A Good Time for Gratitude

 

Earlier this month we in Texas got a several day taste of harsh winter – really cold weather with highs in the teens or twenties, lows around zero, and strong winds in West Texas where I live. Much of the rest of the country got worse. It was unpleasant but nothing like what people endured in similar conditions a couple of hundred years ago. For that people should be grateful and grateful specifically to the oil, gas, and coal industries of this country. They deserve gratitude not only for the obvious accomplishment of keeping the power on and the furnaces running throughout the country but for something more general – creating necessary parts of the economic, industrial, and technological environment which has made the modern world with its modern windows, insulated houses, heated cars, snow plows, central heat, nylon shell parkas, and so on possible. I appreciate it, and other throughout the country should too. The fact that they are despised by the greens says something about the greens and a lot about what the greens want and have planned for us.

Boeing and Diversity

 

Many years ago an old boss of mine told me that the trouble with performance measures was that people meet them. That comment came to mind when I read about Boeing’s latest failures with the 737 – this time a section of the fuselage falling off in flight. Boeing along with many other corporations has for years been active in affirmative action - now usually called ESG or simply diversity - hiring, promotion, and selection of subcontractors based on race, sex, ethnic group, and/or supposed gender. It recently added it formally to the criteria for judging and rewarding the performance of its executives and managers.

Some conservatives have said that that might have been at least a partial cause of the years of failures. Leftists have countered that such suggestions reveal a bigoted belief that black people and members of other favored groups are less competent that white and Asian men. In that they are wrong. Something like the reverse is true, with leftists showing a systematic belief in such inferiority. If they believed that black people and others they favor were equally competent, they would be fine with basing things on quality, ability, and merit, as are the conservatives. That they are not shows they do not.

The conservatives are right on the obvious fact that one cannot maximize two unconnected variables (here quality and “diversity”) simultaneously except by coincidence. I would be hard to know whether they are right in tying that to Boeing’s failures. They surely are right on a more general point. Most of us would rather have the designers, manufacturers, and pilots of the planes we fly be selected to be the most competent that can be found rather than the most diverse looking.

Trump and the 14th Amendment

 

An insurrection is an attempt to overthrow a government as distinct from only conspiring or thinking about doing so. On January 6^th and the in days before it, Trump clearly made such an attempt. The election was decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th, 2020 when the electors voted. Trump’s efforts after that to remain in power were intended to overthrow the government of the United States. I have often wanted to ask some of Trump’s defenders what other purpose than blocking the final certification of the election they think there could have been for staging the rally on January 6^th. It surely wasn’t Bing and Danny getting the men of the 151^st division to show up on Christmas Eve to show the Old Man he wasn’t forgotten. I think the frightened, overwrought supporters Trump brought to Washington and stirred up with talk of losing their country if what was about to happen in the Capitol was not stopped probably were called in on some vague idea of Trump’s to use them to provide muscle for the efforts to remain in power illegally. However, it really does not matter if I or anyone else is wrong on that. Trump would have been guilty of insurrection if his supporters had stood peacefully outside the Capitol and chanted slogans instead of attacking. Trump’s order to Pence to not allow Biden’s election to be certified and instead recognize bogus Trumpist electors from several states was by itself an act of insurrection and an attempted coup. Again, the election had been decided beyond any legal challenge or appeal on December 14^th. Anyone working to overturn it after that was an insurrectionist enemy of the republic. I doubt if it will matter, but the 14^th Amendment applies to Trump.