Mid-Week Notebook

Podcast livestream schedule, some German themes, and the latest scene of The Trump Show

ANNOUNCEMENT: We’re going to have another 3WHH podcast livestream Friday afternoon at 4 pm PACIFIC time. We’re working on solving the technical glitches (screen freezes, sound not syncing up with the video, etc). And as always this is subject to late changes depending on our crazy lives. Join us if you can. The audio-only version will be up Saturday morning.

And now on to the news.

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• Watching highlights of Trump’s 90-minute speech to the WEF (hey—those clowns loved Castro, so why not?) I couldn’t help but think of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Trump is Triumph the Insult Comic President. Not that the Euroweenies of the WEF don’t deserve it.

Now, Trump said that if it weren’t for the United States winning World War II (“big,” he added), everyone in the room would be speaking German (and a little Japanese). This, in German-speaking Switzerland. To be sure, most Germans I know say “No one understands the Swiss,” because the Swiss German dialect is probably the equivalent of deep Cajun-inflected residents of the Louisiana delta. But still. In any case, Trump’s entire DGAF bearing before Europe is totally inappropriate, way beyond the bounds of normality, gauche, rude, ugly-American stuff. It upsets the media. And all I can say is—YES! This IS what I voted for! This is America, baby! Get used to it.

“And just think of it, you only have 12 more years of me. . .”

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• Speaking of Germany, way back in 2008 I went on a week-long tour of Germany, as a guest of the brand new Merkel government, to see their initiatives to accelerate the transition to “green” energy. We visited geothermal projects, wood-waste to energy mills, wind and solar power farms, etc, along with meetings with many government officials and private sector experts (including very nice tours of both BMW and Mercedes-Benz headquarters). One thing we didn’t tour: a single nuclear power plant. Yet every single official, business executive, or academic expert we met with said the same thing: Germany cannot possibly meet its ambitious energy targets unless it kept is nuclear power plants. Which Merkel had already agreed to phase out upon taking office, part of her necessary bargain with the Green Party to form a coalition government.

Well, here we are 18 years later, and lo and behold:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that his country’s exit from nuclear energy production was a “serious strategic mistake.”

Merz made the comments at a business conference in the city of Halle in central Germany this week, where he criticized the previous government’s energy policies.

He said: “It was a serious strategic mistake to depart from nuclear energy. If it was going to be done, they should have at least left the last remaining nuclear power plants in Germany connected to the grid three years ago.”

Merz said that Germany’s energy transition is the “most expensive in the world”, adding that the country does not have enough energy generation capacity. . .

Germany shut down its last three remaining nuclear power plants in 2023, marking the end of decades of nuclear power generation in the country.

Chaser:

So Germany remains the slowest learner of the late Axis powers.

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• And speaking of energy, you can find my latest column for Civitas Outlook right here, where I take stock of America’s energy revolution of the last 20 years. Two quick highlights:

Roll back the timeline to around 2006, and you find America had to import nearly a quarter of its total primary energy supply in one form or another. . . The United States is now in the enviable position of producing a surplus of primary energy — perhaps the only major industrial nation that does so aside from Russia, Canada, and tiny Norway. . .

There has seldom been such a significant change in any large area of economic activity toward which public policy was more irrelevant, when it was not in fact a deliberate hindrance.

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• This week the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Ellingburg v. United States that the ex post facto clause of Article I of the Constitution precluded what they classified as a retroactive criminal fine. The issue of limiting the reach of the ex post facto clause to only criminal law and not civil law goes all the way back to Calder v. Bull in the 1790s, and Justice Clarence Thomas has always held doubts about whether this distinction—nowhere stated in the text of the clause—is correct. So it was great to see his concurrence citing an argument from James Wilson at the Philadelphia convention that I use in the classroom with students:

And this summoned a terrific Tweetstorm from our pal Hadley Arkes, who I wasn’t certain didn’t still favor using the telegraph to send messages:

There are ten more entries in this thread, so click through at the link above if you want to take them all in.