The Winter of Our Discomfort

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                This winter promises to be a long cold one for America, Europe and much of the rest of the free world because of, among other things, the high cost of electricity and the fossil fuels that produce most of it. Natural gas prices, for example, have more than doubled in a year because of heavy world-wide demand which exceeds availability. The Biden Administration, America’s climate warriors and their obedient mainstream media will blame the high prices and shortages on the war in Ukraine but don’t settle for that simplistic answer. The greater cause is the Biden Administration’s mindless war on fossil fuels, including clean natural gas and nuclear power which have done more to reduce emissions than all the green renewable sources combined.

                People will suffer needlessly this winter in America, Europe and elsewhere because they won’t be able to afford to heat their homes, fuel their vehicles afford rent or mortgage payments and perhaps even put enough food on the table because of raging inflation, also the direct result of the Biden Administration’s profligate spending. These people won’t be worrying much about global warming, climate change, melting icebergs or rising sea levels as they try to stay warm. They know that more people die from cold than from heat, not to mention damage from freezing water lines. They should also know that all America’s efforts to keep fossil fuel in the ground and go entirely green will have zero net effect on global climate so long as China and India and the developing nations burn coal and oil which they must to grow their economies and survive. All this sacrifice will do for mankind is to increase misery for millions, especially the poor and working classes this winter.

                The United States and Canada sit on vast reserves of fossil fuels, especially natural gas which can be liquified and exported almost anywhere. That is, it could if the necessary pipelines, processing and export facilities were in place to handle the demand. Think of the suffering that would alleviate in Europe and elsewhere this winter. But these facilities are not in place in adequate numbers because of federal and state restrictions on drilling, fracking, and construction and permitting of pipelines and processing and export facilities in Democrat-run states.

                Is this being done with the consent of the governed? I don’t recall being given a chance to vote on whether or not we choose to live with rolling power outages in order to engage in virtue signaling that will have net zero effect on global climate and serve only to make liberal elites feel good about themselves. People are already suffering from high fuel prices. Choices are being made by real people over whether to have enough to eat tonight or enough gas to get to work tomorrow. There is anecdotal evidence of people buying a gallon of gas just to get home from work.

                Here in the late, great Golden State, the chief climate warrior in Sacramento wants to impose a 90% clean, meaning green, electricity mandate by 2035 and a 100% mandate by 2045. This would require a breakthrough in storage battery technology that doesn’t yet exist and a reliable source of precious earth and metals obtained mostly from China. The manufacturing of these batteries has a significant carbon footprint and there are serious fire safety issues. This is madness and an example of politicians pretending to know something about science when what they mostly know is how to stay in office and feed at the public trough for life.

                California mandates the end of the internal combustion engine to power cars after 2035. Electric vehicles, unless subsidized, are too pricey for many families and will require much new expensive infrastructure. Look for widespread hoarding of old gas guzzlers. We’ll look just like Cuba with streets full of vintage American cars. This is progress? Will our ever-so-woke, thoroughly modern army have to convert its fighting vehicles to EVs? I can imagine it now. Stop the war while we recharge the tanks!   

                No wonder people are fleeing the left coast. Maybe that’s what Sacramento had in mind in the first place. Get rid of all the hated conservatives and have the entire state to themselves. It then will be one big, green paradise punctuated by peaceful rolling blackouts and your occasional forest fire.

                Folks, seriously, it’s time to hold the Democrat Administrations in Washington and Sacramento accountable for the harm they’ve already done and will continue to do with their inflationary spending and needless war to destroy an oil industry that not only will be vital to our economy for decades but perhaps to our very survival.

September 29, 2022

Patient Rights and Responsibilities

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the ways in which medical care is accessed and delivered in many ways. Hospitals, clinics and other care facilities are sometimes overwhelmed. There is a growing shortage of physicians, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, technicians and pharmacists. The cost of a medical education is enormous and many newly minted physicians are mired in debt. They are also poorly compensated initially in their careers, given the hours, stress, skills required and the time devoted to medical training. They are essential to our safety and health and they save lives. They are true heroes and deserve our utmost respect and thanks for putting their own health at risk and sometimes that of their family’s to care for the sick.

                Respect and gratitude to be sure, but not necessarily always agreement with recommended treatment, given the patient’s overall health, age and particular circumstances. Care providers are required to discuss risks involved in detail and the patient may agree or disagree to accept the risks and proceed with the recommended treatment or protocol. The vast majority do, either because there’s no reasonable alternative or they are under the impression that they must obey “doctor’s orders”. But not every case is the same and there may be an emotional or mental aspect on the patient’s part that may warrant a modified or altogether different approach if possible. Providers should listen to patients and take it into consideration.

                Not only does the patient have a vote in the matter, it is the deciding vote. He or she, after all, should have control over their own bodies. Of course, the provider may then decline to perform the recommended procedure or protocol. A young attending physician, for example, may think it prudent to extend a patient’s hospital stay a few days as a precaution. A few days is like a brief interval in a young life but to a, say, nonagenarian, it is an eternity. As those readers who know me may know, I am 91, going on 92, and my wife of 67 years is 90. If you think we don’t look our ages, well, thanks, but we are old and proud of it, Behind the neat façade, our bodies are gradually wearing out.

                Life has been good to me and I am grateful. It’s been a great ride, but God didn’t set the world spinning on its axis just to give me a ride. I have a variety of ailments too numerous to detail here, the latest being a large stone near where my gall bladder used to be which was affecting the liver. It was expertly removed by a highly-skilled and prominent gastroenterologist and surgeon in a procedure he first described to me as very difficult and somewhat risky. He and the highly-experienced anesthesiologist that kept me alive during the procedure are now my heroes and I am grateful that such talent exists. I was allowed to return home after a day of observation at my insistence in spite of increased risk of stroke or bleeding because I understood the risks which were painstakingly explained and agreed to by me. Here’s why.

Neighbors and friends graciously offered to stay with my wife who has Parkinson’s. My daughters, as usual stepped up, stayed with me throughout the three-day crisis, cooked and prepared meals and kept up moral. My granddaughter, a student at Arizona State University, drove in to be with us only to be denied entry to the hospital in accordance with state restrictions because she did not have a vaccination card which is not required in Arizona. She had no symptoms. Do you suppose we will soon need to produce a vaccination card in California to do anything or even to leave home? She had to get back home by Sunday night and I was determined that she did not make the trip to be with her sick grandfather in vain. At my age, there’s always a chance I may not get to see her again. I’m not planning to die, of course. That’s God’s call, and I feel fine now but I am throwing away the 2023 calendars with those adorable puppy dogs and kittycats which clutter our mailbox and I am not starting any really long books. A single day is precious to my wife and me, and I was determined to spend at least one of them with our granddaughter. I also cannot sleep in hospitals, probably because they keep waking you up to see how you feel or to stick needles into you so sleep deprivation was not helping my recovery which would be better facilitated by sleeping in my own king-sized bed that didn’t sound an alarm every time I moved in a quiet bedroom where I live nearby. I said that I had to be discharged by noon Sunday so my granddaughter would not have to drive over the mountains later in the dark. The risks were acceptable to me. I would faithfully follow the recommended protocols at home.

Each day is a gift to my wife and me and we will live them together, not separately in hospitals if at all possible. She had the heavy burden of managing the household and raising the children during a dozen or so deployments during my 30+-year career while I was far away at sea. It’s her time now to have me by her side and there you will find me until they carry one of us away. As you can probably tell from this, I don’t worry much about the much-overemphasized medical privacy every provider of anything says they take so seriously, before the latest data breach is announced.

But enough about me. I’m not a good patient or a patient person but in closing, I can’t say enough good things about the excellent care, courtesy, respect and professionalism of the fine staff and volunteers at our local gem of a hospital. It’s such an essential part of what makes ours the very best hometown in America by far. Tell them you appreciate them and perhaps show them in some way that you really do mean it. Thank them for their service.

September 20, 2022

The Making and Unmaking of a Superpower

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                During the 1930’s, while the winds of war were stirring in Europe and the Japanese Empire’s sun was rising in the west, the United States was mired in the Great Depression. Almost everyone in our neighborhood knew a breadwinner who was out of work and families that were struggling to put food on the table. The national sentiment was reflected in the popular lyric, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”       

                When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally forced us to declare war against the Axis powers, we were, as usual, grossly unprepared. Our battle fleet and shore facilities in Hawaii suffered devastating losses. Fortunately, our handful of aircraft carriers were at sea and survived to turn the direction of the war at the Battle of Midway. But the early years of the war saw heavy Allied losses as Germany expanded its territorial conquests in Europe and Northern Africa, France fell and Japan quickly seized territory in Asia and the Western Pacific including Guam and the Philippines. It would be a long, tough road to final victory and the ending could have been different if we had not developed the atomic bomb before Germany did.

                But the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor had, in the words of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, “awake(ned) a sleeping giant and fill(ed) him with a terrible resolve.” At the start of the war, the U.S. was indeed in a state of lethargy, its economy in shambles. Much of our industrial capacity lay idle and the military was totally unprepared for a world war on multiple fronts. Yet, that sleeping giant emerged from the war as the world’s only superpower and largest economy by far. It also possessed the largest navy ever built, even displacing Brittania as ruler of the waves.

                Yale History Professor Paul Kennedy, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000” (1987, New York: Random House), in his new book, “Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II” (2022, New Haven: Yale University Press) describes the attack on Pearl Harbor as the catalyst that drove America to transform itself from a sleeping giant to the world’s only superpower in just a few years. The rapid mobilization of our country’s industrial base soon made it clear to the Axis powers that they could never match our ability to mass produce all the warships, warplanes, tanks, logistical systems, technology and anything else we needed to defeat them and compel their eventual unconditional surrender.

                Professor Kennedy described the seemingly endless flow of ships, aircraft and weapons that emerged daily from our numerous shipyards and factories. The navy topped out at an amazing 6,768 ships. But when the war ended and peace settled in, the greatest military buildup in history, naturally, ended as well. Ships and aircraft, including even those under construction. were mothballed or scrapped and when the Korean War followed shortly after the second war to end all wars, we were once again unprepared and suffered a high rate of early casualties because of it. Unpreparedness seems to be our default condition.

                Since the Ronald Reagan buildup of the armed forces, our military capacity has been in a state of more or less steady decline and much of our industrial capacity has been off-shored. Today, the size of the battle fleet is the smallest since before World War I, the first war to end all wars. Numbers are not the only consideration of course, but they do matter because a ship can only be in one place at a time and we have wide-ranging global commitments and vast spans of ocean to deal with. With the Russian-Ukrainian War dragging on with no end in sight and an expansionist China threatening Taiwan, it is beyond question that we need a much larger navy to deter Chinese aggression and to protect our vital interests. But it is equally clear that we lack the industrial capacity and defense infrastructure to produce it rapidly as we did during the decisive days of WW II when we built 30 Essex-class aircraft carriers and dozens of light and escort carriers, plus all the destroyers, cruisers, submarines, logistic ships, amphibious vessels, landing craft and battleships that constituted the most powerful navy the world has ever seen or likely will ever see again.

                Not only did we shrink our navy but we shrunk our industrial capacity to rebuild it which is the greater tragedy. Building it back will be difficult, time consuming and expensive but the alternative will be accepting the fact that we become another great power in slow decline, just like those that rose and fell before us. This time, should conflict become inevitable, that industrial capacity that enabled us to win WW II will simply not be there. The high cost of investing in rebuilding it will require a binding commitment from Washington and it is questionable whether such a commitment is even possible anymore.

September 18, 2022

The Higher Cost of Higher Education

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                Long ago, while in high school, I thought I might want to go to medical school and, growing up in New Haven, even entertained thoughts of attending Yale. But that was back in the 1940’s and the cost to attend Yale or any other of the Ivy League schools was out of reach for a working-class family with five kids. There were no government loans and scholarships were few and meager. So, it was off to work at age 16 and later, enrollment in a state commuter college, paying my own way.

                I was fortunate, though. The school was New Haven State Teachers College, sitting on a tiny, two-building campus in the shadows of Yale’s ivy-covered towers. Many of our professors also taught at Yale and our college president was also Dean of the School of Education at Yale. And our classes were taught by professors, not graduate students. Today, the school is known as Southern Connecticut State University with a suburban campus of 171 acres and an enrollment of about 8000, offering advanced degrees in a number of disciplines.

                I’m grateful for the affordable but excellent education I received that enabled me to go on to earn master’s and doctoral degrees in management and education which actually helped me throughout three successive careers over a nearly seventy-year period. Today, I don’t really resent the good fortune of those debt-encumbered students who now may have some or all of their remaining debt forgiven under President Joe Biden’s debt cancellation plan. I just happen to think it’s very bad policy, sets a terrible example, and is unfair to those who repaid their debt or forwent college altogether rather than borrow heavily to finance it. It is also more the role of Congress to forgive federal obligations, not the chief executive, who might be more easily tempted to forgive federal obligations in order to encourage political support at election time. Further, it will do nothing to reduce the inflated sticker price of a college education.

                The so-called sticker price is the full rate of tuition and fees before scholarships and other forms of aid are deducted. The remainder is the net price. Average sticker price has been increasing much faster than inflation and guess why? Partly because of the easy availability of government loans and the widespread notion that in order to be successful one must go to college and therefore, everyone deserves a college education. The availability of government loans takes the pressure off colleges to do more to reduce the cost of higher education, which has become overpriced, and encourages them rather to spend the increasing income on building programs, campus enhancement, salaries, faculty and above all, administrative staff. There is now a dean and/or associate dean, and/or assistant dean for just about every topic you can think of.

                Sticker prices have increased about 73% faster on average at private colleges than at state schools. Then there is the cost of housing, food, books, entertainment, beer—er, I mean other essential needs. According to a Fidelity survey, 40% of high school students still rate cost as the most important factor in choosing a college. But students and their families have been convinced by the media and the education industry that college graduates earn much more than non-college graduates and the more degrees, the higher the earnings. That’s true in the aggregate but much depends, of course, on the field of study and the demand for those skills. And in some professions, such as law, the particular school attended matters greatly. A college degree alone does not, by any means, assure the graduate of higher income or even any income. It’s all about demand. There isn’t a lot of demand for majors in gender studies What jobs there are in the field do not pay well and are often short-lived. About 16% of those with only a high school education earn more that college graduates on average and many of the world’s most successful and richest entrepreneurs are college drop-outs. The value of a degree in some programs simply may not be worth the cost for some applicants who would be far better off financially and contribute more to society by learning a trade.

                The major matters. A biochemistry major, for example, may reasonably expect to earn at least $94,000 after graduation. A visual and performing arts or film major, on the other hand, can probably expect less than $50,000 to start. Many colleges took advantage of the increased enrollment that came from the easy availability of government loans to expand the number of courses and majors offered to include fields that are popular with students and activists but which lead to few good-paying jobs.

                President Biden’s debt forgiveness will not make the debt disappear. Rather, it shifts the burden of repayment to someone else. It will not decrease the high sticker price of a college education but instead will exert upward pressure on that price by encouraging more borrowing. It was easy government lending which caused the problem in the first place by encouraging some to make bad decisions about borrowing more than they could afford. In many cases, they were encouraged to borrow by the colleges who should therefore bear some of the cost of loan forgiveness being passed on to the taxpayers. Finally, it goes without saying, that it is grossly unfair to those who paid their obligation or decided not to go to college because of the cost.

September 9, 2022

A Path to Defeat

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

              A few weeks ago, Republican leaders and conservative pundits were confidently predicting a red wave of victories in the coming midterm elections, with the party gaining control of the House and perhaps the Senate. Today, that confidence has become somewhat subdued. The reasons are several but the biggest by far is Donald Trump, who remains the Democrats’ most valuable asset so long as he remains active in politics.

                The other major reason, of course, is the conservative Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. GOP leaders hope that inflation, the fear of recession, rising crime, growing homelessness, chaos on the southern border and the failure of the Biden Administration to effectively deal with these and other issues may be of greater concern than the anger, especially among female voters, over the abortion decision, as they realize that abortion is not going away. Donald Trump, however, is the problem that won’t go away unless he retires from politics which he seems unlikely to do, especially after the unprecedented and unnecessary raid on the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

                That raid has infuriated and mobilized his most dedicated supporters of which there are many. They believe that it was politically motivated and that the Justice Department has been weaponized by the party in power for use against its political enemies. Whatever the reasons for the search, the raid was unprecedented; the stuff of banana republics and authoritarian regimes and an embarrassment to our nation. There had to be a better way to retrieve the documents at issue. If urgency required an unannounced raid while Mr. Trump was not in residence, why did Attorney General Merrick Garland wait 18 months to authorize it? And why is Mr. Trump being treated differently than Hillary Clinton was for using a private server to conduct sensitive official business while serving as Secretary of State?

                Mr. Trump’s claim, however, that he had a standing order declassifying any material he removed from the White House is a stretch. It doesn’t work that way. There is a process to declassifying material that involves much more than just declaring retroactively that it is declassified. Members of the military understand this very well because mishandling classified material can be a career-ender or worse. Many civilians, however, including those in high office, especially those new to dealing with classified material, sometimes don’t seem to fully grasp their responsibilities for handling classified material. During my more than 30 tears of military service working with senior civilians I found it necessary to frequently stress the importance of safeguarding classified matter, reminding them that even if they produced the material through their own research, it was the exclusive property of the United States and was not to be shared with anyone including colleagues without specific authorization.

                Whatever comes from the investigation by the Justice Department, it will not benefit Mr. Trump or his party. He is also the subject of criminal investigations in New York in connection with his business and in Georgia over alleged interference in state elections. He will always be a problem for the GOP because it is his nature to cause problems. He bullied his way to the 2016 nomination by personal attacks on his fellow candidates and caught the attention of celebrity-loving voters who wanted a change in the establishment status quo. While his policies were for the most part sound, he was clearly not qualified by temperament, character, communications skills, judgement or self-restraint to be president of the world’s most powerful nation and largest economy. He won mainly because then-FBI Director James Comey interfered with the election at the eleventh hour by re-opening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material.

                He lost an election in 2020 that he should have won against an ageing and frail lifetime politician who twice failed at previous attempts at the presidency and who ran a weak campaign from his Delaware basement. His stubborn refusal to accept defeat was a national embarrassment and his meddling in the Georgia runoff election for the state’s two U.S. Senate seats cost his party control of the Senate. He would be any Democrat presidential nominee’s favorite opponent and possibly the only one they could beat.

                Someone told me recently that the Democrats are so terrified of Donald Trump that they will do anything to keep him from running again. I don’t see it that way at all. They beat him with a weak candidate like Biden and Trump has done nothing since to enhance his qualifications. He would be the oldest person to run for president in our history. In fact, he has endorsed a number of weak candidates for the midterm elections only because they supported his meritless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

                If he is selfish enough to run for president again, the GOP will lose. Even if he managed to win, he would be a lame duck from day one. Hopefully, someone will persuade him to do what’s right for the country and his party and step aside. If not, someone strong enough to take him on and defeat him in the primaries needs to emerge soon for the good of the party and the nation.

September 1, 2022