The drinkin' bone is connected to the party bone
The party bone's connected to the stayin' out all night long
And she won't think it's funny
And I'll wind up all alone
And the lonely bone's connected to the drinkin' bone
-Tracy Byrd
In a globalized world with supply chains, commodities and information moving at the speed of light, everything is connected. Twitter sends out the earliest reports of events as they happen, the market responds with huge amounts of capital being bet on one side or the other, and policy is formed and reformed.
Today, four issues dominate the “news”:
Coronavirus is here to stay, even with more boosting.
The IPCC report predicting that if we don’t act immediately, the world will burn.
That “Putin’s war” is surging gasoline prices at the pump for consumers “and that’s wrong.”
Inflation in everything from food prices to lithium poses a major risk that central banks need to address.
To each point, one could write and discuss and reshape the narrative. We’re watching it daily. Isn’t it remarkable how media coverage has changed since they stopped putting the death count on the screens? And this statement by Dr. Fauci’s comment on ABC “This Week”?
"This is not going to be eradicated and it's not going to be eliminated," Fauci said. "So you're going to make a question and an answer for yourself, for me as an individual, for you as an individual. What is my age? What is my status? Do I have people at home who are vulnerable that if I bring the virus home there may be a problem? It's going to be a person's decision about the individual risks they're going to take”
This statement could have been made in April 2020, but instead we got flatten the curve, change all behavior, cover your face, don’t hug grandma, and we will print trillions of dollars to compensate your efforts. In a very subtle way, Fauci has acknowledged that everything we have done for the last 2 years simply kicked the can down the road at the cost of $6.5 trillion and untold future economic damage. He didn’t say it out loud, because that’s the quiet part you shouldn’t say out loud.
The IPCC and “scientists” that have been pointing to apocalyptic endings to the world for 50 years and yet thus far, we are still here. Their increasingly hysterical warnings are showing that fear and doom porn aren’t what they used to be.
The human ego is a force to be reckoned with and it is the reason we need to feel like heroes and strive to solve problems that may not require solving. Geopolitics are vast and complicated, kind of like the average marital argument, it seems to me there’s no reason to insert ourselves in the middle of either.
Sanctions on Russia may be the correct moral move. We shouldn’t finance Putin’s invasion of a sovereign nation and there is a valid argument to be made that the sanctity of borders needs to be protected from tyrants. Eventually the tyrants always wash up on your shores when allowed to pillage abroad. However, the impending food and energy crisis may warrant a full stop on sanctions. Zelensky must negotiate whatever peace deal he can without our ‘help’ and the millions that suffer from energy poverty need Russian oil and natural gas flowing again.
Providing military support is a lot like the drinking bone, it’s creating the very problems we are trying to solve with policies that will hurt millions more than the population of lUkraine. We may not like Putin. We may reject wars of aggression. But we are 48 days in, and Putin will never stop until he gets what he came for. He knows our military won’t be deployed to stop him, and every day that we sanction Russian commodities, we deprive hundreds of thousands of affordable energy and food.
We didn’t flatten the curve. We can’t control the climate of a planet that has been regulating and adapting itself for millions of years. We can’t fix the neighbor’s marriage, and we can’t satisfy Putin’s desire to retake Ukrainian resources. It’s time to do less, and certainly we need to be better.
Back in February of 2020 Cambridge published death estimates for COVID19. The estimate for the US was 3 million would die if we did nothing. We reacted and reduced that number by 2/3rds. Are there consequences for are actions? Remember Fauci also said back then that if we did this right, the big complaint would be that we overreacted. So it sounds like we got it right.
On Ukraine. The question of doing nothing becomes one of when do you take a stand vs an aggressor? What did we learn from WWII, when Europe aquiesced to the bully in Hitler? As Charlie Wilson's war showed in the 80's. we are using the people of Ukraine as proxy fighters, providing them the arms rather than going in ourselves. The question will be what is the economic toll on Russia and will that be enough to end the fight.
And when it comes to sanctions, where do those go? IF China is aiding Russia, are we prepared to extend sanctions to China? Heck, that's one of the levers that Biden still has to reduce inflation is to remove the Trump tariffs, but instead will we double down?
The big push under Trump was America First. What we should take out of that and this is that as Bush said, we are addicted to foreign oil. And we aren't going to produce our way out of it. What we need to do is going from being energy neutral to oil neutral. And that's not just the US but Europe as well. And as been pointed out that's going to take reducing consumption through technological innovation. We've done it before and can do it again.
Great article. I agree on sanctions on Russia being the correct moral move.