multifaceted exchange mean for the future?

First, it underscores the resonance of Trump’s foreign policy among conservative leaders globally, which could be a significant factor should he win the 2024 Presidential election.

Second, it highlights the potential for a strengthened alliance between Trump and Orban, two leaders who share similar worldviews.

Third, it brings into focus the shifting sands of U.S. foreign policy, especially concerning NATO allies like Hungary and contentious regions like Eastern Europe.

In summary, Viktor Orban’s interview with Tucker Carlson was a tour de force that touched on a multitude of issues, from U.S. politics to global tensions.

It serves as a microcosm of the broader geopolitical landscape, offering insights that could shape international relations for years to come.

Individuals, foundations, corporations, NGO’s, and foreign governments have paid big money for decades to corrupt the educational, religious, political and media systems in Hawaii and the U.S.  And those entities in the U.S. have done the same in foreign countries all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine, and still do today. 

Keep reading and I will bring this down to the local Hawaii island situation and the Lahaina fire. But this post is about the global human condition today and this is occurring almost everywhere, not only the the U.S. and Hawaii.

Back in the early 1950s, after WWII and theoretically before America’s culture (ethics, morals, values) were corrupted by the pervasive and now successful Soviet implementation of cultural subversion, already back then the U.S. was unfortunately meddling and subverting the cultures of other nations, including Hawaii.  The negative effects of this were obvious as I was traveling heavily internationally and living internationally 1980 to 2010.  The interferences and policies were not always secret and were sometimes obvious to locals and travelers alike.  Interference was policy.  For example Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard strategy, https://archive.org/details/gb-11-zbigniew-brzezinski-grand-chessboard  (audio discussion of his book)  https://archive.org/details/grandchessboarda00brze_0. 

There are many examples where this interference exploded, for example U.S. interference in Iran with the Shah led to the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the Iranian Revolution, and continues today as Iranian government-backed-anti-U.S., anti-Israel, anti-Lebanon, etc. terrorism.  Another example is the abomination underway in Ukraine, where U.S. government and oil companies interfered long before the hot military fighting started.  Brzezinski (Mika’s daddy) and President Jimmy Carter were proud of their instigation of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.  The U.S. invasion of Iraq was planned in Brzezinski’s books, along with the “color” revolutions, hegemonic dominos in North Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe, which theoretically will end with the fall of Russia.  But I am not writing to indict the U.S.  Many countries and their entities were and are doing the same things. 

The world was Machiavellian before Machiavelli and the Roman Empire, and it still is today, and conquer-or-be-conquered interference is not at all limited to political and military interference.  For example, there have been many decades of religion-based missionary work by most all religions, and many religious wars. For example Muslims conquered most of western Europe and then crusades by Christians recovered Europe and temporarily recovered Jerusalem and old Israel, a period said by historians to be the bloodiest in the history of civilization.  And there been many hundreds of years of corporate exploitation and colonization by companies from many countries into many other countries, for example the heroin trade by Great Britain in China and the Far East and the takeover of the Kingdom of Hawaii by the U.S.

People have not been able to leave other people alone to live in peace.  Machiavelli seems to be in our genes. 

Most of the founders and framers of the Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights understood this problem and designed the U.S. system of government with many checks and balances.  The problem is that we long ago departed from that policy of checks and balances.  Today, it is nothing but lip service rhetoric. 

One obvious example is the repeated and continuing attempts to get Trump, first by the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives, and now by the judiciary.  But Trump is only a recent and simplistic example.  This is not about Trump.  This is about us, wherever you live.  Another example, more pervasive in our daily lives, is the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946.  The Congress, the legislative branch, by this U.S. law handed over to the agencies of the Executive Branch its singularly most important and specifically defined Constitution duty, that is, to debate and pass laws on behalf of their constituents.  Since then, the agencies of the executive branch such as EPA, FDA, DOE, DOJ, Homeland Security, etc. have been able to propose and pass their own rules and regulations which apply with the full effect of law onto the American people and corporations, and so far have been adjudicated by the courts in favor of the agencies.  By this Act, Congress reduced the legislative branch to oversight and only in some cases control of funding.  This Act is an illegal abrogation of the separation of powers doctrine and destroys checks and balances set up by the founders and framers in the Constitution. 

There are many examples of problems and crises that derive from that Act.  For example, the EPA wrote and writes its own rules and regulations for controlling greenhouse gases, which was never the intent of Congress in the law known as The Clean Air Act, and then EPA pushes their rules and regulations down to the states, corporations, and individuals.  And those EPA rules and regulations rely on political works and pseudo-science incapable of being validated which is produced by an international agency, the UN IPCC, and the UN IPCC is an unelected political organization, not a science organization, and not un-biased, and only references selected works by other scientists and organizations; that entire process is unconstitutional in the U.S.  And when this matter is debated in Congress, and it has been, Congress rejected it and rejected the possibility of a treaty on the matter.  

EPA itself was not established by Congress, but rather by the Executive Order of President Richard Nixon.  Analogously, government mandates health care rules and experimental programs on corporations and individuals via employer and contractor rules and regulations set by unelected federal and state agencies, then enforced often by police.  We have corporations, e.g., drug and food companies, controlling government agencies, universities, public media, and scientific and medical journals.  And, of course, we have military and intelligence controlled by corporate contractors in collusion with the Department of Defense, the so-called military industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us, leading to atrocities like the DARPA and NIH funded and patented corona virus being released into the population by a U.S.-and-other-nations-funded Chinese Communist military-controlled lab in Wuhan, China.  Then there is the banking and debt problem, the largest fraud in world history.  There are many examples. 

As a result of this abrogation of constitutionally mandated checks and balances, the federal government and most state governments are now out of the control of the citizens who were originally intended to hold control of them through our elected representatives and president, which means that our nation is out of control, and arguably so is the world.   

This past week, Hawaii island/county Mayor Mitch Roth answered questions in a Volcano village public forum, “However, many of the attendees came looking to question the mayor on a variety of other issues, like vaccinations, the Maui wildfires, and a concept referred to as “15-minute smart cities”, which Mayor Roth said he was unfamiliar with.”

Though, “On Friday, Mayor Mitch Roth announced that Hawaiʻi County had been handpicked for the program, which is a collaborative endeavor involving the U.S. Department of State, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives — Local Governments for Sustainability, Resilient Cities Catalyst, and the Institute of the Americas.”  “Hawaiʻi County has been thoughtfully paired with Fortaleza, Brasil—a partnership that promises to enrich local insight and leverage the wealth of global resources available through ICLEI’s international network of agencies.” (1.)

Hawaiʻi County To Participate In Cities Forward Program

Have you heard of ICLEI? ICLEI noted therein by the county is an agency of the UN and part of the UN’s monstrous Agenda 2030, as is Sustainable Smart Cities.  Governor Josh Green announced at the UN that Hawaii would among the first “sustainable smart cities.”  https://www.khon2.com/local-news/gov-green-goes-to-the-un-to-talk-about-hawai%ca%bbi/

This is out-of-control government at the local level.  I am not suggesting that Mitch Roth or Josh Green are mal intended.  But the process illustrated by Hawaii Climate Council’s “sustainability” program and “Smart Cities” results in Lahaina fires and other major disasters, and we will have more. These disasters have nothing to do with human-CO2-produced climate change or global warming, contrary to the claims implied by Governor Green.   

On our present course, Hawaii and Hawaii island will become like Easter Island, destroyed by institutional ignorance and incompetence, and possible malfeasance. And we the citizens will have allowed it to happen and we paid for it.  Self-destructive behavior.  Witting or un-witting, the result is the same.   

Unfortunately, I am not overstating the issue and the issue is not only about the fraudulent climate change or the sustainability agenda, but that is only one example.  But please read, share and extrapolate the U.S.-based example explained here to Hawaii:  https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-art-of-the-steal-part-5/to

The program of Hawaii County’s newly approved Climate Council should not be supporting solar panel farms, wind turbine farms, electric vehicles, Smart Cities, ICLEI (1.), etc., nor ideological climate miseducation. Instead, they should be funding regular mowing of grasslands, water reservoirs, natural gas and oil terminals, geothermal electricity programs or small nuclear plants, fail safe and automatic redundant emergency alarms, sufficient roads for ingress and egress, sufficient training for police and fire departments, oversight of utility companies, disaster preparation, etc.  Smart Cities/ICLEI and Hawaii County’s Climate Council’s program guarantees more disasters like the Lahaina fire: “Deadly Hawaii Fires Are Result of Political and Policy Failures—Not Climate Change” by Jarrett Stepman at Heritage Foundation. 

The concept of “sustainability” has been perverted by non-scientific political ideology, unconstitutional Federal money, and uber wealthy individuals and foundations like Bloomberg, Gates, etc. The direct result is the opposite of sustainability.  Futile efforts to reduce carbon dioxide (literally a necessary gas of life not pollution, plants need more carbon dioxide not less) will make Hawaii less sustainable, not more sustainable and is already doing so by diverting resources to wasteful and futile activities.  But we also do not need or want Bloomberg, Gates, etc funding campaigns for politicians, district attorneys, attorney generals, judges, nor local issues, which is the same Machiavellian meddling and interference discussed above. 

Repeating the same mistakes over and over is the definition of insanity as is self-destructive behavior. 

Bud Bromley

Reference:

(1) ICLEI via wikipedia: “ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI, originally International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) is an international non-governmental organization that promotes sustainable development. ICLEI provides technical consulting to local governments to identify and meet sustainability objectives.^[2][3][4] It has a strong focus on biodiversity and has worked across local, national, and global levels.^[5] ICLEI was the first and is the largest transnational network of local governments engaging in climate action.^[6]“

“ICLEI is considered a bridging organization,^[7] playing important roles in knowledge sharing^[8] and in intermediation processes between local initiatives and regulatory actors.^[7] It has recognized the significance of cities for urban sustainability and helped to support their activities for over three decades.^{[5][9][10][11]}“

“The international association was established when more than 200 local governments from 43 countries convened at its inaugural conference, the World Congress of Local Governments for a Sustainable Future, at the United Nations in New York in September 1990.^[12] As of 2020, more than 1,750 cities, towns, counties, and their associations in 126 countries are a part of the ICLEI network.^[13] As of 2023, over 2,500 cities towns and regions were listed as members.”

Reblog of James Simpson’s August 7, 2023 post, “The Art of the Steal: Net Zero Is Unattainable, The Greatest Heist in World History” link below.

One of the Biden administration’s stated goals is to “deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030 and achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2050.” As already pointed out, this will only increase offshore wind’s contribution to 4.5 percent, and then only with massive government spending, loan guarantees, and mandates because green energy, especially offshore wind, is not profitable.

Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has turbocharged the agenda, already well under way. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to a full implementation of the Green New Deal, estimated to cost between $51 and $93 trillion.

But could “net zero” be achieved, even with the spending envisioned by the Green New Deal? Non-carbon energy comes from four main sources: solar, wind, nuclear and hydroelectric. (There is also a modest amount of geothermal and hydrogen.) Existing hydroelectric dams in the U.S. are already being dismantled at an unprecedented rate, so constructing new ones will be unlikely. We are left with solar, wind and nuclear.

Ignoring the fact that the Left will almost certainly oppose new nuclear plants, it is literally not possible to construct enough “clean” energy plants, including nuclear, to achieve net zero by 2050 or even much further out.

Here are the details and the rest of the story provided by James Simpson. https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-art-of-the-steal-part-5/

Hat tip to Trevor Louden at his New Zeal blog. https://www.trevorloudon.com/2023/08/the-art-of-the-steal-net-zero-is-unattainable/

You may be interested in Dr. Patrick Frank’s paper and video interview.  His full paper is attached below as pdf or here: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/13/5976#

Patrick Frank is a physical methods experimental chemist. BS, MS, San Francisco State University; PhD, Stanford University; Bergmann Postdoctoral Fellow, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. Now Emeritus scientific staff of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Department of Chemistry, Stanford University. 

The link for the video interview with Tom Nelson is: https://youtu.be/0-Ke9F0m_gw?si=LylKk3mZflvO31FX

Screen capture from video interview of Dr. Patrick Frank linked above.

Spoiler alert!

5.3. Final Conclusions

Direct evidence of a warming climate since the 19th century includes the lengthened growing season, the revegetation of the far North, and the poleward migration of the northern tree line [274,275,276,277,278,279,280,281,282,283]. However, at the 95% level of uncertainty, neither the rate nor the magnitude of 19th or 20th century warming can be known. A more detailed appraisal of errors may modify the uncertainty bounds, but an alternative conclusion is unlikely.

The 20th century surface air-temperature anomaly, 0.74 ± 1.94 °C (2σ), does not convey any knowledge of rate or magnitude of change in the thermal state of the troposphere. Climate alarm on that account is unjustifiable. The Joule-drift that certainly plagued all LiG thermometers manufactured prior to 1885 obviates the reliability of earlier air-temperature measurements. The global averaged surface air-temperature anomaly record cannot sustain any notion of unprecedented climate warming over the last 200 years, or over any other timespan.

LiG Metrology, Correlated Error, and the Integrity of the Global Surface Air-Temperature Record

by Patrick Frank

Selected related posts on my blog:

UN IPCC AR6 climate report apples and oranges

Quote from Professor Richard’s Lindzen’s zoom lecture on Wednesday

Intrinsically implausible AGW narrative

UN climate panic?

Lindzen’s letter to Trump

The plan for C40 Cities is below for download as pdf

August 25, 2023 by Connor Walcott

Fourteen major American cities have signed onto a globalist climate agreement with a truly dystopian goal for the country’s immediate future that includes eliminating meat and dairy consumption, private vehicle ownership, air travel, and clothing purchases. According to a report by The Federalist, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group plans to accomplish this vision by 2030—and Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Seattle are all on board.

The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group was first created in 2005 by London Mayor Ken Livingston and representatives from 18 megacities around the world to reduce climate pollution. The organization, at that time called the C20, merged with the Clinton Climate Initiative the following year, bringing its membership up to 40. In the decades since then, the group has expanded to include 96 cities, representing one-twelfth of the global population and 25% of the global economy.

The C40 is now chaired by London Sadiq Khan, with Democrat billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg serving as its president and primary financial backer—and like all globalist climate initiatives, it threatens to be a disaster for modern society.

The C40’s climate goals are laid out plainly in a 2019 report entitled “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World,” which was reemphasized in 2023. The report detailed the organization’s “ambitious target” of cutting consumption-based carbon emissions by “at least 50% by 2030.” In order to accomplish this, the C40 identified six sectors where “rapid action” is recommended: food, construction, clothing, vehicles, aviation, and electronics.

The ultimate goal, according to the report, is “0 kg of meat consumption,” “0 kg of dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per year,” “0 private vehicles,” and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1,500 km) every three years” per person.

Despite so-called fact-checks from mainstream media claiming that these “targets” do not constitute real policy recommendations, C40 cities across the United States have followed in lockstep with the agenda. Earlier this year, New York City Mayor Eric Adams placed restrictions on the meat and dairy products served by public institutions. California, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of the push for electric vehicles. At the same time, in Europe, the UK banned the sale of new gas vehicles after 2030 and France banned short-haul air travel.

Equally concerning is the fact that the globalist World Economic Forum promotes the C40 agenda on its website, in keeping with its Great Reset agenda…

“You Will Own Nothing, and You Will Be Happy.”

The C40’s full 2019 report can be found below:

America’s C40 Cities Will Ban Meat, Dairy, New Clothes, Private Cars by 2030

C40 The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5 C World (click for pdf )

‘Only Those Who Disobeyed Survived’ Maui Wildfire Roadblocks

August 24, 2023 by Connor Walcott

Survivors of the wildfire that decimated the island of Maui have revealed that the only paved exit out of the town of Lahaina was barricaded by authorities as residents tried to escape. According to a shocking report from the Associated Press, work crews actively turned fleeing vehicles back towards the oncoming flames, leading to dozens of deaths—and only those who disobeyed survived.

The deadly blaze first broke out earlier this month when weather systems from a nearby hurricane combined with dry inland conditions to create the perfect circumstances for a brush fire. Preexisting issues with the power infrastructure on the island of Maui—which Hawaiian Electric knew about but failed to address for years—resulted in downed powerlines and showers of sparks, which grew into uncontrollable fires. With 115 confirmed deaths and an estimated 1,000 people still missing, this has become one of the deadliest wildfires in American history.

In the wake of the fire, the public has gradually begun to see the extent to which bureaucratic incompetence and system failure were involved in this tragedy. Beyond Hawaiian Electric’s failure to repair the known issues in favor of funding green energy projects, the finger of blame has also been pointed at Maui’s emergency manager. As Valuetainment previously reported, Emergency Management Agency Chief Herman Andaya resigned last week after failing to activate the outdoor warning sirens that might have alerted Lahaina residents to the fire. Andaya argued that the system, designed to warn of tsunamis, would not have helped in the case of a fire, but other county officials contradicted this assessment.

Additional blame has been attributed to the Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management. Prior to the disaster, the department was led by a “water equity advocate” who refused to authorize additional water to fight the fire based on the resource’s “revered” status in native Hawaiian tradition.

However, in perhaps the most shocking report to date, witnesses who survived the devastation in Lahaina say they were hindered from escaping when officials closed the Lahaina Bypass Road south of town, cutting off the only paved access to the Honoapiilani Highway. As the flames closed in on the town, the stream of fleeing cars was brought to a standstill by work crews repairing downed power poles along the road.

To escape the gridlock, some residents chose to disobey the road closure and drove around the cones and work vehicles—and that likely saved their lives. According to the Associated Press, “one family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took a dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned.”

But dozens of others who remained in their vehicles—or worse yet, were directed back towards the town by officials on the scene—soon found themselves completely trapped when the fire closed in from three sides. Many died right there in their cars, while others attempted to flee on foot, their abandoned cars making the traffic jam even worse.

“The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” said Kim Cuevas-Reyes, a mother of two who avoided the closure by driving down the wrong side of the road. “I would have had to tell my children to jump into the ocean as well and be boiled alive by the flames or we would have just died from smoke inhalation and roasted in the car.”

The road did not reopen until 5:20 pm, nearly two hours after residents first began fleeing. “It made no sense what they were doing,” Cole Millington, a resident, said, according to NBC News. “They could see the sky was black. They could see the city was on fire. They could see the wind was still whipping everything around. But they were already starting to plant new power poles.”

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said that police did not prevent residents from fleeing, but witness reports conflict regarding officer involvement in the road closures.

In total, 2,170 acres of land, including most of Lahaina itself, were destroyed by the fire. Government inquiries have been launched into various parties involved in the management of the disaster in the following weeks.

‘Only Those Who Disobeyed Survived’ Maui Wildfire Roadblocks

Related posts on this blog:

A good review of the “Smart Cities” conspiracy

Headline: “From 2020 to 2021, life expectancy continued to decline in the U.S. while rebounding in most comparable countries.” The source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker (links below.)

The graph below is stunning.  Yes, there is a sharp decline said to be due to covid-19 (though they use dubious, biased CDC covid-19 data).  But, more importantly, the comparison of the long term trends should set off all of your alarms.

Excerpt: “Life expectancy in the U.S. and peer countries generally increased from 1980-2019, but decreased in most countries in 2020 due to COVID-19. From 2020 to 2021, life expectancy at birth began to rebound in most comparable countries while it continued to decline in the U.S. The CDC estimates life expectancy at birth in the U.S. decreased to 76.1 years in 2021, down 2.7 years from 78.8 years in 2019 and down 0.9 years from 2020. The average life expectancy at birth among comparable countries was 82.4 years in 2021, down 0.2 years from 2019 and up 0.4 years from 2020. (Note: 2021 life expectancy estimates for Canada are not yet available and therefore excluded in the comparable country average for 2021.)

The life expectancy data presented here are period life expectancy estimates based on excess mortality observed in each year. Period life expectancy at birth represents the mortality experience of a hypothetical cohort if current conditions persisted into the future and not the mortality experience of a birth cohort.

In other words, one of many implications, our children and grandchildren will probably have shorter lifetimes than ourselves.  Another, U.S. healthcare is one of the most expensive in the world, especially after Obamacare, the so-called “Affordable Health Care Act” (which almost 100% of Republicans voted against before they could read it), yet U.S. life expectancy is performing poorly compared to that of other developed countries.

Don’t you think that this would be news appearing in supposedly conservative news outlets?  But, it is counter to the big government/WEF narrative.

Hat tip to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai on the health system problem.

Read the full articles with more graphs and demographics at these links

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/indicator/health-well-being/life-expectancy/

Related posts on my blog:

Follow the $$$$.   Big government and big corporation influence in big government.

FDA/USDA/CDC/NIH recommendations for diet and drugs are directly influenced and funded by big corporations like Pfizer, Monsanto, Procter & Gamble, General Foods, all the food makers, etc.  They all have been pushing for my entire lifetime in thousands of subsidized medical studies and journal articles, education programs, mainstream media, advertising, health policies and guidelines, for example the food pyramid and 3 square meals a day, etc. promoting carbohydrate-based foods (e.g., whole grains, seed oil, fruit, veggies, low-fat this and that), and recommending low meat, low cholesterol, and low-fat diets. 

The result of that diet is almost always progressively increasing insulin resistance, inflammation, obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart diseases, digestive problems like gluten intolerance and inflammatory bowel disease and leaky gut, metabolic disease, cancers, thyroid disease and all kinds of other health issues.  Then these myriad diseases are treated (not cured) by medical prescriptions (from doctors who mostly were not trained in nutrition) of ever more expensive drugs, over the counter (i.e., off-patent drugs) and an unlimited and rapidly growing stream of health care supplements, vitamins, minerals, electrolyte drinks, etc. 

A continuous diet of carbohydrates produces insulin resistance and inflammation which reduces innate immunity resulting in higher susceptibility to infectious diseases and a very big market for vaccines and other treatments for those diseases. Many of those vaccines and treatments (like mRNA “vaccines”) cause high incidence of problems like (e.g., heart and clotting problems) which then must be treated by yet more prescription drugs.  It should not surprise that the mRNA gene therapy drugs (aka “covid vaccines”) were followed by introduction of new heart drugs and new drugs for female menstrual bleeding irregularities, etc. 

And, by the way, one of the leading causes of death is drug-drug interactions since all of these drugs overload the ability of the liver to metabolize these synthetic toxins and the ability of the kidneys to remove the non-natural metabolites of the synthetic toxin drugs from the body. Then it’s dialysis machines, kidney and liver replacements, and eventually there will be artificial internal organs. It’s dollar signs all around. 

WEF/UN/almost all governments and big ag corporations want us to stop eating meat and fish and instead eat their artificial food and buy their drugs to treat the diseases caused by that artificial diet. But don’t worry, you will own nothing and be happy.

The government- healthcare industrial complex.