I saw a headline that a federal judge has ordered the federal government to stop building a detention center in “Alligator Alcatraz” to house illegal aliens. I thought at first that the story was a parody from The Onion. When I checked, I saw that it was from a straight news site.

The plaintiffs — two environmental groups and a Native American Tribe — seek to halt the project on environmental grounds. The judge’s ruling stops construction while the parties prepare to argue the merits of a preliminary injunction.

While this particular story was straight news, the invocation of environmental law to affect an issue of border control and national security reminded me of a parody I wrote nearly 10 years ago, reprinted for your reading pleasure:

FDR’s Pearl Harbor Speech, Updated

December 9, 2015 onemorething1703 Leave a comment Edit

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, is a date that will live in infamy.  Vandals, who may be in some way connected to the Imperial Japanese Navy, used military assault weapons to wreak havoc on Pearl Harbor, outside of Honolulu, Hawaii.  In their mindless destruction, these outlaws showed no respect for human life or for the property of others.  Our thoughts and prayers go out to the thousands of families who lost loved ones as a consequence of this senseless violence.

I have directed my Secretary of the Interior to fly to Honolulu tomorrow to assess the environmental damage resulting from the smoke pouring from fires burning out of control along Battleship Row and the release of naval and aviation fuel into the delicate habitat of Pearl Harbor.  He will report back directly to me.

I know that many of you are upset by these events.  Let me assure you, that I too am upset.  However, if we react with violence, if we fail to control our basest instincts, then we will have handed a victory to the vandals who carried out these destructive acts.

Instead of giving these outlaws what they want, we will conduct a thorough investigation.  I have directed my Secretary of State to contact his counterpart in Tokyo to help us gather evidence concerning who these lone wolf attackers were, and how we and our partners in Tokyo can work together to minimize any future outbreaks of senseless violent extremism.  We need to get to the bottom of this incident, to learn why and how it happened, so that we can work to ensure that it never happens again.

We do not know the motive behind this attack and we will not know it for many months, when investigators from the FBI and the Naval Investigative Service have had an opportunity to gather all of the facts, to interview witnesses, and to build a case against the perpetrators.  For now, I am asking my counterpart, the Emperor of Japan, to cooperate fully with our investigation.  I have already sent him a request for the names and addresses of all pilots employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy who may have had access to assault aircraft during the days leading up to December 7.  I have every confidence that my investigators will in time get the facts necessary to allow us to draw the appropriate conclusions and establish a policy that will ensure the continued peace and prosperity of all the nations of the Pacific community.

In the meantime, let’s put all thought of over-reacting out of our minds.  Let’s focus less on the victory of any one country and renew our efforts to find peaceful solutions to the concerns that may at times divide us from our neighbors.  The pilots who carried out these acts of senseless vandalism are a tiny minority of the personnel assigned to the Imperial Japanese Navy.  Let’s not judge an entire organization by the acts of a few extremists.  If we react with violence, the situation could easily spin out of control.  There has already been substantial loss of life, property damage, and environmental degradation.  I am not going to make the situation worse by adding to this senseless violence.

The best thing we can do right now is to light candles against the darkness, gather flowers to remind ourselves of the blessings of peace, link arms, and lift our voices together in song and prayer.

Thank you, and God bless America.

— Gerry Bresslour

My parents were married on June 6, 1943.  As the sun rose on their first anniversary, the Allied seaborne invasion of German-occupied France was underway six time zones to the east.  There are countless books, print and film news archives, and a few films that provide a bounty of information to anyone interested in D-Day.  The coincidental connection of this monumentally important event to a family celebration added to my interest over the years.  The following are some thoughts I posted in 2019 in connection with the 75^th anniversary (the invasion, not the wedding).

Belated Thoughts on the 75th Anniversary of D-Day

December 7, 2019 onemorething1703 Leave a comment Edit

Dwight Eisenhower played Contract Bridge to relax.  Terrence Reese, one of the game’s strongest players, has written: “You play chess with your brain, but in bridge your whole character and personality is expressed.“  Risk-taking and deception are critical to success, while judgment and decision-making are at the heart of the game.  A man grappling with the most daunting decisions a military leader could face enjoyed a game where he could take risks and make decisions for low stakes.

June 5 and June 6, 1944 were dates that provided the conditions that the Anglo-Canadian-American forces required for the massive Normandy landing.  The invaders wanted a night with a full moon when the tide would be halfway to full and still rising at dawn.  The incoming flood would aid the landing craft, while the less than full tide would expose hazards that the enemy had placed on the beach.  The moon would be full on June 6, nearly full on June 5.

The weather was miserable on June 5.  Eisenhower decided to wait another day.  If the weather worsened or failed to improve, the next dates with favorable tides would have been June 19 and 20, but there would have been a new moon on those dates, a disadvantage.  The pressure experienced by a person making the decision to proceed under these conditions cannot be imagined.

This was the largest sea-borne invasion force ever assembled.  The landing included 153,000 troops.  We Americans sometimes overlook the fact that the contribution made by the combined British and Canadian forces was greater than the American.  Britain sent more than 60,000 troops, while Canada provided some 20,000.  The Americans numbered about 73,000, the largest contingent but less than half of the total.

The one thing that almost all of the invaders had in common was language.  Apart from a few French paratroopers and liaison staff, the invasion force was Anglophone.  It has been said that the most important fact of the twentieth century was that Americans speak English.

This point was not lost on Charles de Gaulle.  He had no official position. The United States recognized the Vichy government, yet de Gaulle insisted that he spoke for France.  In the days before the invasion, de Gaulle and Churchill had argued about post-invasion politics.  Churchill’s final word was that Eisenhower was in charge of the invasion, so his decisions on political matters in the immediate post-invasion environment would stand.  If de Gaulle wanted to change that, he had to talk to President Roosevelt.

This proposal drove de Gaulle into a fury.  Why should he have to see Roosevelt about the restoration of the French government?  The upshot was that on the night of June 5-6, when Eisenhower had scores of things to worry about, when the first reports pointing to success or failure were only hours away, he had to deal with a ferociously angry Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle wanted to make a public announcement as the invasion unfolded.  Eisenhower explained that he himself would make the initial proclamation.  Eisenhower showed his visitor a copy of the printed text.  The document failed to mention French forces or de Gaulle himself.  De Gaulle was not pleased.  Nor was his mood lightened when Eisenhower offered de Gaulle the chance to broadcast following Eisenhower.  De Gaulle had no intention of speaking after anyone, much less an American general.

Eisenhower had arranged for a scrip currency denominated in Francs to be printed so that the troops could purchase supplies locally as the need arose.  De Gaulle said the Americans were counterfeiting.  Eisenhower intended to declare a provisional military government that would work with local political leaders until permanent arrangements were in place.  De Gaulle found this unacceptable; he intended to organize French politics on his terms.

At a later date, General Eisenhower wrote (I paraphrase): “Apart from the weather, no other element in the war gave me as much difficulty as the French.”  Those “other elements” included the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.  The thought had undoubtedly occurred to General Eisenhower prior to the night of June 5-6, but I imagine de Gaulle’s behavior on D-Day helped to fasten the idea in Eisenhower’s mind.

Give de Gaulle credit for seeing past the fighting to the political situation as it would exist after the war.  He shared with Churchill and Stalin this view of war as “diplomacy by other means”.  The Allied invasion of France was not a purely military operation.  Churchill and Stalin also planned war strategy with the post-war political situation in mind.  The interplay of their ambitions, umpired by Franklin Roosevelt, produced a vector of forces that pointed at Normandy.  Still, there were alternatives that the Anglophones might have pursued.  One of those alternatives stemmed from the uncelebrated, barely remembered invasion of Italy that began in July 1943, eleven months before D-Day.

I was in London on business on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984.  The commemoration in Normandy was elaborately done.  Thousands of American veterans made the trip.  On the day, Ronald Reagan made one of his finest speeches (“The Boys of Pointe du Hoc”).  My British colleagues were puzzled by the big deal the Americans were making of the fortieth anniversary of the event.

I thought I knew why.  Previous round-number anniversaries had provided an occasion first for the surviving political leaders, then in their turn the generals, and later the senior officers.  The fortieth anniversary was the moment for the men who had ridden the landing craft up to the shore, jumped into cold water, and stormed the beaches.  Or they had jumped out of planes or dropped bombs or fired at the shore from the armada that shepherded the invasion force.  The fiftieth anniversary might be more memorable still, but the warriors of 1944 were already in their 60s and couldn’t count on ten more good years.  The fortieth anniversary was the time to go.

At the time I didn’t ask why we were celebrating the invasion of Normandy while ignoring the earlier invasion of Italy.  Seventy-five years after this dramatic event, I would like to understand why the western allies chose to invade France at all.  The answers are not comforting.

Churchill had not favored a cross-Channel invasion.  The prospect of an attack through France must have conjured a repetition of the trench warfare that had bled Britain dry during the First World War.  Churchill preferred an attack through Italy, which he called the “soft underbelly of Europe”.  Italy offered an additional advantage.  Once the western allies had broken out of Italy, they could advance through the Hungarian Plain to attack Germany from the east.  German troops on the eastern front would be caught between the Anglophones on one side and the Soviets on the other.  The western allies had been active in Italy since July 1943 and were pressing northward during the planning and execution of the Normandy invasion.

Unfortunately, the Italian campaign was more difficult, the going slower and tougher than Churchill had anticipated.  The Allied command allowed itself to be sidetracked into liberating Rome when more important strategic targets were available.  In the Spring of 1944, the moment when the campaign could have succeeded, it suffered two setbacks.  First, additional forces were denied Italy and stockpiled in Britain in preparation for Normandy.  Second, forces were withdrawn from Italy to support Operation Sword, the invasion of France’s Mediterranean coast.  After the war, both the American commander in Italy, Mark Clark, and his German counterpart, Albert Kesselring, openly questioned the wisdom of weakening the Italian front in order to support an invasion of southern France, an area with little strategic importance.  The same could be said of the decision to divert forces from Italy to Normandy, although General Clark does not push this point.

Why invade two French coasts when success so much closer to the German frontier was possible?  The area in eastern Europe that would be occupied by the Anglophones if General Clark’s army had been able to break out to the north was where that other geopolitical strategist Josef Stalin intended to be operating during the late stages of the war.  He did not want anyone else getting there first.  From the moment that the United States entered the war, Stalin started calling for a second front.  When the western allies landed in north Africa, he continued the call.  The invasion of Italy did not satisfy him.  He did not consider Italy a “second front”.  The Normandy beaches are more than 700 miles west of the line that the western allies would have followed had they taken northern Italy and marched north toward Berlin from the east.

The decision to choose the high-risk invasion of a well-defended coast when Allied troops were already on the ground in Italy has set up a debate between the radical revisionist view of Diana West in her book “American Betrayal” and the conventional view that the Normandy invasion established the second front that ensured Allied victory in Europe in the Second World War.

An excellent defense of the conventional view comes from an unconventional source.  Conrad Black is a conservative who admires Franklin Roosevelt; his biography of FDR is subtitled “Champion of Freedom.”  Black points out that on the day the United States entered the Second World War, Japan, Germany, and Italy were governed by totalitarian dictatorships, while western Europe and vast territories in the Pacific were under military occupation.  At the end of the war, democracy was restored to France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway, while Italy, Germany (west of the Elbe), and Japan joined the club of liberal democracies.  Austria, once again independent of Germany, became neutral to accommodate the Soviets, as did Finland.  On this accounting, Mr. Roosevelt earned his subtitle.

A skeptic would note that when the treaties ending the First World War were signed, all of those nations were part of the community of liberal societies.  Japan had been an ally of Britain in the First World War and after the war wanted to continue its friendly relations.  (Britain declined the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty in 1922 at the insistence of the United States.)  Germany was a model republic (on paper), while France’s Third Republic was at the peak of its power.  Italy was soon to prove an exception when the life-long socialist Benito Mussolini instituted Fascism, a movement very similar to what would be called National Socialism in Germany and (after diluting the German version’s anti-Semitism and racism) Democratic Socialism in other places.  Italy aside, the skeptic could note that by 1945, the United States had done nothing more than achieve par.  It had recovered the ground that had been gained in 1919 and later lost.

However, achieving par in western Europe had come at a terrible cost in eastern Europe.  Communist control of Soviet territory was tenuous in 1919.  By 1945, Communist control of all of the Soviet Union was complete, the three Baltic republics had been digested courtesy of the 1939 treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the area of Soviet control had moved to the Elbe.  Even then, Stalin wanted more.  At the 1945 Allied conference in Potsdam, a Berlin suburb, an American official (Averill Harriman) asked Stalin why he looked glum at a moment of historical triumph.  Stalin’s reply was that “Alexander the First [the Czar who helped to defeat Napoleon] got to Paris.”

In contrast to the conventional and near-worshipful view of Roosevelt held by Mr. Black, Ms. West believes that the U.S. conducted the Second World War under the influence of Soviet agents.  She is convinced that the diversion of forces from Italy to Normandy was the work of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s Grand Vizier and, what is more, that Hopkins was a Soviet agent.

That the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents is well-documented, although it is too often overlooked in the adulatory coverage afforded to Mr. Roosevelt by journalists and historians.  I have written before that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they require their advocates to force the facts to fit the theory.  They work backwards from conclusions reached before any evidence has been evaluated.

The belief that hundreds of Soviet agents held positions of influence in the Roosevelt administration does not suffer from these defects.  It is supported by plentiful eyewitness, physical, and documentary evidence that has held up under scrutiny and is internally consistent.  In fact, the behavior characteristic of the conspiracy theorist – dismissal of evidence that does not support a deeply held conclusion – is exhibited by those who deny that the conspiracy existed.

The existence of a Soviet network of spies active within the Roosevelt administration does not establish that Harry Hopkins was part of that network nor that he was acting at the direction of Soviet spymasters when he used his influence to carry out Stalin’s preferred role for US forces in Europe.

The Roosevelt worshipers will dismiss the possibility out of hand.  After all, Roosevelt was a “champion of freedom”.   It might disturb that camp to learn that Roosevelt was unconcerned about espionage in his administration.  In September 1939, Adolph Berle, an Assistant Secretary of State charged with managing internal security, disclosed to Roosevelt a report that Berle had received from an eyewitness (Whittaker Chambers) naming some two dozen Soviet agents who held posts in the administration.  One of the names was Laughlin Currie, a member of Roosevelt’s White House staff.  Incidentally, Chambers’s accusations have been confirmed by independent evidence, although the effort took decades in some cases.

Roosevelt’s reaction was to shoot the messenger.  Berle reported that the President had told him to “jump in the lake”.  (It seems that Berle was cleaning up his boss’s language.  Reading between the lines, it appears that Roosevelt’s actual suggestion involved a biologically impossible act.)  It is sobering to learn that the President was unworried about traitors even among his personal staff.  Still, that doesn’t mean that Hopkins was a spy.

There are at least two reasons for believing that Hopkins was not a Soviet agent.  First, Hopkins is mentioned in several intercepted Soviet dispatches (the “VENONA” telegrams), but always as an “asset” never as an agent.  Second, and more generally, achieving the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during the Roosevelt administration required more than the efforts of some 500 Soviet agents, no matter how hard they may have worked on behalf of their adopted country.  That policy was the result of consensus, not conspiracy.  Consider a small sampling of the evidence:

• When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt’s first impulse was to find a way to help the Soviets. In July 1941, he dispatched Harry Hopkins to Moscow to assess whether the Soviets would benefit from material aid from the United States.  Unsurprisingly, the Soviets were able to convince Hopkins that American aid would be well used.  But what need was there to take sides at all?  The United States was not at war; it was officially neutral.  Two murderous versions of the socialist vision had been allies from August 1939 (when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed) right up to the moment that the German attack began on June 22, 1941.  The Soviets had invaded Poland as agreed in their treaty.  They had actively supplied Germany with materiel and foodstuffs right up to the day Germany attacked.  What reason was there to favor one of these deviants over the other?  The standard answer is that the Soviets were able and willing to kill German soldiers.  That leaves unsaid that the Germans were able and willing to kill Soviet soldiers, who were just as dangerous.  And let us remember that both of these tyrannies were fully prepared to liquidate civilians on a massive scale and did so.
• In 1940, as the Soviets were absorbing eastern Poland, they murdered some 20,000 Polish officers. Stalin, ever the strategic thinker, did not like the idea of that many Polish patriots with proven leadership ability getting in the way of the permanent subjugation of Poland to the Soviet yoke.  Killing the Polish officers solved that problem.  When the bodies were discovered (still during the war) the Soviets blamed the atrocity on Germany.  The United States played along, in order not to upset an ally.
• After the war, high-ranking German officials were held to account for conspiracy to commit a “crime against peace” (among other things). The Soviet Union was one of the conspirators.  Would Germany have invaded Poland in 1939 without the assurances contained in the Nazi-Soviet Pact?  The answer is unknowable, but the fact is that Soviet diplomats and political figures ought to have been in the dock at Nuremberg rather than at the prosecutor’s table.  There was no practical way to put them on trial but there was no need to allow them to prosecute crimes that they themselves had committed and had facilitated.
• Also after the war, the Soviets demanded the return of some 500,000 Soviet soldiers who had ended up in the control of western governments via wartime contingencies. A return to the Soviet Union meant certain death for these unfortunates.  Even so, the western allies accommodated Stalin’s demand for their return.

The last two examples date to the Truman administration, supporting the thesis that the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during this period cannot be attributed solely to the efforts of agents of the Soviet regime.  The policy preference in favor of the Soviets was far more deeply ingrained and more corrosive than can be explained by the work of spies, even if the network included moles prepared to do the bidding of their Soviet clients.

It did not require a spy in a key position in the Roosevelt administration to steer the Anglo-Canadian-American forces toward Normandy and shortly afterwards to the Rhone.  The western allies wanted to repay the sacrifices made by the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet people themselves.  Those sacrifices cannot be overlooked.  The Soviets suffered casualties in the millions, many times the casualties of the United States.  But anyone who thinks that Josef Stalin shed tears over those lost to the German invasion and swore that those honored dead will not have died in vain is mistaken.

The Normandy invasion fits the pattern of the many other accommodations made to the Soviets and to Josef Stalin particularly once the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on the same side in a war against Germany.  It suited Stalin’s purpose to keep the western allies occupied on the beaches of France while his forces pushed forward month by month through the end of 1944 and the first five months of 1945.  U.S. war plans always contemplated an invasion of France.  The Americans wanted allied troops in France headed east.  I have never seen a satisfactory explanation for why a massive Allied army moving northeast out of Italy would not have better served the cause.  Stalin’s geopolitical calculations and American sentiment outweighed Churchill’s original objections.  And Churchill swallowed his objections.  By this time Churchill had adopted a policy of full-blown appeasement when it came to Stalin’s demands.

The second front that Stalin had demanded was opened at dawn on June 6 by an armada of some 6.000 ships carrying the largest amphibious invasion force ever assembled or likely to be assembled again.  As we know, they accomplished their mission.  Eisenhower was a master of logistics and planning.  He kept a fractious group of military commanders focused and under control.  The troops were brilliantly trained and demonstrated courage beyond our understanding as they swarmed ashore against an entrenched, battle-hardened enemy.  Their success on that day was well-earned and stands as one of the great military achievements of all time.

But imagine if that same force and all of the planning, training, courage, and fighting spirit that stormed Normandy had instead been applied to the Italian campaign.  We cannot know what would have happened on the path not chosen, but the opportunity was available to defeat Germany on terms that held Soviet tyranny within the boundaries it occupied at the moment in 1939 when it began to conspire with Germany to make war.

(Note: This was originally posted on January 19, 2025 at a different site when I was temporarily locked out of this one.)

Some nations defend their borders with a stern ferocity but take little to no interest in the borders of other nations.  Switzerland is an example.  Their armed forces are prepared to defend the country against attack – watch it, Liechtenstein – but Switzerland does not engage in military action anywhere else.  Switzerland did not even join the U.N. until 2002, and only after a national referendum authorized the action.

Other nations who guard their borders jealously are less careful about those of their neighbors.  Mexico and Russia are two nations that take this approach.  Mexico guards its southern border but provides generous assistance to the millions of its citizens, residents, and visitors who would prefer to live in the United States.

Russia takes its border seriously, although it does not have to deal with an influx of migrants: a slow afternoon on the Rio Grande will see more migrants than Russia would encounter in a decade.  On the other hand, in the last 20 years, Russia has meddled aggressively in the affairs of its neighbors.  It invaded Georgia during the Bush 43 administration, Crimea during the Obama years, and most recently Ukraine in 2022.

Then there is the United States, which for the last four years has done little to control the unlawful flow of some ten million persons across its southern border.  Indeed, Biden’s people actively encouraged the flow by dismantling the physical, legal, and diplomatic controls that Trump 45 put in place.

This attitude contrasts with the reaction of Biden’s people to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The protection of Ukraine’s borders, in their view, is worth hundreds of millions, “as much as it takes” in the words of the highly decorated General Mark Milley.

In addition, the U.S. has given Ukraine offensive weapons, capable of striking targets inside Russia, and has authorized Ukraine to use them even though we have no obligation to defend Ukraine.  Russia has the world’s largest collection of nuclear weapons.  The nation that put Mr. Biden in the White House must rely on the willingness of Vladimir Putin to exercise patience and restraint, qualities for which he is not well known.

During the last four years, we have not heard a rationale for either policy that stands up to analysis. 

If the United States is going to use military force, either directly or through proxies, it should be for the purpose of defending the country’s national interest.  What is the interest of the United States in maintaining the borders of Ukraine in the location they occupied in February 2022?

Why did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine require the U.S. and its NATO allies to arm Ukraine?  We are told that the U.S. is defending democracy.  That premise doesn’t survive the reflection that Ukraine’s government has outlawed opposition parties. 

We are told that the U.S. must defend the international order.  There is no question that we should defend the internation order.  What is left unexplained is why the imposition of economic and financial sanctions was not enough to satisfy this obligation.

What is the interest of the United States that would be damaged by the relocation of Ukraine’s border with Russia?  Unless we can point to something concrete that would be lost by adjusting those borders, we should limit our response to economic sanctions.

Compare Ukraine to Taiwan.  As with Ukraine, the U.S. is not party to a treaty that requires the U.S. to defend Taiwan.  (The U.S. has enacted a statute that makes the defense of Taiwan the policy of the U.S.  That policy does not give Taiwan the right to call upon U.S. military power as a matter of right.)  Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan produces something we need: advanced computer chips that are vital to the continued development of information technology and computing systems throughout the developed nations.  The disruption of the information processing capabilities of the United States and its allies would have a significant adverse impact on a vital interest of the United States.

The use of military force to defend that interest would be amply justified if Taiwan were invaded.  The justification for military action in that event would not be based on a generality like the defense of democracy, the preservation of international order, or our feelings of solidarity with the people of Taiwan.  Those are sentiments, not interests. 

The use of force would be justified to repel (and the threat of force to discourage) an enemy action that adversely affects a vital national interest.  No vital interest been cited as a reason for the supply of arms to Ukraine during the three years since Russia invaded Ukraine – to be clear, without justification and in violation of civilized norms.

When it comes to the borders of the United States, Biden’s people have taken a different approach.  They occasionally invoke sentiment – the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty is useful for this purpose – but the principal approach has been stout denial.  They insist that the border is under control.  The Secretary of Homeland Security has made this claim numerous times, including under oath in testimony before Congress.

Making this statement and others like it has provided the administration with two benefits, one strategic, one tactical.  The strategic benefit is that it helps to soften the mind of followers and supporters.  Theodore Dalyrmple (the penname of Anthony Daniels) points out that totalitarian governments force their citizens to believe obvious lies as part of a general plan to weaken their will and their ability to reason.  What totalitarians accomplish through force and terror can be achieved by leaders in freer societies through guile and deception when supine journalists are willing to cooperate. 

The tactical benefit of stout denial is that the administration is not called to justify an open border policy.  If you deny that something is happening, you don’t have to explain or justify it.

Nevertheless, some ten million persons entered the country unlawfully during the last four years to join the ranks of perhaps twenty million others who arrived during previous administrations (including Trump 45, although his numbers are better than those of his two predecessors).

We can ask the same question we did about arming Ukraine: what benefit does the United States derive from the entry into the country of some ten million persons without legal authority?  While there are some individuals among them who pose danger – inmates of Venezuelan prisons, members of drug cartels, agents of unfriendly foreign powers, including China – the majority are people whose skills are not essential to the functioning of an advanced economy.  Our cutting-edge industries may need immigrants with critical skills – that’s the subject of the intra-party debate about H-1B visas – but the people with those skills are entering with visas through ports of entry.  They are not pouring through holes in the fence on the southern border.

Biden’s people will remain silent on the justification for this policy right up to the inauguration on January 20.  There simply isn’t a justification for this lawless policy.

How will Trump 47 deal with the presence of so many unlawful residents?  We have been promised mass deportations.  Polling indicates that significant majorities of the public favor this policy.  Will that support continue when the news media begin to show footage of crying mothers and screaming children?  I expect that the footage is ready for broadcast as soon as the new administration gets beyond the deportation of felons and violent offenders.  That’s what happened during the previous Trump administration when the media began showing “kids in cages”.  The video showed scenes from the Obama years, but it was Trump who was blamed for separating “mommas and their babies” as Senator Elizabeth Warren put it in her folksy way.

Majorities will be happy to see action on “Day One”.  We will find out quickly whether that enthusiasm will continue as the process of deporting millions stretches into months. 

                                                                                Gerry Bresslour

                                                                                January 19, 2025

It is leap year day once again. Here is a repeat of some thoughts posted on this date in 2020:

Leap days keep the calendar aligned with astronomical observations.  The connection is doubly important when religious holidays are tied to the seasons.  Easter is a movable feast celebrated near the vernal equinox. Christmas is fixed at December 25, a date significant for its ancient relationship to the winter solstice.  The Roman calendar dated the winter solstice to December 25.  In pagan northern Europe, the date was noted as the first day after the winter solstice with measurably more daylight.

Without leap years, both holidays would drift.  It takes the earth a few hours more than 365 days to revolve from one vernal equinox to the next.  If we start a 365-day calendar by recording an equinox on March 21, we would find that after four years the vernal equinox would occur on March 22.  After a century, it would fall in mid-April.  A calendar of 365 days turns the page on a new year too soon to keep the vernal equinox to the desired date.

Easter is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.  If the calendar is allowed to drift without leap days, the date of Easter would fall later and later in the year as the decades and centuries roll by and the calendar falls behind the equinox at the rate of about a quarter of a day per year.

If the calendar is allowed to drift, the date of the winter solstice would also fall later and later.  If December 21 is the date of the solstice in Year 1, it will fall about a day before the solstice in Year 4.  After a century, it will be more than three weeks earlier than the solstice.  A holiday like Christmas that is celebrated on a fixed date would gradually float backwards through the seasons over long periods of time.  It would return to the date that falls four days after the winter solstice after a tour of some 14 centuries. (365/0.25=1460.)

My personal view is that this arrangement would have lent more interest to these holidays.  There would be long periods of time when the two holidays occurred in the same month.  They might even fall on the same day in a given year.  After that, there would come a time when elders would fondly recall the days when, as children, they found Easter eggs hidden under the Christmas tree.

Long before Easter and Christmas became Christian holidays, other keepers of calendars felt the need to make adjustments to keep their holidays at the traditional and desired time of year.  Two lunar calendars – the Chinese calendar and the Jewish calendar – add a “leap month” every few years.  That allows the Chinese New Year to be calculated by counting new moons after the winter solstice, two for a common year and three for a leap year.  A leap month keeps the Jewish High Holy Days tied to the fall of the year and Passover tied to the spring.

The Islamic calendar starts a new month with the first sighting of a crescent moon after a new moon.  A year consists of twelve lunar cycles and is some 355 days long.  There is a Koranic prohibition against the use of leap months.  Consequently, the holy month of Ramadan falls some ten days earlier each year on a solar calendar.  (One wag asked “Is it my imagination or is Ramadan coming earlier each year?”)

During Ramadan, observant Muslims may not eat during daylight hours.  That rule has a consequence for physical laborers in higher latitudes during those periods when Ramadan falls in the summer months.  My gardener is a devout Muslim and was forced to cut back on his work schedule a few years ago when Ramadan was observed during high summer.  Apart from that, allowing the lunar calendar to drift relative to the solar calendar does not appear to have done Islam any harm.

The Romans imposed order on a solar calendar more than 2000 years ago.  Prior to the year 46 BC, the Roman practice was to add a variable number of days to the month of February every few years ad hoc as the need arose.  (Needless to say, the Romans did not refer to that year as 46 BC.)  Julius Caesar gathered the best astronomers of his day who advised him to reform the calendar systematically by adding one day to the calendar every four years.  The Julian calendar was born.

Unfortunately, the Julian calendar overdid the required correction.  If you add a day to the calendar every four years, you have made the average year 365.25 days long, or 365 days and six hours.  [(365 + 365 + 365 + 366)/4 = 365.25.]  A year – measured from one vernal equinox to the next – doesn’t take that long.  The earth arrives at a vernal equinox 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds (on the average) after the previous one.

The 365-day calendar turned its pages too quickly.  The 365.25-day calendar took too long.  The built-in error of eleven minutes and 15 seconds per year accumulated inexorably.  After a century, the Julian calendar had added some 18 hours more than was necessary.  The date of the vernal equinox began to move backward. In 1582, when Pope Gregory took the matter in hand, the vernal equinox occurred on March 11.

The solution was to reduce the number of leap years in a 400-year cycle by three.  Instead of adding 100 leap days over 400 years, the Gregorian calendar adds 97.  Years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400.  1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was.  To get the vernal equinox back to the desired date, ten calendar days were skipped by fiat.  In places where the Pope’s word was authoritative, the day after October 4, 1582 was October 15, 1582.

Even so, the calendar will need an adjustment in the distant future.  The average year in the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days long.  [(365×303) + (366×97)]/400=365.2425.  However, the observed average length of the time it takes for the earth to complete the circuit from one vernal equinox to the next is 365.24219 days.  That tiny difference means that the Gregorian calendar adds about 27 unnecessary seconds per year.

It will take a bit more than 3000 years (counting from 1582) for those 27 seconds to amount to one full surplus day.  Our remote descendants may decide to skip a leap year to further improve the alignment of the calendar to the seasons.  The simplest proposal is to treat the year 4000 and future years divisible by 4000 as common years of 365 days.  Of course, the kids will do whatever they think best.  There is plenty of time to decide.

— Gerry Bresslour

In the summer of 1788, Mozart completed work on three symphonies.  He finished Number 39 in Eb Major on June 26, Number 40 in g minor on July 25, and Number 41 in C Major on August 10.

There is no unambiguous proof that the composer ever heard a performance of any of these works.  There are surviving concert programs that refer to performances of Mozart symphonies later than summer 1788 and earlier than December 1791, when the composer died, but it’s not clear which works are being referred to.

Wikipedia tells us that in 2011, a letter written in 1802 was discovered containing a recollection of the performance of the g minor symphony that Mozart attended at a private home.  The letter reports that the composer was so upset by the poor quality of the performance that he left the room.

The letter was written some twelve years after the event.  How accurately can you recall the details of a concert you went to over a decade ago?  Whether or not the 1802 letter is an accurate recollection, the best evidence that Mozart heard Symphony No. 40 at least once is the fact that he revised the score.  The woodwinds in the original score were a flute, two oboes, two bassoons, and two French horns.  The revised version doesn’t alter melodies or harmonies, but it adds two clarinets and adjusts the oboe parts accordingly.  (Neither version has trumpets or drums.)  The inference is that he revised the orchestration after he heard the piece.  The conclusion is not ironclad; someone working at this level would have heard the music well enough in his mind without the aid of sound waves hitting his eardrums.  After all, he composed the original version without hearing it performed by an orchestra.

Mozart did not compose another symphony before his death in December 1791.  The three that he produced in the summer of 1788 were his last.  Their standing as his final symphonies, the brief time the composer needed to produce works of transcendent quality, and doubts about performance during his lifetime have combined to open the door to the romantic notion that these symphonies were addressed to posterity and not to flesh-and-blood audiences of the 1780s.  The musicologist and Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein said they were an “appeal to eternity”.

These romantic notions ignore some mundane facts.  Mozart had a family to support.  He was a man who enjoyed good company.  He led an active social life, where he indulged a taste for practical jokes and adolescent-level bathroom humor.  He was beset by problems in 1788 – his wife was ill, a child had died in infancy, he was short of money.  Because he did not have a wealthy patron, if he wanted an income, he had to continue to compose and perform music that listeners would pay to hear.  It’s unlikely that he took nine weeks off to write three symphonies for audiences yet unborn, like a message in a bottle floated out to sea.

Mozart didn’t write a lot of music in minor keys.  Within that limited sphere, the first movement of K. 550 stands out for its chameleon-like quality.  It changes character, becoming at times more intense, at others less, in its minor key qualities.

Other Mozart minor key works that I am familiar with display one of two characters.  Some are “lightly minor” while others fully embrace the dark character of the minor key in which they were composed.  The c minor Serenade K. 388 (composed for wind octet, then repurposed as the String Quintet K. 406), the g minor Piano Quartet K. 478, and the d minor String Quartet K. 421 (one of the “Haydn” quartets) fall into the first category.  Their minor key sonority is mild and they retain a sweet quality not often associated with minor keys.  The g minor String Quintet K. 516 splits the difference.  Its first movement is properly minor while its last movement is downright cheerful once it gets going.

In contrast, the two minor key Piano Concertos, No. 20 in d minor K. 466 and No. 24 in c minor K. 491, are unremittingly dark in their outer movements.  These are unsettled, agitated, sometimes menacing, sometimes fierce.

Symphony 40 is harder to pin down.  Each statement of the opening movement’s first theme has a level of light or shade slightly different from its neighbors.  Leonard Bernstein provides a brilliant explanation to show that Mozart pulls off this effect by combining chromaticism in the upper voices – the use of notes that are a half-step higher or lower than the tones natural to the home key – with a relatively conventional downward progression of fifths in the lower voices.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ZE38BQmvQ.

Another oddity in that first movement is the way the upper strings step all over the lines of the other sections.  The movement begins with the lower strings playing a rhythmic accompaniment.  If we’re going to have an introduction, the audience expects to hear it before the main event gets going.  A one and a two and a three . . . .  Instead, the upper strings come in after the “and a one”.  What if the listener isn’t ready?  The composer asks you to catch up.

The strings do it again 20 measures later.  At measure 14, the winds join the strings to close out the initial statement of the opening theme.  With that done, at measure 20 the winds provide a conventional bridge of descending thirds to pave the way for the strings to state the theme a second time.  The strings impatiently step on those thirds and begin the theme again without waiting for the winds to finish.

To complete the trifecta, the strings do the same thing at the end of the development section.  The composer has used the development to dissect the first subject down to its component notes until the winds prepare at measure 164 to take the listener by the hand for a gentle reintroduction of the first subject in full.  The violins again barge back in.  On this restatement of the first subject, the violins don’t wait for even one measure of accompaniment by the lower strings.  The violas, cellos, and bass come in later.

There is one more twist to mention in the first movement.  In the standard treatment of a sonata-allegro movement, the first and second subjects are presented initially in different keys.  The tension that results – felt if not heard consciously – is released when the two subjects return after the development section.  The first subject will be altered – modulated – in some way so that the second subject can be restated in the home key.  As I’ve said before, no one needs to know any of this to enjoy a piece of music, any more than you need to know about gothic arches, pilasters, or groined vaults to be moved by great architecture.  But it helps a listener who is trying to understand how a composer uses technical means to produce an overwhelming emotional impact.

In K. 550, the first movement’s initial theme is in g minor, while the second subject, which arrives at measure 44 as a huge sigh from the orchestra, is in Bb major, a minor third higher.  After the development, as the first subject squares up to give way to the second subject, the composer plunges the music deep into the lower strings.  After a roundabout trip the music moves back up to the violins. The composer is ready to reintroduce the second subject in its new key, which should be G major.  However, Mozart modifies the second subject to present it in g minor.  A YouTube commenter said that this little trick – stating the second subject in a major key on its first appearance and transferring it to a minor key on its return – is something Mozart did in all of his minor key sonata movements.  The mood of the movement is now permanently darkened and stays that way to the final g minor chord.

The second movement is the only extended sunny moment in the symphony.  Its themes are simple – the piling up of a chord to open the movement, a little two-note bird call further on, and so on in that vein.  The composer presents these pleasant melodies initially in a pastoral mood, but uses these same innocent elements to produce a stormy interlude and a brief minor key climax before returning the listener to the tranquil mood that began the movement.

The third movement, a minuet and trio in A-B-A form, is in an unambiguously minor mode in the outer sections.  Tension in the minuet is provided through a disagreement among the upper and lower strings over meter.  The rhythmic instability is unsettling.  It isn’t clear from measure to measure which section is in charge.  The trio is the last of the symphony’s bright spots.  The instrumental sections take turns repeating a pleasant dance theme.  Even the violins behave until the minuet returns.

The fourth movement, in sonata form, is remarkable for its ability to project barely controlled chaos once the movement’s main themes have been presented – a nervous, agitated first subject and a more lyrical but equally nervous second subject.  In the YouTube video I mentioned earlier, Leonard Bernstein points out that in one disorienting passage in this movement, the composer uses 11 different tones – every note in the chromatic scale except for G, the tonic on which the movement is grounded.  He notes that this is a technique that a listener would expect to encounter in the 20^th century but not in the 18^th. As in the first movement, the second subject is converted from Bb major to g minor on its return after the development.  The mood darkens until repeated minor scales in the bass and broken arpeggios in the violins close the movement, which ends on a defiant g minor chord.

This is a perfect piece of music and deserves a perfect recording.  I haven’t found the perfect recording but I can recommend a few that I will live with until a perfect one comes along.

Part of the difficulty in the pursuit of perfection in this piece lies in finding a tempo that allows the cleanest possible articulation of each note while maintaining a sense of forward motion.  Tempos have gotten faster over the decades.  Compare this 1956 recording of a performance conducted by Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcALATiVlZs&t=363s with a 1992 recording conducted by John Elliot Gardiner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1n9cVbwaz4.  The Gardiner performance gives the impression that the rental for the recording studio was about to expire so that the only way to avoid surcharges was to hurry to allow time to pack up the instruments.

In addition to moderately brisk tempos in service to clear articulation, I prefer performances that take the indicated repeats and that demonstrate Mozart’s ability to get the upper strings to shimmer and shine.  Two contemporary recordings that get things about right for me are Julien Salemkour conducting the Staatskapelle Berlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqkXqpQMk2k&t=448s and Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyQ-POuTNn8&t=808s. Incidentally, the Frankfurt performance appears to be the original version of the symphony, without clarinets.  An older (1977), somewhat slower, but satisfying performance (with clarinets) is provided by Karl Böhm (1894-1981) and the Vienna Philharmonic.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that each of these orchestras is German or Austrian and that each has been in existence for a long time.  Frankfurt began in 1929, the Vienna Philharmonic in 1842, and the Berlin Staatskapelle before 1570(!).  An orchestra will feel a piece like this in its bones as generations of young musicians learn the subtleties of the music from their elders and then pass that knowledge to those who come after them.  For example, in this 20-minute clip from a master class, the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic works through K. 550 with a young violinist in part to prepare her for an audition in the first violins but also to teach her the way that she will perform the piece if her audition gets her a seat in the orchestra.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwC-2GBnMWY&t=234s.

This is a widely loved work and for that reason there are many recordings, including some eccentrics that I have encountered.  Nikolaus Harnoncourt built a distinguished career as part of the historical performance movement.  The idea was to produce the music of earlier centuries using instruments from the period, or replicas of those instruments, along with historically accurate tempos, tunings, and performance styles.  However, in this recording of the 40^th Symphony he leads the Concertgebouw, an orchestra in the modern, conventional mold.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6LJBzXTyPk&list=PLZbukSlHOkYQuiopQ2sPn9uWZsP2ATJ9n&index=8

His tempos are erratic and changeable.  Long pauses are inserted into sectional breaks within movements.  I found the performance less than enjoyable.  This talented orchestra might have been used to better purpose.

This performance by the Basel Chamber Orchestra would be among my favorites but for one flaw that is as annoying as a toothache.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDzxKJkU21s&t=127s  At measures 90 through 94 (starting at 1:45 on the recording), we are getting ready to close out the exposition of the first movement. A series of four quarter notes starts the process.  It is interrupted and then continued by a similar series of eight quarter notes.  All of these notes should receive equal stress as they take us along the path to the final measures of the exposition (and later to the final measures of the movement).  They should sound: bum bum bum bum bum bum.  For reasons of his own, the conductor, Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, the nephew of the great pianist with the same last name, decides to throw a little ragtime into this passage, so we get: BARRUMPH BUM bum bum bum bum.

I can’t listen to it without getting annoyed, which is a shame because it is otherwise a fine performance.  Other compensations include a highly engaged and entertaining concertmaster and the fact that the orchestra presents the original oboe version.

As an alternative, a chamber orchestra presentation without clarinets that avoids the ragtime (and also dispenses with a conductor) is provided by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLAh_0Nd6j0

One final eccentric recording: The Harvard lecture by Leonard Bernstein that I mentioned earlier is followed by a performance of the symphony by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein conducting.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8bZ7vm4_6M The orchestra members are all dressed in somber tones.  The men wear black ties, the (very few) women wear black evening gowns.  The musicians sit on white raised platforms.  The scene is lit brightly but starkly.  They display minimal emotion or movement as they perform.  In contrast, Bernstein is presented with a dark backdrop, dramatically lit.  He sways, he grimaces, he is transported as he waves his baton.  I’m sure the maestro was deeply moved by this music.  How could he not be?  What seems comical to me is how much he wants us to know he is moved.   After watching this video, I had the mischievous thought that perhaps Bernstein was not really conducting the orchestra on this occasion.  Is it possible that the BSO performed under the direction of a stand-in, musical stunt double, and that the producer dubbed in the gesticulating maestro later?  The video is inconclusive.

Anyone interested in further commentary on performances of this symphony can consult two excellent resources.  Gramophone magazine offers a deep dive into recordings of K. 550.  Mozart’s Symphony No 40: A deep dive into the best recordings | Gramophone

Gramophone’s favorite recording is a performance by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Charles Mackerras.  I agree that this is a fine performance.  Mackerras takes every repeat (even one in the third movement that strictly speaking is not indicated), which is a joy to those of us who like performances that respect the composer’s intentions on repeats.  Tempos are well-judged and the sound is first-rate.

Dave Hurwitz offers a review of the six final Mozart symphonies.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkA16kBTkrk&t=1378s  His favorite is Sandor Vegh conducting the Salzburg Camerata Academia, which I would not place in the first rank, but he covers a number of others as well.

Otto Klemperer, one of the conductors I mentioned earlier, was asked in an interview to name his favorite composers.  He went through a list of the expected names – Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – but didn’t mention Mozart.  When the interviewer asked him why he left out Mozart, Klemperer said “I thought you were asking about the others.”  The story is probably an invention.

–Gerry Bresslour

In this grim season, I came across a story that got me to laugh out loud.  If it elicits a chuckle or even a smile from you, it will be worth the time it will take me to tell it.

The British politician Benjamin Disraeli (Primer Minister in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880) was a dinner guest at a private home where the food was far below his standard.  He suffered through one tasteless course after another, waiting for the evening to end so that he could return home to something worth eating.  He thought the moment had come when his hostess stood up.  He stood as well.  When she realized that he was planning to leave the table, she told him that the meal was not yet complete.  In this house, they always served champagne to signal the end of the evening.  As Disraeli sank into his chair, he said, “Something warm at last.”

— Gerry Bresslour

This is an imagined transcript of a fictional conversation taking place over a speakerphone.  Two Americans named Sonny and Pauly – I borrowed the names from “The Godfather” – are on a call to some Ukrainian business associates.  After the conversation is underway, the Americans are joined by a more senior individual who is identified only as “the Big Guy”.

Sonny:  Good afternoon, gentlemen.

Accented voices: And good morning to you.

Sonny:  Following up on our last conversation, I wanted to repeat that Pauly and I – Pauly’s here in the room with me – are still interested in working with you to address the issues that concern you.  Thinking about the alternatives that you mentioned last time, we think if we served on your board, that would be the most effective way to put us in a position to solve your problems.

Voice:  Sonny, thanks.  So that we understand each other, we are not talking about problems, plural.  Really, we are not even talking about a problem.  More of a situation.  We want to improve the public-private partnership here in this country, but we can’t do that without cooperation from the other side.  A certain amount of give and take.

Sonny:  I totally understand.  Pauly and I, we’re available to help.  That’s what we do.  Listen, we can talk about the details later, but you remember that I’ve mentioned the Big Guy in some of our past discussions?

Voice:  Of course.

Sonny:  Well, it’s a coincidence, but the Big Guy happens to be available at the moment.  He’ll stop by in a few minutes if that’s OK with you.  I’d like him to say hello.

Voice:  I, all of us, would be happy to talk with him.

Sonny:  There’s no need to go into any details with him.  I think you would enjoy talking with him and he would enjoy talking with you.  You, Pauly, and I, we can pick up this other conversation after he leaves.

Voice:  Of course.  I understand.

The door to the room opens.  The Big Guy enters.

Sonny:  Hi, Big Guy.  You remember Pauly?

Big Guy: Harya, Pauly.

Sonny: And we have some of our Ukrainian associates on the line.  I thought you might like to say hello.

Big Guy:  From the Ukraine?  Whaddaya know!

Sonny lunges for the “mute” button.

Sonny:  They don’t say “the” anymore.  It’s just “Ukraine”.

Sonny presses “unmute”.

Big Guy:  Hey guys, I didn’t mean to say “the” before.  You know, I grew up in a Ukrainian neighborhood.  Three of my best buddies were Ukrainian.  They were always over at my house and I was always over at their house.  Houses I should say.  I tell ya, I ate so much borscht in high school, my lips turned red.  My buddies used to kid me because they thought I was wearing lipstick.  No joke.  True story.  Of course, today that wouldn’t be an issue but back then it could be a big deal for certain people, bigots.  Anyway, they were always telling me to drop the “the” and I was always forgetting even then.

Voice:  Back then it was “the”.

Big Guy:  I know.  That’s what I’m saying.  Even then, these guys, these friends of mine, they objected to “the”.  They were ahead of the game.  We have to keep changing with the times.  Change is good.

Voice:  Agreed.

Big Guy:  So, I don’t know anything about your situation.  You understand that, right?

Voice:  Of course.

Big Guy:  Sonny is the smartest guy I know and Pauly here, he’s no slouch either.  Whatever your situation may be, I think they can help you find a workable solution.

Voice:  We’ll talk to Sonny and Pauly later about the situation.  In this country, situations are very changeable, like the weather.

Big Guy:  Speaking of that, how is the weather where you are?

Voice:  The weather here is a little cloudy, but we are hoping for better weather soon.

Big Guy:  They say everyone complains about the weather but no one ever does anything about it, although with the UN, the scientists, we’re working on it, know what I mean?

Voice:  I know what you mean.

Big Guy:  Gentlemen, I have to leave you for a previously scheduled appointment, but it’s been a real pleasure.

Voice:  Thank you, sir.  Good day to you.

The Big Guy leaves.  The phone line stays open.

Voice:  Very satisfactory conversation for us.  You have a transcript?  Your colleagues in the news media can work with it?  You need to brief them?

Sonny:  We don’t need to brief anybody.  There’re one or two news organizations here that will publish lies and distortions no matter what the facts are.  There’s no point in making our case to them.  Our people will report honestly that you guys talked about borscht and the weather.  They’ll stick to the facts.

Voice:  I regret that you have to give a thought to any news organizations that would publish lies and distortions.  As for the others, the ones you can rely on [his voice grows hoarse], it reminds me of the old days.

In most places and at most times, an unsuccessful rival for political power could expect to receive harsh treatment, including expropriation, exile, imprisonment, or death at the hands of the winner.  Conversely, the impulse that drives a political leader to seek power can descend into an atavistic desire to inflict pain on those who would take it away.

Harry Jaffa identifies the US election of 1800 as one place and time when that desire was suspended:

[W]e know of no example before 1800 of a government in which the instruments of political power passed from one set of hands to those of their most uncompromisingly hostile political rivals and opponents because of a free vote.  The electoral contest of 1800 climaxed a decade of party warfare.  The election of 1796, the first following the retirement of Washington (whose election had been virtually uncontested), was bitterly fought, but the incumbent party retained office.  The political conflict intensified in the next four years, and its rhetoric exceeded in acrimony any in subsequent American political history, including that of the elections preceding the Civil War.  Yet when the votes of 1800 (and 1801) had been counted and the election decided according to the forms of the Constitution, the offices were peacefully vacated by the losers and peacefully occupied by those who had prevailed.  Nor were any of the defeated incumbents executed, imprisoned, expropriated, or driven into exile, as were the losers in the English civil wars and in the political contests of the Rome of Cicero and Caesar.  The defeated Federalists went about their lawful occupations unmolested and for the most part engaged in the same kind of political activity in which their opponents had previously engaged.  Again, to the best of our knowledge, this was the first time in the history of the world that such a thing had happened.

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom, p. 3, Rowan & Littlefield, 2000.

— Gerry Bresslour

Can electric vehicles replace conventionally-powered cars and trucks on a wide scale?  There are two significant challenges.  One is the production and distribution of additional electrical power to run millions of cars and trucks.  The other is mining and refining the metals for the batteries that will store that power to run those vehicles.

In 2022, US vehicles burned 135 billion gallons of gasoline and 47 billion gallons of diesel.  If we had the goal of reducing those figures by 25% over the next 15 to 20 years by replacing that gasoline and diesel with battery power, could it be done?

If the new electric vehicles in, say, 2035 will travel as many miles as the vehicles they replace traveled in 2022, we will need electrical power equal to the energy of 35 billion gallons of gasoline and 12 billion gallons (rounding) of diesel.

The constraint is that the United States already uses nearly all of the electrical power that we produce.  The US generates 4,120 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in a year.  We buy small amounts from Canada (50 billion kilowatts or so depending on the year, net of U.S. exports to Canada) and even smaller amounts from Mexico, but they don’t affect the numbers in any significant way.

Almost all of the electricity currently produced in the U.S. is consumed for residential, commercial, and industrial use, that is, for uses other than powering vehicles.  If we are to maintain current levels of energy consumption for things other than vehicles, then the power to move electric vehicles will have to come from new electrical production.

One gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.5 kilowatts.  One gallon of diesel is equivalent to 40.7 kilowatts.  (Source: EPA.)  To replace 35 billion gallons of gasoline and 12 billion gallons of diesel with electrical power means producing approximately 1,800 billion kilowatts of electrical power that is not being produced today.[1]

Where is that electrical power to come from?  In 2023, about 60% of U.S. electricity is produced by burning natural gas and coal.  It seems pointless to use hydrocarbons to produce electricity in order to avoid burning hydrocarbons as fuel for vehicles.  We should not expect state and federal regulators to permit plants that burn natural gas and coal to come online to produce a significant share of the 1,800 billion kilowatts needed to produce power for electric vehicles.

We get roughly 20% of our electrical power from nuclear power plants.  Nuclear power is clean in that it does not produce carbon dioxide, but it does produce nuclear waste.  Nuclear power is definitely not favored by regulators.  It is not likely that nuclear plants will receive permits to come online to produce part of the needed 1,800 billion kilowatts.

About 6% of power comes from hydroelectric dams.  There is little to no appetite among regulators to approve new hydroelectric projects.

The rest, nearly 14%, comes from renewables, principally wind and solar power.  Renewables face three constraints.  One is the amount of land required to produce large amounts of electricity from solar or wind power.  A second is the variable nature of the inputs – the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow.  Finally, the new power generated from wind and solar sources will have to be transmitted from the places where it will be produced to the places where it is to be consumed.

A solar array that produces one million kilowatts, a gigawatt, requires 32 acres of land.  One billion kilowatts require 32,000 acres of land, about 50 square miles.  Using solar power to replace 25% of the liquid fuels consumed by today’s vehicles would require 1,800 x 50 = 90,000 square miles of suitable land.  The U.S. has 3,000,000 square miles, so there may be enough land.  But are there 90,000 square miles of vacant land in sunny places, not being used for anything else, not part of a pristine wilderness, in a location that can be connected to the existing power grid and where no one is going to protest or raise legal objections?  That’s a problem that may have a solution with enough planning.  Are there plans being developed to convert tens of thousands of square miles to solar power generation?

What about wind turbines?  A wind turbine with a 1.5-megawatt rating produces 0.5 megawatts in practice and requires 2 acres of land.  Wind farms that can produce our needed 1,800 billion kilowatts of power would take up something on the order of 250,000 square miles of land.

That problem can be finessed in part by placing wind turbines offshore.  The Ocean 1 Project plans to place big 4-megawatt wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey.  The project will produce 1,100 megawatts of electrical power when it comes online in the next decade.  This is a massive project[2], but 1,100 megawatts amount to, pardon the expression, a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to replace the energy equivalent of 25% of the gasoline and diesel consumed by the nation’s vehicles in 2022.[3]

To address the issue that the sun doesn’t shine all of the time and the wind doesn’t blow all the time, these wind and solar power plants would require backup from natural gas or nuclear power plants.  Even the most ardent supporters of wind and solar power concede that natural gas power-generating plants are needed to supplement the power that wind and sun can produce.

Further, if all of the required electricity is produced from renewables, it will have to be transmitted from the places where it is produced to the places it is needed.  The existing grid is at capacity, so additional transmission lines will be needed, something well in excess of 100,000 miles of it.  There is no sign that the planning, permitting, site acquisition, or procurement needed for such a massive project is underway.

The batteries that will hold the electrical power that will move the fleet of electric-powered vehicles require massive quantities of copper, lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth minerals.  A fascinating presentation by a gentleman named Mark Mills projects that the transition to electrically powered vehicles will require the production of ten times the amount of copper currently being produced and (rough numbers) 40 times the amount of lithium, 25 times the amount of graphite, 20 times the amount of cobalt and nickel, and seven times the quantity of rare earth metals now being produced.  In fairness, I think Mr. Mills’ numbers are based on a transition of 100% of vehicles by 2040.  I am trying to project a transition of only 25%, so we can divide the massive increases in metal production by 4.  It is still far more than the world produces or has ever produced.[4]

Mr. Mills adds two other important points.  One is that it takes sixteen years on average to bring a new copper mine on board.  The second is that if all of the needed metals are mined, the ore has to be refined to produce the required minerals.  China is the world leader in the refining of the metals that we will need to bring about the energy transition.  It is part of China’s long-term economic plan to be a world leader in refining these minerals.

Electric vehicles take a long time to charge, they have a limited range, and they become fussy when the weather turns cold.  Those are some of the reasons that consumers have resisted buying them.  My assumption is that all of these problems will be solved.  Large numbers of very bright people, dedicated to reducing the production of carbon dioxide, are working on these problems.  I frequently see headlines mentioning a breakthrough on one technological front or another.  I don’t think you have to be a wild-eyed optimist to believe that these engineering problems will be solved in time.

But developing a quick-charge high-capacity battery doesn’t matter if the millions of batteries needed aren’t produced because of a shortage of (aptly named) rare earth minerals.  Nor will the production of those batteries matter until the electrical power to charge those batteries is on hand.

The question is not whether technological breakthroughs will occur.  The question is whether the sinews – the power generating plants, the transmission lines, the minerals for producing batteries, and the battery production plants – will be available to deliver the new technology to the people who will need it to maintain their mobility.

— Gerry Bresslour

[1] Of that amount, 1,600 billion kilowatts are contained in the gasoline and diesel that we are replacing.  An additional allowance is required for the power lost when a battery is charged.  Right now, between 10% and 30% of the power supplied to charge a battery is lost.  I’ve noticed this effect when charging small batteries at home.  The battery becomes warm during recharging.  The warmth is the energy lost in the transfer.

We can assume that charging will become more efficient as time goes by, but it will never reach 100%.  The demand to put 1,600 billion kilowatts of electrical power into American cars, buses, and trucks means that some 1,800 billion kilowatts of power would have to be delivered to charging stations.

[2] See ocwfactsheet1021.ashx (azureedge.net)

[3] 1,100 megawatts would be just over one billion kilowatts.  As calculated above, we need 1,800 billion kilowatts of power.  The New Jersey wind farm will produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the replacement power needed.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg&t=63s