Shaking the Tyrant’s Bloody Hand

Please read this piece, from the excellent Mauldin Economics page, entitled Something Rotten in the State of Russia. It shows the many profound problems besetting the Russian state.

That horrible, horrible man, Putin, is indeed horrible.

But how dangerous is Putin to the USA? Or to our allies?

Putin presides over a crumbling country.

Meanwhile Trump, who some believe is under Putin’s control, is focused on driving down oil and gas prices and pushing NATO to increase defense spending, both of which are hard blows to Russia. Trump is also promoting pro-growth policies which will help fund a military buildup and modernization.

Russia has no prayer of matching this.

Putin has real problems, with no real solutions.

Trump is confronting Putin with challenges he cannot overcome, which will only grow worse over time.

The idea that Russia is capable of embarking on a new Cold War against the United States is laughable.

Russia is only considered to be a country of the first rank because of its nuclear arsenal. But that arsenal is useless, other than as a deterrent to invasion, or as a way to commit suicide. No one is going to invade Russia any time soon. More importantly, Putin and his cronies are not suicidal. Putin may even be the richest man in the world. Putin and his posse have a nice life, and a lot to lose. They likely want to enjoy the benefits of their despotism in peace, not see their dachas reduced to radioactive ash.

(Further, the Russian nuclear arsenal may be of diminished value if, as expected, Trump pushes forward on missile defense.)

China is a rising power; Russia is a declining power, even a dying power. Russia is a menace to its neighbors; Islamic Terrorism is a menace around the world.

China is the long term challenge, Islamic Terrorism is the acute, immediate challenge, to the USA and its allies. Russia faces a long-term threat from China, which seems destined to simply overrun the entirety of Asiatic Russia. Russia is also threatened by Islamic terrorism. The USA and Russia face the same serious threats.

Russia should be aligned with the USA with regard to both China and Islamic terrorism.

The current situation is absurd and should be resolved.

This does not mean the USA will become “friends” with Putin, or the Russians.

We will not trust Putin or the Russians.

We will not be allies, beyond allies of convenience, case by case, with Putin or the Russians.

We will not have shared values with Putin or the Russians.

We will simply recognize important common interests, including ramping down the hostility between our countries, cooperating where it is mutually beneficial to do so, and focusing on more important, mutual threats and challenges.

There is plenty of room for a deal here.

Nixon shook Mao’s hand, a hand dripping with the blood of 65 million victims.

FDR shook Stalin’s hand, a hand dripping with the blood of 50 million victims.

Trump will do what is best for the peace, prosperity and security of the United States.

That will likely include shaking the tyrant’s bloody hand.

Trump has to choose a strategy.

There has been a huge uproar over President Trump’s Executive order to limit immigration from seven Middle East countries that are in turmoil. A Seattle federal district judge issued a restraining order to block the immigration “pause.”

The result is widely hailed by Democrats and the usual open borders advocates.

Still, there is some trepidation about the Democrats’ vulnerability on this issue.

Democratic arguments about immigration mostly aren’t arguments. The party has relied on opposing Trump’s more outrageously exaggerated claims about the criminality and all-around character flaws of immigrants. That’s fine, as far as it goes — but as November showed, it doesn’t go far enough.

The core problem is that Democrats didn’t really make an affirmative argument for an overhaul to U.S. immigration policy that might appeal to voters. Instead, they talked a lot about what great people immigrants are, and how much they benefit from migration. Unfortunately, the clearest group of beneficiaries from this policy — people who want to migrate, but haven’t yet gotten a green card — can’t vote.

Most of this is, like the British Labour Party, an attempt the replace one voting group with another.

However, aside from the implications for employment for American citizens, there is the question of terrorism.

We are conducting a war with radical Islam in the Middle East.

How do we fight that war ?

One of the problems facing the Trump administration is the lack of an overall strategy to defeat radical Islamism. The one left over from the Obama administration consists of a schizophrenic blend of attempting to solve “root causes” incongruously combined with a program of targeted assassination. “The U.S. dropped an average of three bombs an hour in 2016 — a total of 26,171 explosive devices dropped in seven countries in the past year” according to a report published at the close of President Barack Obama’s second term, not counting thousands of air strikes which went unreported according to the Military Times. This vast campaign of targeted aerial assassination was accompanied by what the Nation called “the secret nation-building boom of the Obama years”. By 2014 Obama had doubled “nation-building spending from $24.3 billion to $51.3 billion”.

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Environment

Amid some pretty stiff competition news-wise this week, these two linked stories were particularly infuriating mostly because the matter received relatively little attention, in comparison to coverage of the protest itself. But such is the towering hypocrisy of these times. The establishment national news media continues to conduct itself in the manner that, sadly, we have come to expect of them. Mostly, they cover stories like this with a pillow, until they stop moving.

But the sheer gall of a protest encampment called to protest potential-possible- maybe environmental damage caused by construction of a pipeline … which then actually does damage to the local environment by the sheer quantity of stuff abandoned over the past six months, and the possibility of seepage of human waste into the nearby river. Well, really one might have very good reason for doubting the sincerity of those protesters with regard to protecting the environment in the first place.

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Worthwhile Reading

How the 16th century invented social media

Virginia Postrel thinks that now is the time for big-box stores to embrace the 19th century

Is it possible to make American mate again?

Related to the above:  mapping the geographical patterns of romantic anxiety and avoidance

Maybe also related:  sex doesn’t sell anymore, activism does

PC oppression and why Trump won

Theory and practice: an interesting Assistant Village Idiot post from 2010

Learning about effective selling from a surfer dude

Here’s a guy who says: I help create the automated technologies that are taking jobs…and I feel guilty about it

After discussing his concerns about automation-driven job losses, he goes on to say “I feel even worse when I hear misleading statements about the source of the problem. Blaming China and NAFTA is a convenient deflection, but denial will only make the wrenching employment dislocation for millions all the more painful.”

I’ve seen this assertion–“offshoring doesn’t matter because Robots”–and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  It should be obvious that both factors play a role; there’s no need for a single-variable explanation.  (Actually, offshoring-driven job losses and automation-driven job losses are somewhat less than additive in their effect, since automation generally makes US-based production more relatively attractive.)

Here’s an argument that the next big blue-collar job is coding.

What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant?  Among other things, it would change training for programming jobs—and who gets encouraged to pursue them. As my friend  Anil Dash, a technology thinker and entrepreneur, notes, teachers and businesses would spend less time urging kids to do expensive four-year computer- ­science degrees and instead introduce more code at the vocational level in high school….Across the country, people are seizing this opportunity, particularly in states hit hardest by deindustrialization. In Kentucky, mining veteran Rusty Justice decided that code could replace coal. He cofounded  Bit Source, a code shop that builds its workforce by retraining coal miners as programmers. Enthusiasm is sky high: Justice got 950 applications for his first 11 positions. Miners, it turns out, are accustomed to deep focus, team play, and working with complex engineering tech. “Coal miners are really technology workers who get dirty,” Justice says.

I’m reminded of two things that Peter Drucker said in his 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity.  In attacking what he called ‘the diploma curtain’, he wrote “By denying opportunity to those without higher education, we are denying access to contribution and performance to a large number of people of superior ability, intelligence, and capacity to achieve.”

But also, Drucker wrote, in his discussion of the Knowledge Economy:

The knowledge worker of today…is not the successor to the ‘free professional’ of 1750 or 1900.  He is the successor to the employee of yesterday, the manual worker, skilled or unskilled…This hidden conflict between the knowledge workers view of himself as a ‘professional’ and the social reality in which he is the upgraded and well-paid successor to the skilled worker of yesterday, underlies the disenchantment of so many highly educated young people with the jobs available to them…They expect to be ‘intellectuals.’  And the find that they are just ‘staff.’

Indeed, many jobs that have been thought of as ‘professional’ and ‘white collar’…programming, financial analysis, even engineering…are increasingly subject to many of the stresses traditionally associated with ‘blue collar’ jobs, such as layoffs and cyclical unemployment.  As a higher % of the corporate cost structure becomes concentrated in jobs which are not direct labor, it is almost inevitable that these jobs will be hit increasingly when financial problems make themselves felt.

Drucker’s second point, which I think is very astute, is somewhat orthogonal to the coal-miners-becoming-coders piece, and probably deserves it own post for discussion.  Regarding the question of non-college-educated people becoming programmers (of which there has long already been a fair amount), the degree to which succeeds is to some degree coupled with the whole question of h-1b visa policy, and trade policy in general as it relates to offshoring of services.

The Revolt Against the Experts

‘Trump makes sense to a grocery store owner’

Economist-mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb contends that there is a global riot against pseudo-experts
 
After predicting the 2008 economic crisis, the Brexit vote, the U.S. presidential election and other events correctly, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the Incerto series on global uncertainties, which includes The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is seen as something of a maverick and an oracle. Equally, the economist-mathematician has been criticised for advocating a “dumbing down” of the economic system, and his reasoning for U.S. President Donald Trump and global populist movements. In an interview in Jaipur, Taleb explains why he thinks the world is seeing a “global riot against pseudo-experts”.

Taleb has a typically thoughtful and contrary take on Trump’s electoral victory. Worth reading in full.

(Via Peter Saint-Andre.)