Real Clear
Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
News: DOGE, Ukraine, EU, Vance, California Craziness
The episode explores a range of pressing issues, including critical questions about competence in leadership, the burden of rising home insurance premiums, and the future viability of state governance.
• Discussion on Mayor Eric Adams’ criminal charges
• Analysis of the Trump administration's restructuring of Homeland Security
• Elon Musk's proposals for budget cuts and tackling inflation
• Overview of rising home insurance costs in California
• Concerns about governmental inefficiencies and leadership competence
• Examination of the implications of rapid reforms on national stability
And welcome back everybody. It is Tuesday, february 18th 2025. Let's go through some news today, and I might talk about California today or sometime this week. If we're looking at domestic affairs, we have a federal judge who has ordered US prosecutors to appear in court in order to take a look at the DOJ's request to dismiss criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Dismiss criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the move from the DOJ to dismiss those charges has started a heated discussion around the implications of the integrity of the judicial process. According to some news sources, others see this as a righteous dismissal due to political witch-huntery, to use a Trumpian term. You could see that one coming way back with the Al Smith dinner, when Trump was basically giving a nod to Eric Adams, who was sitting in the audience not far from him. That may have been a political move to court New York voters or to somehow rouse support amongst black Americans who might view Adams as unjustly persecuted and, as we all know, trump did much better amongst minority voting groups this past cycle. It is possible that was a politically motivated dismissal at the DOJ and a sort of one hand washes the other and of course, everyone has been following Doge. That has been the topic du jour these past couple weeks.
Speaker 1:The Trump administration has been gearing up to dismiss a lot of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees as he tries to restructure the agency. I think this action probably represents the administration's larger agenda to really reshape federal agencies and downsize government. If he's willing to do it with the Homeland Security Department, then of course he's very willing to do it with other agencies and departments across the nation. I don't know if you caught this on my last episode or seen it elsewhere, but we really have a system where federal employees can only retire if their paperwork is physically taken down to a limestone mine under the ground where around 600 elves work who are employed by the federal government and they're not doing anything clandestine or secret there. They're just processing paperwork, and the reason that this place exists is simply back in the 1950s the us government needed space and this space was available, and so they rented it and just continued to rent it. So every day, trucks of paper with federal retirement documents in it goes up to a mountain in Pennsylvania and goes underground, and then it takes an obscenely long time something like two months to get someone fully retired. This is something that Elon Musk and his doge boys discovered.
Speaker 1:If they're focusing on things like this, that makes a lot of sense. If they're meandering out into other topics're focusing on things like this, that makes a lot of sense. If they're meandering out into other topics that are perhaps beyond their scope, that doesn't really sit well with a lot of Americans. But they're finding things like millions of dollars being paid in social security benefits monthly to people who are above 150 years old. Obviously, things like that and optimization of the way that the mechanisms of government work on a payee scale are a good thing for the nation. But, as I'd mentioned in my last episode, if he's going to be venturing out into areas like quote taking a look at members of Congress unquote from when he was standing in the Oval Office and their finances, I've got some eyebrows raising. Those are members of Congress, yes, but they're also private citizens in their own right, and if you're going to take a look at their finances, I think that probably falls under the SEC, fbi or DOJ. Let's be careful here.
Speaker 1:Some people have some real concerns about the richest man in the world optimizing government and cutting people at the level of salary that can have a first look oddity to it, but, as I'd mentioned last time, my view is that the richest man in the world probably has the least motivation to try to benefit from such a staging act. I actually think Elon Musk is much odder than material wealth. He geeks out on efficiency. I'm not saying I trust the man entirely. I'm saying that the notion that he's doing what he's doing for personal gain it falls flat on my psychological appraisal of the man. This is a person who slept on the floor and still lives in rather paltry environments, given his wealth, and really doesn't care much for material lavishness. It's not exactly the psychological profile of somebody who would be seeking personal gain, although friends of mine have proffered the idea that personal gain may take the form of the accrual of power and that someone like Musk might be thinking more about power and leverage than he is about material gain. That's a fair point, although, again, we have to be careful about falling into the algorithm. Whoever you're looking at for your news sources, you're destined to be pilfered with some sort of algorithmic reflection of your preferences.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are saying look, he's trying to eliminate his AI competitor, openai, and make a bid. He's also talked for a long time about his concerns about AI, and he's Sam Altman to stop open AI from going for profit. He sees that as a roving mechanism for AI to take over humanity and he doesn't want that to happen. That being said, I'm sure he has, with his Grok 3 AI release, likely pursuing profit himself. Some people have mentioned that Elon Musk will be much wealthier in four years than he is now, as if that represents his aspiration toward material gain from what he's doing with Doge, and my rejoinder, however, is what are the odds that Elon Musk wouldn't be wealthier in four years than he is now, regardless of what he's doing? This is not a man who tends to lose money year over year. We've got to be careful with our measurement metrics, is my point.
Speaker 1:Nevertheless, musk said he'd like to cut a trillion dollars from the federal budget and he thinks two trillion would be an optimal best-case scenario. As he was talking with Mark Penn, political strategist. His idea is that doing that would then bring down inflation, and I believe he has stated that, if his numbers are correct, he'd bring inflation down to 4%. As a reminder, it's been up 9, 10% over the past four years and they're looking for an algorithmic way to bring that down. He's going through enlightening speed and I think that's really disorienting people.
Speaker 1:Again, I'm not saying I'm fully trusting Elon Musk or Doge. I'm skeptical but optimistic in terms of seeing what happens. I'm certainly not joining the bandwagon of saying, oh, this is some sort of draconian overreach. I don't know. I'm open to seeing what happens, but I also want to keep an eye on whether they get too widespread and too ambitious and too overreaching. It's disorienting people to see anything in government moving this fast. We're used to seeing government doing relatively nothing and something about maintaining the status quo is safer than making major changes. And they've made some errors. They fired a bunch of people around 300, who monitor the nuclear stores in the US, and then they quickly realized that was a mistake and hired them back. They ended up only needing to reduce by 50. And they are moving very quickly. Musk himself said that they were going to make mistakes but would correct them quickly. So this is seeming haphazard to a lot of people, a lot of onlookers, and then to half the country or more who voted for Trump. They see this as a major positive and his ratings are very high at this point. People who voted for Trump overwhelmingly support what Musk is doing, and so that's where we're at with Doge, of course.
Speaker 1:This past week, donald Trump also implemented reciprocal tariffs, and that simply means the amount of tariffs that any country charges us, we're going to charge that country, and on this issue, almost like every other, it's split down party lines in terms of whether you think this is a good thing or into the reduction in US enforcement around the world, specifically through US aid reduction, the $40 million for the emphasizing feminism in Bahrain and so forth, and Sesame Street in Iraq. This past week, the United States and Russia began peace talks regarding Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volensky was not terribly excited about that and felt as though he should be part of the negotiations before Russia. Donald Trump sees it differently, and very high-level delegations from the US and Russia are convening in Saudi Arabia to discuss the future of Ukraine. European leaders and Ukrainian officials have been sidelined about this and they are concerned about it, but Trump being Trump, he goes right for what he thinks is the essential target, and that would be Vladimir Putin. I think he views that move as likely a more seductive maneuver for Putin. I think Trump is appealing to Putin's narcissism by going directly to him and making him feel much more special and central. If that's his thinking, he's probably on track there, because Putin has felt quite resentful about being sidelined and not viewed as a credible leader to negotiate with and I'm not saying that he is those things, but in terms of trying to reach a settlement with him, appealing to his narcissism is probably a good idea, although I can see why it would raise concerns with Zelensky and EU leaders.
Speaker 1:Jd Vance was in Europe and really gave the European leaders a talking to. You should catch that video where he talked with Europe, not about external concerns regarding terrorism and threats to their security, but about Europe departing from its own values. It was about a 35-minute talk. Figures such as Vladimir Klitschko, a man who I greatly admire, was in the audience watching lockjawed, as were other European leaders barely a clap in the room as he tongue-lashed them about their clamping down on individual freedoms and rights of expression. For example, in Scotland, a place that has become remarkably draconian regarding free speech, you can be arrested in your own home for praying.
Speaker 1:There was also a person in Germany who was arrested for praying thinking about his unborn child, who he had aborted with his previous wife or girlfriend, near a place where the child was aborted. Across the street. He was looking downward, apparently, and simply praying, thinking to himself about his unborn child. Police came up to him, asked him what he was doing. He told them and he was arrested. It is a law in Germany where you cannot do such a thing within proximity of a place that provides abortion. Of course there's much more to those stories and I'm not reporting on the original text of those stories, but that's what Vance was remarking on to the European leaders and trying to get them to reflect on their own overreach of power, their shutdown of expression and of the right to free speech. And this is coming in the context of the US trying to emphasize that Europe take greater responsibility for its own security. Vance there trying to point toward internal security, of course. This past couple weeks there was another terrorist attack in Europe where a deranged young man in his mid-20s from a Middle Eastern country drove a truck into a crowd and injured many people, killing one or two, including a child.
Speaker 1:The new administration is focused more on Europe taking more of its own spending under its own control, whereby we would like the US to stop subsidizing NATO and European security, initially in the 2000, initially in the first Trump administration this was seen as buffoonish, but it was very effective. As soon as he addressed the EU leaders about this and NATO, they scrambled to make up the deficit of their own spending. It has historically been seen in a bipartisan way in the United States that we should be the world's leader and carry a big stick and a big mouth and exert our control, and we've done that financially. But it's possible that we may have done that through an overextension of our deficit. That seems to be what the Trump administration is emphasizing these days. We've turned into some kind of federation starship control system where we don't have the money to keep the starship in operation. Again. Others see that as a short-sighted idea and that we're going to be relinquishing global control for China's Silk Road.
Speaker 1:Weirdly, in the United States the egg market has been majorly damaged by bird flu. Huge amounts of the bird flock in the United States have been put down due to the flu, increasing egg prices and supply chains across the country. Supermarkets are now having. Supermarkets are now placing limits on the amount of eggs that you can purchase at one time. This is something the US hasn't seen for a long time. This is going to have downstream effects, of course, as we've put down large amounts of the flock and that's going to take some time to rebound. If ever there was a time to get yourself some chickens and raise your own eggs, this might be it. There's been some concern about house cats contracting bird flu and there's been some public concern about transmission to humans, although this is something that health authorities are just monitoring to prevent further spread In the context of COVID, I think the average American now has skepticism about the CDC or public health officials to advise them on much of anything, and that's a problem that's going to just need to be ironed out over many years.
Speaker 1:Turning back to a Musk-esque thing, spacex successfully executed a maneuver where its Starship booster rocket was caught back at its launch pad in South Texas. This was an engineering achievement and it marks a huge step in Elon Musk's plan for deep space exploration. Now there's been some hubbub about the firing of the FAA chief, who was apparently investigating Musk's violation of federal airspace and some of his explosions of his rockets, and some people are skeptical about the Trump administration removing the FAA chief in the context of the spat with Musk, and we'll see how that shakes out and whether there is anything to that, or whether the administration removed that chairman because he was engaged in TEI hiring, which the Trump administration views as a major threat to the US, especially in aeronautics and flight. I think that I'm going to get to California later on this week, but as a teaser for you, I'd like to start talking about Ricardo Lara, the commissioner of insurance in California. This is a man who has no business being in the role at all and we've got to be clear about that. Where someone should not be in a role, we need to be clear and get them out. This is one of those cases. Ricardo Lara has overseen the greatest disaster in California fire history, with the palisades in a cinder just crisped and people nowhere near going back to their homes.
Speaker 1:I think that many fires could be entirely prevented in California. Ricardo Lara believes that we need to change the temperature of the earth before California can make more reasonable fire plans regionally itself. That's an insane idea. I hate to put it that way. I don't like being outlandish about my expressions, but that really is crazy. California could have large tracts of land cleared if it were not for the excessive conservationist concerns in quotes about the spotted lizard and so forth, as if the spotted lizard is going to make it through a major wildfire, lizard and so forth, as if the spotted lizard is going to make it through a major wildfire. And Ricardo Lora is a man who has a bachelor's degree from San Diego State University, a party school I like SDSU, but it's a party school and in Spanish and Chicano studies. That's what the man has studied.
Speaker 1:This is not an actuary. Insurances must be run by actuaries, people who have a deep understanding of systems dynamics, who have a really excellent arithmetic capacity. That would exclude me and perhaps many of you. No offense to all of us, but we need people smarter than us to man positions like this, and so I think California is going to have to start engaging in a process of getting people out of government who are not able to hold anything similar in the private market.
Speaker 1:One of the great myths of the modern discourse regarding people serving in Congress and heads of state and elsewhere is that somehow they're making a great sacrifice because they could be making a lot more money in the private sector. I don't think that's true for people like Ricardo Lara. I don't think so at all. I think the man would be working at the mall, to be frank and the idea that he would be profiting greatly if he was working in the private sector. From what company? From what company? Who has any interest in the bottom line? I don't think so at all. So we've got to talk more about this.
Speaker 1:We have a most likely and I hate to put it this way because it's such a buzzword these days, but I really do think that he likely is a DEI hire that in the post-Floyd frenzy and the last four years that Ricardo Lara was elevated to his position for no reason other than some people thought it looked good. And if you look at what happened in LA County with Mayor Karen Bass, as well as the assistant fire chief and the fire chief, you have a spate of DEI hires that are really not in the best interest for the American people, and the people in the Palisades are really in full view of that right now. It's a question right now what's going to happen in California? Have we gone so crazy that we're not going to make reasonable decisions for who takes control over major agencies, or have we been burned and that we're really at a point where we're not going to allow this to continue much longer?
Speaker 1:It's not clear to me at this time, as a result of the Palisades fires, there was a letter sent out to homeowners such as me with a $1,000 increase to our home insurance premiums. That means I'm paying $9,000 a year for home insurance. I have neighbors paying $16,000. I know people who are trying to buy much more expensive houses than I could ever purchase and they backed out of it because the home insurance was around $50,000 to $60,000 to $70,000 a year on a home of that nature. Why is this the case? In the face of the Paradise fires and then the Palisades fires, home insurance companies backed out of the state. State Farm is discontinuing policies. They're not writing any new ones. Other insurance agencies are leaving.
Speaker 1:And what did the California Department of Insurance do? Commissioned by Ricardo Lara, they made them give them money. That's right. The California Fair Plan, which is a last resort plan in the state it's a stopgap, it's a state-sponsored fire insurance plan Is there as a last resort. They came up a billion dollars short. They could not pay out for the people in the Palisades. So what did they do? They tapped on the shoulder of the private insurances and they said give us money. And what did those insurances do? They said okay and they turned around and they went to people like me and said give us money. And I have to. This is the breakdown of civilization in California.
Speaker 1:I wonder if California, if the coastal elites, will find a way to say to themselves look, we have to make reasonable decisions. Even if reasonable decisions seem to us to be aligned with our so-called opponents on the right or the conservatives, we're not going to care about that anymore. We're first going to care if that anymore. We're first going to care if the decision is reasonable. The first reasonable decision we have to make is to put people who are not IQ 100 or 110 in office. We need IQ 130 and above. We need a track record of serious actuarial capacity. Then we need to start clearing our forests, large tracts of land where fire can't jump over it, and that's how we're going to stop California from burning every year.
Speaker 1:We're not going to make insurance companies stay here. They're going to leave. And why would they stay? The deal with insurance has never been. Every year you're going to rebuild a city. That's not how insurance works. I don't know folks. Will California turn more purple? Right now it's so blue it's blinding. California is always going to be a quirky place with exotic features, because you can tax the weather here, but it should be purple, for heaven's sakes. In other words, it should be reasonable. Okay, I'm sure I'm going to talk more about it because, as you can tell, I'm pretty pissed about it. This is the land of Reagan. It's the land of reasonable decisions, of the greatest aqueducts the world has ever seen. It's the land of excellent farming that feeds America. We can't allow this gem to be torn asunder. Okay, talk to you soon.
