I wonder?

One of my favorite pastimes is to watch our presidents/congress flail about.

Now, those of you who are out there executing righteous hating on the Donald, you go.  He is as an appropriate target for your splenetic humours as anyone who has held the office.  I can't really defend anything he has touched and subsequently made worse.

I guess that my feeling is different about the clown.  That poor sad little bastard is in so far over his head and has so few resources (intellectual and structural) to support him that he never, ever had a chance. 

But the truth of the matter is that the work he has to do just isn't possible to get done with our expectations and our self-image and our selfishness.  It just isn't possible and to be completely honest with you, he is about as crappy a tool to do the job as could be chosen.

So, now that I have got the requisite Donald-hating out of the way, I want to talk about one of the specific reasons he is uniquely ill-suited to the task at hand.  It will be an odd confluence of thing a-happening and some strange and probably unsuccessful attempts at connecting the dots.

So..let's talk about the Gilets Jaunes and the "Green New Deal" as proposed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Because buckaroo, what you are looking at is the same thing.

Let's remember that the Frogs ain't like us God fearing Americans.  Oh, in the intellectual circles right and left alike, there is a certain set of thoughts that make us think that when we die, heaven will be a English-speaking version of Paris, but that is just rank silliness.

First and foremost, Paris is the bully-boy of French politics and intellectual thought.  Long history, long tradition, it represents Paris and seems to think that makes it representative of France (sound familiar?).  Macron is a product of France's wealthy and the Europhile wing of French politics.  He is subservient to the European banking community and Brussels.  I am not at all certain that he sees himself as the President of France as much as he see's himself the Governor of France representing the European Union.

So, onto the Gilet's Jaune.  Approximately speaking (and this is very approximate as the Frogs just ain't like us), these folks would most likely feel at home at a rally sponsored by the "Deplorable" wing of the US electorate.  This is where the tie-in with Alexandria Octavio-Cortez and the "Green New Deal" comes in.  The Gilets Jaunes are protesting at being the tax donkeys for a proposed restructuring of the French energy and political systems.  The move to get away from the petrochemical systems that are poisoning the planet is a sound one, but the Parisian Eurocrats made the mistake of placing the onus of payment on the people who can least afford it. 

AOC in her appropriate push toward getting the US off of an oil economy are necessarily trying to push us down the same path that France is taking.  I think that she is smart enough and untied to special interests enough that she may well be able to get the conversation started on the path we need to go down.

And that path is the same one that the little fuckball Macron is trying to push France onto walking.  World conventional oil peaked in 2005.  Right now we are super busy beating the dead horse of fracking and pumping the conventional oil as fast as we can.  When the accellerated depletion of the fracked wells starts getting traction, and the loans required to drill the wells (which are looking iffy) start to come on board, and the conventional oil reserves start thinning out, we will be in a real and true energy crisis. 

The "Green New Deal" Is a pretty fair start at the problem.  It's main problem is that is that, due to the obligatory optimism, it is being pitched as being easier than it will turn out to be. 

Changing primary energy sources for a civilization won't be in any way, shape or form a simple task.  It will be difficult beyond imagination.  The requirements will simply be that everyone will have to work very hard for a very long time and accept considerably less than what they currently feel is their due.

We will need to rebuild an entirely new infrastructure to replace the aging and now inappropriate transportation and logistics systems currently in place.  Automobiles won't be a fleet of clean running electric cars maintaining our wanderlust, mass transit systems will need to be rebuilt and extended and rationalized. 

All of this and the enormous capital investment to create the solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal resources will cripple the current economy and force living standards down. 

All of this will need to get paid for.  Taxing the rich will help, it will actually help a lot.  But a sizable chunk of the money will need to be squeezed out of the proles. 

I can see them going to Wal Mart to buy their Gilets Jaunes, because they will not at all want to give up what they feel has been promised them and is their due.