Greetings and welcome to this 19th edition of the Carnival of Fools! Hey, remember when this newsletter was supposed to be a fun potpourri of interesting and silly news stories? But then the presidential campaign’s madness blotted out the sun? Well, the evils of 2024 may yet live on, but since I interred the year’s bones in this newsletter over the last two weeks, I’m done with it forever — even if its consequences are nowhere near done with us yet. That means that it’s time to return to form, just in time for a new (but also old) administration to take office. George R. R. Martin may have dropped work on writing his Song of Ice and Fire, the lazy millionaire, but some of us still have bills to pay.
Greenland Is an Idle Distraction
One marvels at Donald Trump’s ability to sidle up to any microphone, whether real or virtual, and immediately set the media world aflame with commentary. Admittedly, part of the reason is that he is president-elect of the United States, but this doesn’t explain all of it: The only way Joe Biden ever dominated a news cycle during his entire administration, as Trump does every week, was by spontaneously wilting onstage like Walter Donovan after choosing poorly.
So, when Trump took to Truth Social in the new year to refer to Justin Trudeau as the “governor” of the “51st state” and joke about annexing Canada, there the soon-to-be-former prime minister was, denying furiously on the record that Canada would forfeit its independence to America. (Canada has instead agreed to abide by prior international arrangement, whereby it forfeits only its comedic talent and all Stanley Cups since 1993.) Otherwise, Canada is determined to remain as Canadian as possible under the circumstances; Trudeau himself only a few years ago proudly declared his country to be gloriously “post-national,” mind you, so it seems that his sole conception of “Canada” is as synonymous with “not America.” As for me, I see no need for the United States to concern itself with acquiring a mere geographical expression, a nation whose richest province is still poorer than America’s poorest state. We already essentially run its entire national defense network anyway.
Matters then turned to the (more serious, we are told) question of buying Greenland from Denmark, which currently governs it as a quasi-independent territory. Why? Because it’s there, nobody occupies it save for a few hunter-gatherers, scientists, and arctic foxes, and, most importantly, acquiring it would allow us to complete the strategic encirclement of our ancient Canadian enemy. And look at us! The media are taking all of this quite seriously, aren’t we?
There are actually sound reasons for the U.S. to want to acquire Greenland: its geostrategic value vis-à-vis Europe and Russian Asia is so self-evident that we already maintain an air base there. (Denmark objected to this in the first part of the 20th century, but if it wishes to re-raise the issue now, it’s free to leave NATO first.) More importantly, its potential natural resources (including rare earth minerals) are largely unexplored and likely vast.
None of this is going to happen, however — in my opinion, this is all just national watercooler chat — because none of this needs to happen. For one thing, it would be almost impossible to negotiate an acceptable price to purchase the territory given those unknowably vast natural resources. (My colleague Dan McLaughlin suggested the international equivalent of the “Bobby Bonilla contract” — whereby Denmark would get inflation-adjusted annuities for a century — as one way to make this work.) As already noted, America already has military sovereignty over Greenland regardless of legal fiction, so national security in this case does not pose as pressing a need.
Finally, what’s Greenland to us? A barren rock of no human value whatsoever. There’s a reason that the population of the entire island is comparable to that of my neighborhood in Chicago. I happen to have a friend who spent an inordinate amount of time at Thule Air Base in the northwest part of the island, and I’ve never forgotten how he described it to me: “The nice thing about Greenland is that, as a human, you have no natural enemies. Instead, all of God’s creation is your enemy.”
The Los Angeles Fires Are a Matter of Governance, Not Fate
Los Angeles is burning. It has been burning for a week now, with multiple fires in different parts of the city, some perhaps set intentionally. The Pacific Palisades enclave — a Norman Rockwell–like slice of suburban America hidden within city limits — is but a memory now. Malibu, with its quirky beachside bungalows set next to rickety wooden shacks, has been reduced mostly to ash. Truly old American neighborhoods have been destroyed, likely never to be rebuilt, at least not in any way that reflects their original character. And the danger is nowhere near past.
I already wrote about the role of Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom in this entire mess, and I commend that piece to all those who want to watch me pour accelerant on two careers already on fire. For now, however, I would like to recommend this lengthy and thoughtful piece by Claire Lehmann at Quillette: “Three Hard Truths about California’s Fire Crisis.” Lehmann is Australian and thus writes about the lessons of Los Angeles through the lens of her experience with the catastrophic fires that wracked her hometown of Adelaide in 2020. Readers will find much to agree with, I suspect, but much that also reads like a counsel of despair: Governments need to have the courage to step in, she writes, and privilege the realities of climate change over mere property rights. It reads uncomfortably like the excuse-making for bad government that she denounces elsewhere. I stopped short where Lehmann writes:
The challenge of implementing controlled burns shows how politics fails us regardless of ideology. It doesn’t matter if it is a left-wing or right-wing government, almost all governments fail to provide enough controlled burns.
And this is where she loses me as well as anyone who has paid attention to how American governments operate on the state level. It is a question of competence, yes, but when Lehmann compares Australia to California she is comparing two essentially left-wing governments — like and like — which is no doubt why she throws her hands up in resignation. That is needless defeatism, as the record shows. The proper comparison, rather, would be between California’s fire management and that of its inverse, the red-state bête noir that is Ron DeSantis’s Florida.
The simple truth, as even NPR admitted with disbelief, is that Florida and other southern, Republican-run states — with every bit the same level of dangerous seasonal fire exposure — are light-years ahead of sclerotic California when it comes to fire mitigation. And it is very much a matter of governance, not resignation to fate. Florida and other southern states prove, with their smartly and lightly regulated regimes of controlled burns of brush and deadwood, that you can prevent massive fires with intelligent policy. As Lehmann’s firefighter friend aptly points out in her piece, “politicians never want to admit that nothing we can do will stop the really bad fires once they’re going.” Which is why politicians in more practical (read: Republican) states have figured out that the best way to avoid that situation is to prevent the really bad fires from getting going in the first place. California forgot this, but it can remember it again.
Los Angeles is indubitably fire-prone. But force majeure is not the same as fate. Even my city once rather infamously burned to the ground — mostly because it was made out of wood at the time. Our response was to rebuild it out of less flammable materials such as concrete and steel — now we have no problems whatsoever; Chicago is a metropolis of model governance. Heck, Moscow has burned down so many times throughout its history — most notably in 1812, when it razed itself in response to a flood of obnoxious and unwanted French tourism — that one almost begins to understand why Russians are the way they are. But our American experience has shown us that blaming “climate change” or “acts of God” is a cheap response, an act of avoiding responsibility. If Florida and Georgia can figure this out, then the only thing preventing California from doing so is Californians.
Trump Hasn’t Yet Tightened the Screws on the Cabinet He’s Assembling
National Review’s John Fund reported on Sunday that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s controversial nominee for secretary of defense, is in serious trouble of failing to gain confirmation. I believe he will edge his way across the finish line, even though I am unconvinced as to his fitness for the position.
One reason for this is that I suspect the Senate Republican Conference lacks the appetite to tank more than two of Trump’s more controversial nominees. Matt Gaetz was easy enough to reject out of hand — so easy, in fact, that some in Washington count him as a “freebie” — but between Hegseth, Lori Chavez-DeRemer at the Department of Labor, and RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, the appetite for opposition is likely to suffice for only one (at most two) of these picks.
Which is why I’m also paying attention to the fortunes of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence. Gabbard’s past issues — meeting secretly with Bashar al-Assad in Syria, loudly opposing national security measures in FISA’s Section 702(d) — are already well known, and she has attempted to tack to the winds by reversing some of her positions. But I am told that her rounds of meetings with the GOP conference on Capitol Hill went rather poorly, largely because she tended to treat them as superficial meet and greets rather than the job interviews they were. She has time for a course correction; it will be fascinating to find out how many votes she ultimately loses when the final roll is called.
Darwin’s Vandals Invite Darwinian Response
In more news about the obnoxious, two loathsome elderly prats with the radical environmental group Just Stop Oil spray-painted Charles Darwin’s grave in London’s Westminster Abbey to make some stupid point or another. (I’m not quite sure what the slogan “1.5 IS DEAD” means, but I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s got something to do with just stopping oil.) As some of you may remember, I have a particular loathing for eco-protesters, whether in their American form (who block traffic or invade the field at sporting events) or their European varietal (who typically deface artworks and monuments with paint). I recall feeling disappointed that protesters who vandalized Stonehenge last year weren’t immediately vivisected in a harrowingly pagan Neolithic sacrifice and then dropped in a bog. I offer the same sentiment to these two protesters and recommend that we establish ironic punishments in all such cases: Truss them up, take them down to the Thames, toss them in, and dare them to swim to safety. Call it “survival of the fittest.”
Until next week.