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New Year’s Investment Resolution: Bet on Carbon

Economy

New Year’s Investment Resolution: Bet on Carbon

Words disappear into the air, but money talks.

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In investment, the adage has it, the trend is your friend. If the trend is with you—think internet stocks in the last three decades—chances are, if you stay with the herd of bulls, you’ll make money. So what’s the trend, in 2024 and beyond, for carbon fuels? (Okay, The American Conservative is not known as an investment sheet, and yet every conservative should be familiar with political economy, the self-evident point that investment, up or down—and anything else to do with money—occurs within a political context.)

To listen to the words coming out of the COP 28 climate change conference that wrapped up in Dubai on December 12, one might think that the trend for carbon fuels is bearish. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said of the final communique, “The decision embraces transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems so as to achieve net-zero by 2050.” Indeed, Kerry added, in a hat-tip to harder-core greens, “we will continue to press for a more rapid transition.” (Emphasis added.)

With money in mind, we might further consider the words of Jennifer Morgan, the American-born Greenpeace activist who is Germany’s chief diplomat on climate: “Every investor should understand now that the future investments that are profitable and long-term are renewable energy—and investing in fossil fuels is a stranded asset.” We can see that the greens have learned to talk the language of the other green. Who would want to invest in carbon fuels if political economics necessitates that the assets will be stranded, left in the ground?  

In fact, ExxonMobil stock fell more than five percent during the COP conference; it’s now about 15 percent lower than it was in September. The green agenda is clear: badmouth carbon energy to talk down business confidence, thereby depressing, and ultimately stifling, investment in carbon fuels. Given that environmentalists are well on their way to pastoralizing Germany—the Morgenthau Plan coming late, and self-imposed!—it’s possible that the greens will succeed in their global mission. Without a doubt, greens and their media allies will be touting, and spinning, COP28 for a long time to come. Sample headline: “COP28 Climate Deal Marks ‘Beginning of the End’ for Fossil Fuels.” 

But there’s just one thing. What if Kerry, Morgan, and the greens are wrong? What if the trend, outside of the echo-chamber West, is actually in favor of carbon fuels among the 150 or more countries—including China and India—that don’t take their cues from the New York Times and the Guardian?  

Late last year, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser took note of rising coal usage, quipping, “If you think about it, we are transitioning to coal.” In fact, we are burning a lot of coal: World coal production is rising. If we drill down we further see that China is far and away the biggest burner, with no end in sight. The communist regime is happy to sell us solar panels, which they produce with coal-fired electricity. 

To be sure, coal use in the U.S. is down—coal-happy India recently overtook America—and yet new coal mines are opening around the world, from China (of course) to Australia to Africa. Even the United Kingdom has opened one. So when Kerry said, post–COP 28, “The first and easiest thing that countries need to do to make this commitment a reality is to stop building new unabated coal,” it’s evident that countries are not stopping. And if they aren’t doing the “first and easiest thing” to get to net zero, where does that leave everything else? We can step back and observe: So long as a person is eating eclairs, there’s no need to take their protestations about a weight-loss diet seriously. 

In fact, world oil production is also movin’ on up. So is natural gas. Indeed, even the U.S. is part of this upward carbonward trend. In the words of Bloomberg News on December 21, “The US consolidated its position as the world’s largest oil producer, with daily output increasing 200,000 barrels last week to the highest in data going back to 1983.” The news service quoted energy analyst Tamas Varga: “It has become blatantly evident that predictions of stuttering growth in US shale production after the Covid-19 pandemic have been misplaced.”  

To be sure, the Biden Administration did come into office with grand plans to decarbonize, and yes, it fought what it deemed to be the good fight to kibosh drilling and burning, and with some successes. Yet the animal spirits of capitalism and energy hunger, helped along by Republicans in Congress, are winning out. American oil production is now at an all-time high

So we’re starting to see the difference between the words of Western officialdom and the deeds of the world’s energy producers and consumers. Carbon fuels are here to stay. Yes, nuclear power is making a comeback, and yes, solar is doing well (wind, not so much), but the world is voraciously hungry for energy. Notably, such post-industrial functions as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies are energy hogs on a par with steel mills. Microsoft, for instance, wants to build nuclear power plants just to service its A.I. operations.    

So the whole notion that non-carbon renewables are “the wave of the future” is starting to look like mere backwash. Most likely, we’ll have “all of the above” energy systems coexisting for a long time. Maybe forever.  

But won’t we run out of some energy? What about “peak oil”, Which has been variously prophesied as happening in 1922, 1960, 1971, and so on? So now here’s a possibility that the world’s eco-energy establishment hasn’t yet come to grips with: Carbon fuels, too, are renewable. How so? It’s more than possible that the earth is actively making carbon fuels. The “abiogenic” hypothesis holds that production stems from the vulcanism of the earth, not dead dinosaurs. If we consider that the earth’s core—diameter, 1500 miles—is the same temperature as the surface of the sun, we can start to see how that much heat could crack carbon, the planet itself being Mother Nature’s own beneficent refinery. So, quite possibly, the “fossil fuel” label is a misnomer, to be regarded as one more bit of rhetorical sleight of hand aimed at convincing people that carbon fuels belong on the ash heap of history. 

The abiogenic theory goes all the way back to the 16th century metallurgist Georgius Agricola—with assists from such other legends as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table in chemistry. If it’s true, that explains why we keep finding more carbon fuels; since 1970 oil reserves around the world have tripled. Importantly, reserves is a technical term regarding the current-moment political economics of oil production; the better, broader, term is resources—the actual amount of stuff in the ground. 

Of course, not all the energy is in the ground; a lot of it is in the ocean. Frozen at the sea bottom are quadrillions of dollars’ worth of methane hydrates. And, speaking of energy resources with no connection to fossils that we know of, we can add the oodles of methane, aka natural gas, on Mars and on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. That’s just what we know about, extraterrestrially.  

To get a measure of resources closer to home, we can look to the Institute for Energy Research, which finds that the U.S. boasts oil resources totaling 2.9 trillion barrels. At the current price of around $75 bbl, that’s a tad more than $217 trillion. That dollar total is more than six times the U.S. national debt, and about eight times our GDP. Given that much wealth, with deficits and all, is it really to be expected that we’re going to leave it in the ground? Maybe Massachusetts will, but Texas won’t.  

Indeed, once Americans figure out that the whole country could be like Alaska—where last year each resident received a dividend of $3,284 from the oil-based Alaska Permanent Fund—the pressure to not strand it, to not leave it in the ground will be, shall we say, beyond the power of the greens to shut down. Interestingly, the U.S. is not uniquely blessed with such wealth; this country accounts for less than two percent of the earth’s surface; there’s plenty of everything everywhere else, too. Drilling or digging it out is just a matter of political economy—capital goes where it’s safe to go. 

Ah, but what about climate change? If there’s too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there’s a simple enough solution: take it out. That’s what trees and other green plants have been doing for a good long time, at no cost to us. And there are other mechanisms, as well, for carbon capture, as this author has detailed in the pages of TAC, here, here, and here. Just in October in Foreign Affairs, Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, offered a grand-strategic vision of carbon-fuel production and carbon capture (and a pro-American industry “foreign pollution fee” on China to boot).

Carbon capture and carbon utilization epitomize the circular economy thinking that the greens should love. Yet for now, they don’t. As Politico’s “Power Switch” newsletter explained on December 18, adding its own worried tone, “An idea scientists once envisioned would help remove small amounts of carbon from the atmosphere is steadily being built up as a global excuse to keep on burning fossil fuels.”

Well yes, that is kind of the point: The world is looking for excuses to keep on burning carbon fuels. And those excuses can be summed up in one word: money. So much money—zillions of dollars, under the ground, at the ocean bottom, and even in space—that the chances of the world not using it are close to nil. What a friend we have in carbon! That’s the way to bet, and for those interested in following the money, that’s the way to invest. 

The post New Year’s Investment Resolution: Bet on Carbon appeared first on The American Conservative.

Michigan Democrats Woo the Felon Vote

Politics

Michigan Democrats Woo the Felon Vote

Gretchen Whitmer’s prison-to-polling place pipeline is a desperate bid to win to keep the flagging Democratic Party alive—and it’s just the start.

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You heard it here first: Felons are the future of the Democratic Party, something predicted in these pages in April. Michigan’s irascible Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, adopted the felon-voting measure earlier this month.

Most states strip voting rights from convicted felons, something nearly as old as the republic. Yet in recent years professional activists have launched a string of state campaigns to overturn these laws, first to restore the franchise to ex-felons, then—and this is the controversial bit—to allow criminals to vote from jail, which Democrats assure us is about “expanding our access to democracy” and not at all about winning elections.

Michigan just went further. Starting in 2025, felons finishing their sentence will automatically be added to the Wolverine State’s already bloated voter rolls, where 55 counties (of 83) report more registered voters than voting-age residents. 

Reintegrating ex-felons into society is one thing; swelling voter lists in a cynical play to prop up the Democratic Party is quite another. 

The stakes are high. The Sentencing Project, a leftist group responsible for the Michigan law, calculates that there are 4.6 million potential felon voters who could be tapped this way. The Campaign Legal Center, which also lobbies for these laws, boasts that 18 million ex-felons are eligible to vote but fail to cast a ballot. Naturally, the center runs a registration drive targeting them.

And where Activism Inc. goes, there follows the Democratic Party. Felon re-enfranchisement and prison polling places featured in the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act introduced in August (in which “felon” is mentioned over 20 times) and in last year’s failed John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act

There’s a powerful reason for these efforts, though it’s often underappreciated by conservatives. For roughly 15 years, the left has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into identifying, registering, and turning out new Democrat voters in swing states while the right—which dominated voter registration in the 2000s—has virtually ceased competing altogether. 

That’s not persuading independents of the merit of “progressive” ideas. It’s using statistics to reduce individuals to demographic data points—black, female, unmarried, Millennial, college-educated, urban, etc.—to guess how likely they are to vote for Democrats. 

Democratic operatives pretend they want everyone to vote; in reality, they’re registering the left’s preferred voters and no one else. 

In this, leftists are lightyears ahead of conservatives largely thanks to their monopoly on sensitive data concerning eligible-but-unregistered individuals, piped in via the controversial Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). 

My organization, Restoration News, estimates that the Left has $1.3 billion available each year to fuel these sophisticated registration drives. I would be amazed if the Right had $20 million to register new conservative voters.

Yet these operations demand a great deal of resources even for left-wing megadonors, so “progressive” lobbying groups like the Brennan Center are also angling to pass automatic voter registration laws—like the one in Michigan—in all 50 states. Their reasoning: Why ask partisan donors to pay to register Democrats if taxpayers will foot the bill for them?

Usually, Americans register to vote on their own initiative. Automatic voter registration flips that opt-in system to opt-out, with the ultimate objective of adding everyone with a heartbeat to state voter rolls—instantly and dramatically expanding the pool of registered voters for the left to tap into. 

Put differently, “progressives” have largely given up trying to win over America’s existing electorate—so they’re creating an alternative electorate instead.

As with ex-felons, the political potential is staggering, with an estimated 77 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals nationwide up for grabs, according to the far-left group Demos. Considering that Joe Biden’s (electoral vote) margin of victory was about 45,000 votes across four key states, that’s a jackpot Democrats cannot afford to miss—and Republicans can no longer ignore.

So don’t be fooled by calls for “justice” from power-hungry ideologues. Instead of feeding their get-out-the-vote machine, let’s build our own.

The post Michigan Democrats Woo the Felon Vote appeared first on The American Conservative.

America’s Ukraine Problem

Foreign Affairs

America’s Ukraine Problem

When your friends threaten you, they aren’t your friends.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was back in Washington earlier this week begging for more money and guns. President Joe Biden offered his typical assurances of support, but otherwise, Zelensky’s reception was different than it has been in the past. 

At the beginning, he was widely feted across the U.S. and Europe; politicians couldn’t wait to get their pictures taken shaking his hand. Fast forward through busted victory predictions, endless costly subsidies, bloody failed counterattacks, and mass Ukrainian casualties. Increasing burdens for the allies combined with diminishing prospects for Kiev have diminished support for Zelensky on both sides of the Atlantic. Backing Ukraine is no longer a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Instead, American and European officials are focusing more on their own peoples, and the importance of ending the conflict. 

For instance, before Zelensky arrived the Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio was blunt: Kiev is going to have to negotiate and likely will lose territory. Accepting this outcome is in “America’s best interest,” he explained. Such sentiments still trigger wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale among Ukraine’s high-profile advocates. However, ever more members of the foreign policy establishment recognize that Vance is right, even if they still won’t publicly admit reality.

Washington’s influential Kiev lobby is running out of options. Plans to disable the Russian economy flopped. Hopes to oust Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, democratize Russia, and even break up the Russian Federation proved even more fantastic. Demands that China abandon its partner were ignored. Pursuit of global backing against Moscow crashed and burned amid the West’s many hypocrisies, including support for Israel’s oppressive occupation and indifference to Gaza’s mass civilian casualties

Hysterical warnings that a victorious Russia would next conquer Europe and perhaps the rest of the known world, failed to rouse the public, belied by Moscow’s difficulty in defeating Ukraine. Bizarre attempts to sell military aid to Kiev as a jobs-creation program for Americans failed miserably. After all, almost any expenditure on anything else in the US would provide a bigger economic boost than sending bombs to Europe.

Now Ukrainians are warning that if Americans don’t agree to write checks to and risk soldiers’ lives for Kiev, Ukrainians won’t like us. They might turn against us. And who knows what might happen then. For instance, Denys Karlovskyi of the Royal United Services Institute warned:

A seeming failure of the Western allies to shield Ukraine from a second butcherous war is likely to make Ukraine’s population feel resentful and expended for the sake of ‘great powers’, just as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum is perceived by Ukrainians today. The task for NATO policymakers is to avoid making post-war Ukraine’s public sentiments grow anti-Western or, worse, isolationist. They must build a mutually beneficial security cooperation framework with Ukraine’s government and maintain current levels of Ukrainian public support for NATO and the E.U.

Although insulting, this is a truly wimpy threat. Ukrainians might grow “isolationist”? Does that mean they would stop asking for financial aid, military support, and security guarantees? That sounds a lot like Ukraine’s position before the allies backed the 2014 street putsch against the Yanukovych government. Ukrainians didn’t ask for anything special from Washington. The country looked east and west economically, held elections that flipped east and west, and avoided military commitments east and west. Corruption was rife and politics were ruthless, but, by refusing to commit themselves to either America or Russia, Ukrainians lived peacefully in a united country. That seems almost utopian compared to today.

Peace was good for the allies as well. The reason NATO never acted on the ill-considered 2008 Bucharest promise of alliance membership is because no one believed Ukraine was worth fighting over: a position evident even as Russia invaded. Ukrainians continue to request an invitation to join the alliance, which the U.S. and Europeans continue to withhold. The European Leadership Network recently explored Ukraine’s desire—or, more accurately, demand—for firm security commitments from the U.S. and Europe. NATO membership was preferred, but other options were considered. However, all would be dangerous for the West. For instance, “the Japan and South Korea models” or “the Israel model,” if rigorously implemented, would impose potentially substantial military burdens on the U.S.

Karlovskyi also posited an “anti-Western” Ukraine. That would be an ironic response after receiving substantial financial and military support against Moscow. However, while hostility toward the West would be unfortunate, the possibility is no reason for the allies to offer a defense commitment. Surely a defeated Kiev is unlikely to partner with Russia and attack the rest of Europe. Resentful Ukrainians could turn away economically. However, even though greater integration with Russia would be possible, the violent antagonisms unleashed by years of brutal warfare would persist. Europe would remain the most likely source of aid, investment, and trade for Ukraine. Indeed, Kiev is likely to be as dependent on the West after the conflict ends as during combat, whatever Ukrainians think about allied policy.

Yet Zelensky explicitly threatened Europe with ill consequences should it reduce support for his government. Ukrainian refugees there have so far “behaved well,” he allowed. Cutting assistance, however, could “drive these people into a corner.” In the Economist’s paraphrase, he warned that stopping the gravy train “would create risks for the West in its own backyard. There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.” 

Is he suggesting that those dependent on Europe for refuge—meaning safety and support—would endanger their status by, say, rioting across the continent? There would likely be little tolerance for such behavior. After all, diminishing government assistance for Ukraine reflects falling popular support for Ukraine. Already countries like Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia are putting the economic welfare of their own citizens before that of Ukrainians. Populism is again on the rise across Europe, and immigration is perhaps the top issue. The welcome mat for Ukrainian refugees could be swiftly removed.

Zelensky’s bizarre threat against those whose assistance he is seeking is yet another reason for the U.S. and its allies to base Ukraine policy on their own interests. When your friends threaten you, they aren’t your friends. 

Nor is this the allies’ first such wake-up call. Last year, Zelensky attempted to lie NATO into war with Russia based on a Ukrainian missile strike on Poland. The American and Polish governments knew that the missile came from Ukraine. So, assuredly, did Zelensky. His desire to drag the U.S. into the conflict was predictable, even understandable, but highlighted the need to apply Ronald Reagan’s famed “trust but verify” dictum against Kiev as well as Moscow.

It is time for Washington, with or without its European allies, to begin pressing for an end to the war. That requires negotiation. The likely outcome, as Vance observed, would be Ukrainian concessions. The latter almost certainly would include some loss of territory and a form of committed military neutrality. 

It is not Washington’s place to impose an agreement on Kiev, a process that undoubtedly would create enormous resentment. Rather, the U.S. and Europe should inform Zelensky of limits on Western aid and the consequent need to end the fighting. The allies should affirm to Moscow their willingness to accept Ukrainian neutrality, restore Russian funds, and reintegrate Russia as part of a reasonable settlement. After impeding peaceful negotiation at most every turn, such a process won’t be easy for the U.S., Europe, or the combatants. However, years more of conflict, in which Kiev suffers an increasing disadvantage, would be worse. 

The Ukraine-Russia war is a tragedy, a crime committed by Russia, but only after the allies recklessly ignored Moscow’s oft-expressed security interests. Zelensky’s visit didn’t salvage Kiev’s fortunes, nor will Ukrainian threats against those who have spent nearly two years underwriting Ukraine’s military efforts. The allies need to turn from fueling conflict to promoting peace.

The post America’s Ukraine Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trouble at the Panama Canal

Foreign Affairs

Trouble at the Panama Canal

The former American zone has turned dystopian, and now China is making moves.

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This summer, hundreds of ships backed up at the Panama Canal, leading the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), a semi-independent organization whose board of directors is selected by various branches of the Panamanian government, to restrict travel in the critical global trade artery through which 40 percent of all U.S. container traffic travels annually. The culprit of this global commerce crisis, so the media narrative goes, was low water levels linked to El Niño and climate change. But talk to enough of the approximately 30,000 U.S. citizens living in Panama and you’ll hear mention of another factor: Panamanian corruption and incompetence. 

Given Panama’s embarrassing history of financial crime, that should not be surprising. The country has twice been on the “gray list” of the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization founded in 1989 to combat money laundering. In 2016 the “Panama Papers” leak revealed the country as a locus for money laundering and illicit finance. And in May of 2023, Canal Minister Aristides Royo requested the resignation of ACP board of directors member Jorge Gonzalez, provoking speculation regarding the latter’s corrupt relationship with a major Chinese state-owned enterprise doing business related to the canal.

“We built a thing called the Panama Canal,” Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson in an August interview. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito…. We sold it for one dollar. China now controls it. They actually control the Panama Canal.” The claim that China “owns” the canal is hyperbolic, but it’s true that Chinese companies have for years heavily invested in infrastructure-related contracts in and around the canal, as the Center for Strategic & International Studies explained in a 2021 report. “There’s five…Chinese state-owned enterprises along the Panama Canal,” commander of U.S. Southern Command General Laura Richardson warned in August. “What I worry about is their being able to use it for dual use. Not just civilian use, but flip it around and use it for military application.”

For the Americans who live in Panama, their frustration is not just about the geostrategic threat posed by China, though that is very real. It is about the loss of a way of life. The Panama Canal Zone, a 553 square mile area that for about seventy-five years was U.S. sovereign territory, was at one point home to 100,000 Americans. Thousands of U.S. citizens departed Panama prior to the handover of the territory to the Panamanian government on December 31, 1999, but many more remain, a curious and instructive vestige of a foreign policy focused on executing the Monroe Doctrine and ensuring American dominance in the hemisphere.

The best historical treatment of the construction of the Panama Canal remains David McCullough’s 1977 National Book Award–winning The Path Between the Seas. What was for the French an unmitigated disaster that cost 22,000 lives and almost three hundred million dollars, as well as bankrupting thousands of French investors, turned into one of America’s most impressive achievements. Teddy Roosevelt deserves credit for securing American control of the project, including the Bismarckian enabling of a Panamanian revolt against Colombia by way of gunboat diplomacy. But the canal’s success was predominantly the result of two ingenious Americans: self-educated chief engineer John Frank Stevens, who designed the canal’s brilliant lock system; and sanitation officer William C. Gorgas, who identified the mosquito as the preeminent threat to canal workers and took sweeping steps to defeat malaria and yellow fever on the isthmus.

The admittedly contentious Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, signed in 1903, gave the United States authority to build and administer the PCZ and its defenses. Panama itself remained a U.S. protectorate until 1939. The PCZ, which forcibly depopulated about 40,000 unevenly compensated local inhabitants, was administered by an American governor appointed by the president. Hospitals, schools, and housing developments were built across the U.S.-governed territory, which was part military base, part suburban development. There were commissaries, cinemas, and even an overseas campus of Florida State University, established in 1957 at the request of the Department of Defense. 

It was, in a sense, an American colony. It was “a small southern town transplanted into the middle of Central America,” according to Michael Donoghue, author of Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. Zonians, as they were called, could enjoy social clubs, sports teams, and other fixtures of American life without ever learning to speak Spanish or even needing to leave the Zone—though plenty regularly did, to the benefit of the local economy, helping turn Panama City into the metropolis it is today.

This idyllic tropical paradise did not sit well with many Panamanians, however. They bristled at the wealth and privilege of their American neighbors and harbored grievances over the splitting of their country by a canal they viewed as rightly theirs. Demonstrations and riots occurred between 1958 and 1962, and in 1964 a student-led march on a high school in the PCZ snowballed into violent exchanges between Panamanian protestors and PCZ police and U.S. military units. Twenty-two Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers were killed. Lyndon Johnson in 1965 declared plans to renegotiate the 1903 treaty, though it was not until the Carter administration that the United States agreed to hand over the entire PCZ, a process that was completed in 1999. (A controversial amendment to Carter’s 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, named the DeConcini Reservation after Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini, stipulates that the United States retains the right to use military force if necessary to keep the canal open.)

The textbook story of the Panama Canal is one of American imperialism and Panamanian autonomy. Many Zonians offer a different perspective. Even after the 1964 riots, it remained easy for Panamanians to cross into the PCZ, which, for all its flaws, was a critical node in U.S. geostrategic policy and served as a beacon of American efficiency, law, and order. Unemployment was non-existent, crime was minimal, and if a PCZ resident was found with illegal narcotics, the entire family was sent home. When the Panamanians assumed control, many of the buildings in the former PCZ deteriorated or were simply abandoned. Gamboa, today a rainforest reserve but once a thriving community employing those focused on dredging the canal, is a bit dystopian, with many abandoned or destroyed American-made homes, churches, and even a movie theater. Crime, including in the former PCZ, has steadily increased.

The maintenance of U.S.-made infrastructure is noticeably delayed and haphazard in the former PCZ. Massive potholes dot the roads in communities such as Clayton and Albrook, former Zonian suburbs populated by a mixture of Panamanians, Americans, and other expats. Similarly, the ACP has a reputation for waiting until canal machinery breaks to do repairs, rather than preserving the proactive maintenance schedule that was in place during the American administration. The growth of Panama City has increased the demand of freshwater from lakes and tributaries feeding into the canal, which by extension affects water levels, but there seems to be little motivation by the Panamanian government or ACP to address that problem. Efforts to combat saltwater intrusion into the canal, meanwhile, are more band-aids than strategic solutions.

At the Miraflores Locks near the former Fort Clayton, now called Ciudad del Saber or “City of Knowledge,” visitors watch an IMAX movie narrated by Morgan Freeman that briefly touches on the American resourcefulness that made the canal a reality, before offering an extensive, not-so-subtle propagandistic presentation of Panamanian control of the canal. Jimmy Carter makes an appearance, praising the Panamanians for increasing the income of the canal fourfold, though that is a bit disingenuous given that, under U.S. control, the canal was mandated to only break even in order to finance its use and maintenance (any surplus revenue was returned to the federal government). Today, the canal is the largest contributor to Panama’s primarily service sector economy, which also includes tourism, logistics, container ports, flagship registry, and banking.
In contrast to recent reported controversies, there was no remotely comparable corruption during the U.S. administration of the canal. That is not to downplay the well-documented problems of U.S. rule. Beyond the tensions with the Panamanian people, there are embarrassing examples of racism and segregation; enforcement of the Civil Rights Act did not occur in the Zone until the 1970s. Yet for those Zonians who remain—and the many others who annually congregate in Orlando—the PCZ was an important manifestation of U.S. power in our “near abroad.” As recent geopolitical events indicate, its loss may be a decision the United States comes to regret.

The post Trouble at the Panama Canal appeared first on The American Conservative.

Shelter From the Swarm

Politics

Shelter From the Swarm

Will the advent of drone warfare result in a more defensive—and more peaceful—world?

US Navy's X-47B, AV-2, Bureau # 168064, of Air Test and Evaluation Squadron Two Three (VX-23) successfully complete Air-to-Air Refueling (AAR) with the K-707 Omega Tanker over the Chesapeake Bay on 22 April 2015.  VX-23 is part of the Naval Test Wing Atlantic in Naval Air Station Patuxent River, MD.  The Mission Operators of the X-47B are Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Mr. Corey Lazare and Mr. Dave Fulton. Pilots of the Omega Aerial Refueling Services are Mr. Tom Straiton and Mr. Dennis Warren. (U.S. Navy Photo by Liz Wolter)

“The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank.” That was the headline in Politico E.U. on October 26. That header tells us that the world’s military establishments have been caught flat-footed. As one Ukrainian drone-master, Pavlo Tsybenko, explained of his anti-Russian-tank weapons, “We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys.” The parts of the Ukrainian drones are COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf. If the goal is quick and cheap, it often helps not to have a whole huge Pentagon-type procurement system. 

And now we’re seeing the same mil-tech dynamic in Gaza. Hamas, too, has used drones to deadly effect on tanks, and the Israelis, who have even more expensive tanks than the Russians, are scrambling with the same jerry-rigged expedient, putting so-called cope cages atop their tanks, where their armor is thinnest. These hillbilly-looking contraptions seem to work against drones dropping from above, but they pose their own problem: They raise the silhouette of the vehicle, and so go against the the trend of tank design for the last century, which calls for going low to avoid more familiar direct-fire, line-of-sight anti-tank weapons. 

Oh, and the cost of a U.S. Abrams tank is about $10 million (nothing about the Pentagon is cheap). We should also mention: An Abrams has a crew of four. So even if we factor out the ethical value of human life—we are talking warfare, after all—the dollar cost of the crew is expensive: how much it costs to train them, how much it costs to replace them, how much it costs in benefits to survivors. No doubt the next time the U.S. military deploys to some hot zone—and it’s always a “when,” as opposed to an “if”—our tanks, too, will have an anti-tank countermeasure grafted on. It’ll be a great emergency cost-plus deal for some defense contractor.  

What we’ve seen here, drone vs. tank, is a case study in the never-ending revolution in military affairs—the perpetual cat-and-mouse that has, in the past, seen iron beat bronze, the musket defeat the sword, the machine gun massacre cavalry, and and on. It wasn’t that long ago that the Nazis used their tanks to blitzkrieg their way through defensive formations; now the defenders are blitzing back. 

Yet even as we allow that war is hell, and that it’s hellaciously difficult to know what a determined foe has up his sleeve, we should acknowledge that militaries have been, by their bureaucratic nature, slow to grasp technological possibility, including the possibility that a toy drone could be made as deadly as the million- or billion-dollar products of the world’s military-industrial complexes.  

Big militaries suffer a mirror-image fallacy; that is, they tend to assume that the enemy will be like them. During the Cold War, the Pentagon understandably focused on the Soviet Union, which was heavy with tanks and jets. And so Uncle Sam was unprepared for the Vietnam War, when the foe was not a mirror, but rather, was asymmetric— low-tech, swimming around the Americans like fish in the sea. American G.I.s said that they won every battle against the North Vietnamese, and that’s true; yet it’s undeniable who won the war.  And the same held true for Afghanistan and Iraq; we ran up the body count against our enemies, but today, they’re still there, and we’re all gone.  

Interestingly, it was during those last two wars that the U.S. upscaled its use of drones, most notably the Predator, which could launch Hellfire missiles. Yet if the U.S. started the drone chapter, the other team wrote its own coda. The Predator had a wingspan of 41 feet; it was, in a sense, an airplane, the sort of vehicle with which the U.S. Air Force would be fully familiar. Then, others figured out that a drone could be small and still be effective. Moreover, these microdrones could be made in the thousands and, who knows, maybe nanodrones can be made in the millions, even billions.  

Such “particle-ized” warfare has not computed well with established militaries, because it calls into question the unchallenged verities of contemporary combat: that you need a tank (or other kind of artillery), or an airplane, or a submarine, to deliver kinetic force on the target. That is, the costly big-unit idea hasn’t yet given ground to the cheap small-unit idea. What tank driver, or pilot, or ship captain, wants to think that some tiny little robot can do the same job? Is it too cynical to say that it’s the military ego that’s blocking evolution? Perhaps. So maybe we should just point to a readily observable phenomenon, the mental tyranny of legacy systems: If it was optimal yesterday, then perforce it will be optimal today—and tomorrow. Yet reality eats legacy for breakfast. Today, weeks into the 10/7 fighting, Hamas rockets are overwhelming the vaunted Iron Dome, routinely hitting a broad range of targets in Israel.

So, mass quantities of drones and low-tech projectiles threaten everyone. We all need shelter from the swarm. So how to protect? Pavlo Tsybenko, the Ukrainian drone meister, has his answer: Drones are “almost impossible to shoot down,” he told Politico E.U. “Only a net can help.  I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.” Hmm. 

If a city of nets seems unlikely, we can recall that 9/11 seemed unlikely—until it happened. On that day, of course, three hijacked jets crashed into three buildings, killing nearly 3,000. Yet we can’t say that we weren’t warned. As far back as 1974, a domestic terrorist committed murder as part of his plot to hijack a civilian passenger jet and crash it into the White House. In 1994, Tom Clancy wrote a best-selling novel about crashing a 747 into the Capitol, and that same year, a crazy man actually crashed a Cessna into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (And yes, there were more proximate warnings, too, also ignored.) 

So 9/11 took the Bush administration by surprise; it had been busy planning for missile defense, as well as, of course, for democracy in the Middle East. Belatedly, the White House and the Pentagon, as well as a few other potential targets, are now protected by anti-aircraft weapons and air patrols—at least against kamikaze airplanes. Yet a high-rise in any city in the country is no better protected than it was 22 years ago. And one wonders if the U.S. Secret Service really knows how to stop a bird-sized drone from flying into Marine One—or into the West Wing.  

Nevertheless, even as the threat from drones has become obvious, it can be argued that a small drone can carry only a small payload. And that’s true, although we’re only beginning to grasp just how many drones can be launched at once. Little things can add up when there are a lot of them. Moreover, we’re always learning about new miracles of miniaturization, aren’t we? 

So are we back to the idea of nets for buildings? For sure, we’re back to the need to start thinking. If nets aren’t a good idea, what is a good idea? Air defense is good, so long as we internalize that the attacking aerial vehicle might not be a bomber, or an ICBM, but rather, a man on a paraglider (as happened in Gaza), or a drone mimicking a sparrow—or maybe a bumblebee. Or it might just be a low-tech mortar round, or a bullet.  

If we can’t imagine those things happening to the local skyline, then, well, we aren’t very good at imagining. And that’s okay—so long as any potential attacker is also not good at imagining. 

But if we assume that there’s a kind of permanent tech arms race—involving not just nation states, but paramilitaries, narcogangs, terrorists, criminals, and geekily skilled psycho-thrillseekers—then we need to think about building up building defenses. Once again, it may seem improbable that anyone is going to attack a random condo or office tower, but the same can be said about high-rise fires—they’re rare, but structures have fire extinguishers and sprinklers anyway.   

So other than nets, what might building defense look like?  One can think of some broad categories: 1) forbidding drone flights—or even drones themselves—in certain areas; 2) jamming drone signals; 3) camouflage, including digital obscuring; 4) hardening the target; 5) shooting down drones as they approach, or blocking them, as with a force field.

To be sure, all of these expedients seem to sit somewhere between “daunting” and “ridiculous.” And so we might pray for 6) spiritual renewal that makes us less avid about innovative killing. But then we remember that the country is too diverse to permit that sort of shared goodness. And so we should mention 7) dispersion; and 8) bunkers—maybe the people building underground homes are thinking ahead. 

So as we assess our list, we might see that 5), drone defense, has the most potential, at least for extant structures we’re attached to. In fact, one benefit of drone defense is that if we could master the technology, it would pay spinoff dividends all over. That is, defensive shields—defined as a directed-energy wall of electrons, or as a wall of copper, as in a hail of cheap projectiles, or whatever else an X-Prize might summon up—can be used in many different circumstances. Do we wish to defend ourselves against drones? Or sniper bullets  Or carjackers?  Or human intruders in our homes or across our borders? Against all these threats, there’s a common point: It helps to have a shield. Good fences make for good neighbors.   

To be sure, the energy amounts required for such defenses are enormous; physicists debate exactly how much, but one estimate suggests that if the kinetic energy of a bullet is one kilojoule, it would take 175 kilowatts of force to stop it. That’s about 235 horsepower. So we’re talking a lot more energy than we’ll get from local windmills and solar panels. Fortunately, micro nuclear reactors are now a thing, and we’re also discovering white hydrogen everywhere. So the energy is there if we want it. We just need to ditch low-tech Luddism. If there’s one steady rule of civilization, it’s this: Every advance is a new kind of energy hog.  

Moreover, if we start thinking about defense in new ways, we’ll reap a big upside: With enough substrate thinking about hearth and home, the superstructure of our national strategy might change. That is, if we start focusing on defense, there could be less focus on offense. As we know to our sorrow, for many decades, the U.S. military and its sidecar of armchair imperialists have been preoccupied with “force projection.” The mega-question they always seek to answer with their PowerPoints: How will Uncle Sam sally forth into the world to liberate, democratize and otherwise improve foreign peoples?  

But the rest have learned two things: First, coercive Kantianism doesn’t achieve its stated objectives; and second, salivating about outbound “opportunities” comes at the expense of assessing inbound threats. So if we, the American people, were to demand more defensive thinking—against drones, of course, and while we’re at it, against other kinds of invaders, too—we might actually get to a consistent ethic of America First. 

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Killing the Mother

Books

Killing the Mother

A new book situates the problems with feminism at its inception.

Mary_Wollstonecraft_by_John_Opie_(c._1797)
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797) (Wikimedia Commons)

The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, by Carrie Gress, Regnery Publishing, 256 pages

Mary Wollstonecraft liked the sound of her own voice. Her eventual husband, William Godwin, would complain of an early meeting that “I…heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear [Thomas] Paine.” Despite her prodigality, however, both in spoken and written word, Wollstonecraft was not particularly lucid, prone to chatter and reason in circles. The ideology which she mothered would follow in her footsteps, forging its path through history with a similar excess of words.

Wollstonecraft’s story is where Carrie Gress begins her new book, The End of Woman (Regnery, August 2023). The book chronicles the history of the feminist movement with the goal of bringing to light its under-discussed flaws. A Catholic mother and author of several books, Gress is best known for her Theology of Home series and online magazine, a Christian response to pop culture lifestyle magazines. Gress is no mere “mommy blogger,” however. A fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C. based think tank, and a scholar at the Catholic University of America, Gress has written a number of books on Christian womanhood, including The Anti-Mary Exposed, which explores the toxic view of femininity which has grasped the western world since the 1960s. Fittingly, Gress begins her new book with a study of another Mary, who, she argues, forged the way for this toxic ideology.

Gress is far from the first to chronicle the history of the women’s rights movement and its harmful elements, but she is among the few who identify those elements all the way back at its inception. Where other post-feminists suggest the movement went wrong during the Second Wave, or express dislike for the feminists’ controversial methods and ties to communism, but approve at least some of the results, Gress is not afraid to say that the problems with feminism were baked in the cake. The only way forward is to reject the philosophy whole cloth, starting with Wollstonecraft.

This is not the conservative orthodoxy some might imagine it to be. Erika Bachiochi, also a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has spent much time and effort to make Wollstonecraft palatable to conservatives through the Wollstonecraft Project at The Abigail Adams Institute, which Bachiochi directs, as well as in her book, “The Rights of Women.” But the virtues Bachiochi finds in Wollstonecraft’s thought are too absent, at least for Gress, in the mother of feminism’s life.

The proof, in other words, is in the pudding. This is a thread which Gress pulls on with each of the major feminist namesakes, from Wollstonecraft to Friedan: the girls led debauched lifestyles, many engaged in witchcraft and the occult, and the later women’s involvement in communist groups makes the purity of their intentions suspect at best. Most troubling of all, however, is something which even a strict survey of the founding texts alone cannot overlook: the fundamental goal of the movement was egalitarianism, and its attendant death of all hierarchies, which Wollstonecraft took issue with as fundamentally male.

Much of this trouble can be traced to an abnormally distressing family life, Gress argues, a common feature for every major female in the movement’s history. Wollstonecraft’s father abused her mother and Wollstonecraft herself twice attempted suicide; her daughter with free-love advocate William Godwin, Mary Shelley, spent most of her youth chasing the licentious Percy Bysshe Shelley around Europe. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father openly wished she was a son, while her domineering mother left her with a permanent antagonism toward authority. Betty Friedan had a discontented mother, too, who scolded her for her ugliness and large nose, and to whose presence Friedan attributed her own turn to feminism. These were not happy women, they were not raised by happy women, and they did not produce happy women.

“Lost girls,” as Gress refers to them, make bad role models.

Lost girls are also not nice. As each woman became embittered toward men, she broadcast her bitterness to bring countless other women down with her. Gress describes this as “destructive envy:” “It is a kind of envy, but also a hidden rejection of what it means to be a woman.” Which is another way of saying that the story of feminism is a story about mean girls. Moreover, their energy was not always commensurate with the wrongs done to them. Charles M’Clintock, noticing the time it was taking Elizabeth Cady Stanton to write the Declaration of Sentiments, apparently joked, “Your grievances must be very grievous indeed, if it takes you so long to find them.”

Wollstonecraft once wrote that “the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.” But what has come of egalitarianism, Gress argues, is quite the opposite. The girls who rage against the patriarchy—out of their own hurt, or due to a sense of sisterhood with other, angrier women—“have become exactly the type of man they love to hate: “negligent, narcissistic, aloof, unengaged…like players and cads.”

“We haven’t used our power properly,” Gress writes. For Gress, the problem baked in the feminist cake is that it asked the wrong question: How can women become men? Its conclusions, therefore, are wholly unsuited to reality. They have also led to death: death of unborn babies, death of female fertility, death of marriage, death of family, and death of womanhood itself in the face of the new transgender “science.” More to the point, all this death has not even been good for those who wanted it.

Is there a way which leads to life? Gress says yes. It requires restoring what has been destroyed, including, provocatively, “the patriarchy.” While Gress doesn’t flesh this out, it’s clear from her language throughout the book that her vision is neither slavishness for women nor egalitarianism. Instead, she proposes a grammar of womanhood which emphasizes the female creative role in harmony with men: “As uncomfortable as it is to say, we have to consider women as mothers—even if, of course, many among us aren’t mothers now or won’t become mothers,” she writes. This is because “all women are called to a type of psychological or spiritual motherhood in our relationship with others, where we look out for the best interest of others, mentor them, and help them grow.”

This grammar of motherhood involves women seeking to serve others, to take responsibility for our actions and behavior, to restore the art of homemaking, and to nourish and hold those in our care. We might describe this vision for women as replacing Mary, the mother of feminism, with Mary, the mother of Jesus. She’s a sight for sore eyes.

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Indiana Jones, Independence Day, and the Presence of the Past

Culture

Indiana Jones, Independence Day, and the Presence of the Past

Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.

indiana_jones

If reviews of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made reference to an “aging” Harrison Ford, in 2023 there is no denying that the actor is now old. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not shy away from this fact. The film opens by showing Indiana Jones in 1969: We find him clad only in his underwear, awakened in his easy chair by the longhairs partying in the adjacent apartment, blasting the Beatles first thing in the morning. 

Still a bit drunk from what appears to be a nightly routine of solitary boozing, Indy grabs a baseball bat and heads to confront the revelers, who laugh and tell the old man to get lost. Humiliated, he returns to his tenement, where he confronts the reality that his family is falling apart. Outside his apartment building, New Yorkers are enjoying a ticker-tape parade celebrating the moon landing. But Dr. Jones is exhausted by the present.

As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2023, we are confronted by a nation seemingly drained of its past vitality. Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.

In both cases—the real America of 2023 and Jones’s life in 1969—our exhaustion stems primarily from the present’s stark contrast with the past. There is some sense that our halcyon days are over, and that they cannot be recaptured. Today, the country grapples with the important questions posed by this fatalism. What is the value of the past? Who, if anyone, has the rightful claim to it? Should it have any role in the life of the present – or does the past have a right to stay in the past?  

These are the issues addressed by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While it isn’t a great film, it does offer some compelling answers—answers that can help those of us who sense that the great America that we used to know is taking on the status of an ancient relic.

In many ways, the Indiana Jones series itself is a historical artifact. The first film was released in 1981 to universal acclaim in a much different America. While everybody loved these movies, not everyone has loved Indy. Critics have derided the character as an avatar of western colonialism, an educated cowboy who travels to exotic places, blasts and whips his way through the local muscle, and locates cultural treasures—only to steal them back to the safety (and sterility) of an American museum. Indeed, the screenwriters apparently feel a bit ashamed of Indiana Jones: All five films include characters who level charges that he is a “thief” and a “graverobber.”

But contrary to what woke critics and Indy’s fictional detractors say, he is not a thief or a graverobber. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones doesn’t try to procure the Ark of the Covenant as much as he tries to prevent the Nazis from doing so, and he protests when he learns that US authorities will simply keep it in secret storage. In Temple of Doom, when he finds that a small Indian village’s sacred Sankara Stone has been stolen by a Thuggee blood cult, he retrieves it and returns it to the people. In Last Crusade, Indy doesn’t want to seek the Holy Grail—he is compelled to do it in order to rescue his father, a grail expert who has been kidnapped by the Nazis. The goal is not to possess the grail, but to keep it out of Nazi hands. When they find it, there is a brief moment where the younger Jones does want to take the cup, but when his father tells him to leave it behind, he complies. Similarly, the entire plot of Crystal Skull is driven by Indiana’s effort to return the artifact to its indigenous place of origin . 

In short, the films don’t depict a rapacious crusader, but rather a man with a deep and abiding respect for the past. Time after time, his impulse is to protect artifacts, to honor them, and when possible, to leave them be. When the situation does not allow them to be left alone, his refrain is that they “belong in a museum.” Woke zealots today see museums as mere storage houses for the spoils of colonialism and war, but that’s not what they are for Indiana Jones. He wants the remains of the past in a museum precisely so they will be protected. 

But protection isn’t enough. After all, the Ark of the Covenant would be quite secure sitting in a locked crate at a secret government facility. The museum is a place where the relics will get the reverence that they deserve. Reverence from whom? Professors? Curators?  No. Reverence from everyone. Reverence from the people. This indicates Dr. Jones’ recognition that if anyone “owns” the past, it is a collective ownership, a human ownership that reflects our shared history. To know our own time is impossible if we don’t understand both how the present differs from the past and how it represents a continuity with history.

Early in the Dial of Destiny, Jones’s partner insists that “some things should stay buried.” This a pithy digestion of the entire theme of the film, which culminates in a moment where Indiana must decide whether he will live in the glorious past or in the present. While the present is less than ideal, making a choice to abandon the past in its favor amounts to a gesture of hope. The future is uncertain, after all. Choosing to live in the present reflects a will to believe that the future will be worth living. Viewers of the film will find that Jones needs a little intervention in order to let the past go—but he does. 

Ultimately though, (re)resurrecting a beloved film franchise—a piece of our shared (pop) cultural inheritance—simply to have an octogenarian encourage us to honor the past by leaving it behind…well, it’s a strange bit of metafiction. After all, if Ford and the makers of the movie really believed its message, they would have never set out to make it. Indeed, for decades Ford himself scoffed at the idea of revisiting classic characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But he has returned to both. 

This unwillingness to let cinematic history stay in the past is also underscored by Dial of Destiny’s impressive use of computer technologies that “de-age” Ford in certain scenes, depicting him as a younger man around the age he was in the first three films. Again, this is a very odd choice for a film that finally tells us to let go of the past and live in the now. One wonders: with technology like this, have we really seen the last Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (or at least his digitally rendered likeness)? New stories featuring a 35-year-old Indy in his prime could be made in perpetuity. There’s a lot of money to be made. Let’s hope Hollywood can learn the lesson of Dial of Destiny and respect the past by leaving that money on the table.

Which brings us back to our present. This week we celebrate the foundation of this nation and our shared history. The great symbols of our heritage have not been treated well as of late. The founding is falsely smeared as an effort to protect slavery. Whether it’s via demands to expand the Supreme Court or calls for abolishing the electoral college, the government bequeathed to us by the Constitution is under attack. Many Americans now see these documents as relics: ones that deserve no reverence, even ones that might need to be destroyed. In making these attacks, the belligerents of our society assert some ownership of that past—they claim the right to do with it what they will, even if that means their destruction. 

The Fourth of July is a holiday where we remember our past, and how our present is an extension of it. By remembering it, we revere it. And while the America that we see in 2023 may never again be what it once was—before the cultural revolution and its assassinations, before 9/11, before the terrible year of 2020—it still belongs to us. That means that while the past perhaps cannot be recaptured, we nevertheless have an obligation to honor what remains, to protect it, and to transmit that legacy to a new generation. That Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate this nation is one of many ways we continue to fulfill that duty. In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to its legacy, and choose to look toward a shared future in a spirit of American optimism rather than one of trepidation.

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