Four dollar gas

The price of oil has varied quite a lot in the long run. The spikes are some sort of world wide events.

Business news are always trying to scare you. They want you to support the "more drilling" candidate.

That was this week. As far as politics goes, the Trump vs Biden issues are burying all long term plans. Biden is right to promote electric cars. But even the politicians supporting less emissions have not quite looked at this well enough. Consumers have, and many want a plug in hybrid. This is mainly because they want to be independent. There may be the luxury end, but most of are going to charge at home, not at Tesla charging stations. They do travel, though, and most are used to finding gas stations, even if they charge the car at home. Those will remain, and interstate roads will have plenty of gas stations. The electric charging stations will be at work places and shopping centers.

Where the politics is going wrong is in supporting electric truck transport. Not even California is going to get that anytime soon. We had decades to support electric trains, but those are not going to go far. Mostly commuter trains. But we could certainly go for an electric train going East and West.  It would have to be a set of parallel tracks with normal trains going North and South from it. None of these things are going to happen with the current Democrats and Republicans fighting for abortion and shutdowns. So I'll just leave that for now.

But the cars are coming. The barrel price of oil will not get to 150 dollars soon and will not stay there for long. But in the coming decades, it will. The price of oil can only go up. It will never come down to the 1900s prices again. We won't give up on oil, but it will be expensive. Large vehicles will continue use it and consumer prices for retail goods will reflect it.

The consumer is going to go for the plug in hybrid for the next car. Drivers will become more frugal and will try to limit driving to less than 50 miles a day.

Googling for plug in hybrid with 50 mile range gets me...

Ford, Lexus and Volvo, Mitsubishi and BMW. But all with 35-40 mile range. Karma GS-6 will go 61 miles. But that is more of a sports car. Not a people's car. We are getting there. I predict that some small vehicles will develop. Safety issues will arise. Prices will be worked on, a compromise of price and safety. Since the hybrids and electric cars will both have some weight issues, let us just say that the challenge is similar. But the weight issue can be addressed by much smaller vehicles. Imagine a car that looks and acts more like an electric bicycle. Or even the type of three wheeled motorcycle we see now. Basically a light vehicle with all the weight other than the battery stripped down. 

Just to give some idea of a light weight vehicle, here is one with some calculations made by the physics people. (This is not a hybrid, this a light weight electric). See*

All those will go 50 miles as the technology develops. No technology developed in less than 20 years to this level. 

There is also a case to be made for "full hybrid" but the issues are a bit complicated. You may not get politicians to support full hybrids as it will always use gas. LINK:

https://www.progressive.com/answers/plug-in-hybrid-vs-hybrid/

*PAPER • OPEN ACCESS Lightweight Design and Test of Electric Experimental Car To cite this article: Fei Song et al 2022 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 2185 012046

LINK https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2185/1/012046/meta

The Criminal Trump

As a Democrat I am concerned about Trump, but also the presidency. The president can, as it is, do anything he or she feels like with all the departments, the cabinets and secretaries. With the right wing hatred of the federal government, we could end up firing a million government employees. Nothing in the constitution says we need to have the cabinet posts. We could end up with secretary of state, war and treasury. Keep about 500 people to run those.

Another point I wish to make is that ex-Trump voters, still republicans, dismiss the Trump charges as politics. Not actual crimes. No, we don't want any president to act like the autocrat that he was.

Our election laws need fixing. Our human rights...including voting...need fixing.

Now, the case for january 6th will indeed go to court. Trump lawyers have their own problems. The rest of us will have the problem of protecting witnesses and jurors. I have said this before. I would not be on that jury. I would refuse.

The Georgia indictment also came through. I will be curious about the GOP response to RICO charges involving actual voting processes and voting machines. "It's just politics" is not going to work anymore.

The Debt Ceiling

 In 2017 the national debt was about 20 trillion. It is appoaching 25 trillion now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States

President Obama added about $8.6 trillion, about a 74% increase, to the national debt at the end of President Bush’s last budget in 2009.

At the end of fiscal year 2020, the debt was $26.9 trillion. Trump added $6.7 trillion to the debt between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2020, a 33.1% increase, largely due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and 2020 recession.

Trump's years before the pandemic:

In 2017, 2018, and 2019, the debt limit (total debt) was reset at $20.5 trillion, $22 trillion and $28.4 trillion, respectively. (Snopes)

You could easily manage the debt by raising taxes. Taxing individuals would be needed, as corporations do not pay a lot of tax, even if you raise it a few percent.

Peer pressure, groups and the odd group identity

People form groups naturally. These groups appear in public, discuss things, and may hold opinions as a group that the members do not agree with. Things like stability and a safe environment are important for people. In public they may conform to the rules that they do not follow in private.

Important members of the group express their opinions in public. They may be the employers in the community. When election comes around they have a big influence on the candidates and votes. The members of the group may follow the leader on some issues or all of them. Personal opinions are not so important to many people. The authoritarian group respects a strong leader.

In addition some of the people voting are not smart enough to follow what happens after election. They actually never find out they were screwed. Or they refuse to admit it out of embarrassment.

Social psychology is the field that attempts to unwind all this and see what the factors are that determine election outcomes. In the internet era you could get a lot of data from anonymous surveys. But they too have error, there is now a reluctance to answer. The internet is seen as too invasive. We just use it to get info, not to provide it.

The topic of the book was quite eye opening for me, as I have never identified with any groups in this manner, other than the camraderie I had as a scientists with my type of science.

Books on Populism

For a year or two I've looked at books on populism that did not go to one or the other side, supporting populists or at least populism as beneficial or then going full anti Trump. This Moffitt book so far has been the only one, even from academia. It only goes to 2016. The tea party movement is well described, birthers and anti Obama feel bubbling under. Trump is not covered, as the book focuses mostly on Europe and Latin America and does not go past 2016. Sarah Palin makes a brief appearance.

Populism is not always active in day to day politics, but occasionally will color the entire year with shades of discontent. This happened with the banking crisis 2008. Somebody was doing terrible things. They have to be held accountable!

A paragraph will explain more on the scope of this book.

It's quite readable, and the first page of text captures quite well the views of the populist right: the elites and unelected bureaucrats are running "our" country, so they are angry. It gives good historical background. The chapter on populism and democracy catalogs the academic views on populism, positive and negative. From the negative side, it is pointed out that in elections the populist parties may be large parties, even larger than the other two or three if we are in Europe. The populist leaders and their followers always seem to subjugate the other parties and any minority groups to their rules.

One thing that got pointed out is that like everything in the world of the Internet and media, even popular movements might not be genuine, but manipulated from the very start.

Other authors seemed to be too happy with populism as a force. This book does describe what happened in recent times, but with not much criticism. The chapter titled Protest in the Age of Populism is worth reading. Covers grass roots activism, which on the right got funded by the Koch brothers.

Anne Applebaum covers Brexit and Europe well but not so much the US. Her examples are from the 1970s.

Protest in the 2020s

The tens of millions of people that voted for Trump and the equally large group that attended his rallies are used to togetherness at events, and even anger. But protest is alien to most of the group. And even expressing what they felt was difficult. When they heard "the election was stolen," that was easy enough to repeat to reporters. Conspiracy phrases were also popular. They would remember phrases from Tucker Carlson as well. In fact Tucker was probably the needed fuel to get Trump going in 2016. He convinced them the "liberal elites" and unelected bureaucrats should not be running the country.

I'm reading some books on the 1968 Chicago convention, Vietnam war and the 70s popular trends.
It struck me how different the protest is from the left and the right. We had the truckers protesting the Covid lock downs, but other than that, the protest from the MAGA folks was at Trump rallies. There were some major events with armed Proud Boys and so on, but the majority of the events were in the safe confines of some building or outdoor event center. There was parking! Vietnam protesters did not need cars or parking.

The same restrained attitude to protest came up with the BLM protests. The black people protesting were all "looters and criminals" according to MAGA.

It's all sanitized to give a safe family type of protest for them. No thought involved, even the signs they held ups were printed by Trump. Jordan Klepper was able to get something more out of the Trump supporters on the grounds of the events, but the issues still tended to fall in the conspiracy theories and the stolen election.

The people in the Trump rallies would discuss the conspiracies, election denial and other Trump claims, but not anything serious as far as politics, mainly things they were taught to be outraged about. If you would ask them about what sort of things government is necessary for, how do we spend tax money, and that sort of thing, they would not have much to say. Or they would come right out and say "government is spending on minorities." Obama tried to explain how most government programs benefit us all. But this benefit of government is quite vague in the minds of MAGA republicans. You could only demonstrate the benefit by cutting it off for a few years. Much of spending is also long term planning and support, so the systems supported might run ten years or more before much deterioration. The Cincinnati bridge is an example.

The political scientists would say that the questions need to be more anonymous. I would say that the majority of Trump voters still believe in "deep state" and the elites running everything. But they only need to hint at this and not say it directly. They are racists, and this includes Jews as a target. Just a few words leak out, like "Jewish space lasers" and the crowd will know who to blame. The establishment.

A Jewish journalist comments: Apparently, according to Greene, “Rothschild Inc” started the fires using a space laser, and its goal was to clear the way for a high-speed rail project.

You can read the entire bonkers tirade on Media Matters. 

The violence did appear but those were basically young men with nothing to do, libertarians, not the white working class that Trump captured.

Separate from the MAGA protests, the anti-abortion movement has always been public.

Puzzling Trends and Minority Rule

Support for Democrats and Republicans fluctuates wildly from president to president. I am always surprised at the number of people going back and forth between elections and midterm results. Both Clinton and Obama lost a lot of votes and the house at the midterm of their first four years. I am led to think that voting is mostly a gut feel thing. Short slogans and TV ads are a big influence. "But her emails." Voters have to like a candidate in some manner, policy never wins an election.

The Republicans have been the minority party for a while, though they occasionally get more votes than Democrats in a mid term election. That may be more to do with who shows up to vote. That is part of their strategy, to control access to voting. And also in general, they have a good number of states under control. The governors may decide future elections, if vote counts are close, and we continue using the Electoral College.

Ballot initiatives even in Republican states like Kansas and Kentucky have provided protection for abortion rights. Of course the state legislatures in red states have moved to block ballot initiatives. You can do this by demanding so many signatures in every county, for example. And other legal tricks.

The general trend over decades, with voters in urban areas, is toward the liberal end. The tolerance view, as opposed to white Christian nationalists. People are influenced by family and may tend to drift toward the views of the parents when they get past forty.

But there is now evidence that the millennials do not change to conservatives as they age. They may even have fewer children and continue to be the same liberals they were when they were 20.

So the trend may be toward the Democrats here. However, since Trump packed the court with conservatives, that may be a major factor holding back the millennials for another 20 years. A disturbing trend came up with Title 42 which is essentially a presidential tool to control health hazards and the movement of people in a pandemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Health_Service_Act

Gorsuch dissented, explaining how it is not even their job.

In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the "current border crisis is not a COVID crisis. And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort."

 

The Supreme Court and the US Constitution

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

While we plough through multiple elections, it will be the Supreme Court that lays out the topics for the next 8-12 years. Most of our government has run smoothly for the last 50 years. The departments that run are not listed in the constitution, but it does allow the president to employ assistants. These have turned into the bureaucratic cabinets. The defense side is rather safe, but many other cabinets are not legal (or at least not required) by the constitution. These two guys...

...will lead the effort. The Tenth Amendment (see top) will be heavily used. Based on this one amendment, the court will go on to strip the government of many powers. We can have federal income tax. But Social Security is rather iffy if you take the 10th amendment word for word.

Republicans in congress will simply allow the social security funds to run out. Then it is a simple matter to scrap the law as well.

There is a brief mention of "the people," but this people is pretty much going to be the people as part of a state. The people nationwide will not be considered having rights.

The abortion...sort of...election

 I was clicking around The Onion when a link from there caught my attention. it was a site called the Root. There was an article on the election with some numbers and a LOT of comments.

THE ROOT: ABORTION

A few screen shots of the comments will give you an idea of the anger.

2022 and 2024 elections

We are all quite anxious about the election. I think it will be a sort of non-event when we are over it. There may be recounts but we are still not in the full Trumpian era, where states reverse results. That will be more in the electoral count system in 2024.

But we will only enjoy our sigh of relief about two weeks. Once all the dust settles we will have the Trump 2024 campaign announcement. And if we get Trump on Twitter, you will get an endless stream of Trump news for two years. And whatever the result of the election...it will not stop Trump. He has one more chance to be relevant, 2024. After 2024...whew...Trump is quickly forgotten.

In 2024, he will lose, as the repeat of the 2016 election is unlikely. His unpopularity will be worse than Biden's as legal cases mount. All we have to do to win is...not run Biden. Democrats should see this and Biden himself needs to do a little something. He can promote someone when we have a likely candidate. And for those politicians, someone has to go first. A few more will then follow. [Added note 2023: this did not happen by 2023. Now it is a bit late for Biden to pull out. Also, name recognition needs more time, so a candidate not Biden has little chance to jump in during 2024]

Sorry folks , that is how it goes.  Find a hobby for two years, travel, start exercising, anything! I am posting a President Niinistö picture. He is the symbol of all of us.

Trump is expected to announce running in 2024 a few days after the election. This is actually sensible, unlike the chaotic Trump camp, in that there is a window here. Waiting to 2023 looks "weak" in trump terminology. He no longer needs to support candidates for revenge, as he did this year. All the money goes to promote himself now. By campaign finance rules. Trump's popularity is 41%. In 2016 Gallup had him at 36% on election day. But he got some 30% of the voters who viewed both Trump and Clinton as unfavorable. So we don't really know anything about 2024 yet.

AND HERE WE GO

TRUMP WILL BURN IT DOWN

Update: The Big Lie has died. This was the end:

My prediction for 2024:

The end of the populist's career: I think that Trump as a whole will not interest a large part of the people in the 2024 election. Democrats and independents don't care how Trump did in 2020, and this is Trump's only theme. That he has suffered injustice. The whole of 2016 was a matter of white old people feeling that they had somehow been marginalized in the 2016 election. Trump ran a campaign against foreigners and people of color. Now the whole campaign is Trump himself. Sympathies ran out in this 2022 election.