I concur with the editors of the Chicago Tribune:

What we haven’t seen until now is Donald Trump appearing before a gathering gathering of the nation’s military commanders — summoned to Quantico, Virginia, from all over the globe for what turned out to be a bizarre made-for-TV rally of sorts — and describing our fellow citizens as “the enemy within” and who and adding our city to his list of potential “training grounds” for troops who enlist enlist to defend America from foreign adversaries.

Trump speaks illiberally as a matter of habit. It’s sad to say that many Americans, whether supporters or opponents, at this point are inured to the schoolyard taunts and cartoonish bravado from our nation’s commander in chief.

But context in this case makes all the difference. It made these words — as Chicago braces for an incursion of federal troops over the objections of Gov. JB Pritzker — disturbing.

I urge Chicago’s elected leaders not to sink to Trump’s level. I also urge them to think twice before defending conduct including throwing things at law enforcement officers or assaulting them as “protected speech”.

Update

And I agree with the editors of the Washington Post:

America’s cities ought not to be training grounds for preparing troops for future conflicts. That’s not why soldiers serve. Defending the homeland is different from policing it.

There are ways of blurring the difference and we should avoid them.

I have no opinion on Secretary of War Hegseth’s and President Trump’s addresses to the generals and flag officers yesterday other than to observe that I have long held that there are too many of the latter. At the Washington Post David Ignatius remarks:

The implicit message of Tuesday’s “key leaders all-call,” as it was officially termed, was to get on board with Team Trump or get out. “If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” said Hegseth. Hopefully, those gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico will ignore that guidance. It would be a national disaster to lose the battle-tested leaders who understand the military’s true challenges in the decades ahead.

For Trump and Hegseth, the issues facing the military seem more symbol than substance. Thus, their emphasis on rebranding the enterprise as the Department of War. And their endless rehashing of culture-war issues: “No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions,” said Hegseth.

Okay, got it. Clear away the modest elements of “woke” culture that developed in the Pentagon. But what are you building for the future?

Hegseth is so intent on creating a tough military that having a smart one appears secondary. He wants to restore the old-time, gung ho imagery. Basic training that’s “scary, tough and disciplined.” Drill sergeants who can “instill healthy fear” and “put their hands on recruits.” Hegseth seems convinced that how soldiers fight depends on how they look. “The era of unprofessional appearance is over,” he said. “No more beardos.” Maybe he doesn’t remember the unshaven “dogfaces” of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons during World War II.

Hegseth wants to overturn more than grooming standards. Among the 10 directives he issued Tuesday is a review of standards for bullying and hazing, so that leaders can “enforce high standards without fear of reprisal.” Yikes. That sounds like a blank check for behavior that could drive away, say, the math-and-science whiz who could design and operate future combat systems.

Another unpinned grenade is Hegseth’s directive to revise an inspector general process that he claimed has been “weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat.” If a commander makes “honest mistakes,” those can be expunged from their record. For the military, Tuesday was “liberation day,” he said. “We are attacking and ending the walking on eggshells and zero-defect command culture.”

Hegseth’s vision of a hard-ass military might be compelling if you believed that future combat would be a reprise of landing on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. But the nature of military conflict is changing — on the drone-saturated battlefields of Ukraine and in the scenarios for deterring a tech-savvy China in the future. Beijing would be delighted if America focused on how many push-ups a soldier can do rather than how many computer tools he or she can use.

Based on what I’ve heard all of the generals and admirals can probably use PowerPoint. I don’t think that asking them to be able to do some push-ups is too much to ask.

Actually, I’m a bit confused about Mr. Ignatius’s observations. Based on my review of the biographies of generals and admirals (a tedious and time-consuming exercise) 20-30% of them are “battle-tested”. Relatively few in the Navy, Space Force, Air Force, or Coast Guard are “battle-tested” in the sense that I would use the term (came under fire and commanded troops in combat). Is Mr. Ignatius implying that they should be? I don’t oppose that. What does he mean?

I found his comments about Beijing thought-provoking. I know that Beijing has recently been emphasizing the importance of “informatization” and “intelligization” in the PLA and that recruitment standards have been raised and training adjusted accordingly. Most PLA recruits these days are university students which pretty much guarantees literacy and a reasonable degree of computer literacy. Given their ages I would expect them to be “digital natives”.

I’ll take this opportunity to repeat something I’ve said before: very few PLA generals and admirals are “battle-tested” (as I would use the term). I would say that we have very little idea how Chinese military doctrine would perform in actual combat situations (and neither does Beijing).

Most of Anatol Lieven’s post at The American Conservative is devoted to some clarifications of Russia’s recent provocative air activities but I thought his concluding paragraph was worth taking note of:

Instead of trying to trap the U.S. into a commitment to Ukraine involving the permanent risk of war with Russia—with all the long-term dangers and costs to the U.S. that would follow—European governments should be steadily and sensibly building up the defenses of NATO within its existing borders while at the same time developing a viable peace settlement by which Russia would abandon its impossible demands to Ukraine in return for a new European security architecture guaranteeing Russia’s own legitimate security interests. Of such European thinking, however, there is at present very little sign.

The following graph, courtesy of the World Bank, illustrates Germany’s defense spending over the last 65 years.

In 2024 Germany spent 2% of its GDP on defense for the first time in more than 30 years. The area I’ve shaded illustrates the shortfall in Germany’s spending.

There is such a thing as defense infrastructure. Spending 2% of GDP in one year is not enough. I don’t know that Germany needs to spend 2% every year to make up for more than 30 years of neglect. It might. But it’s surely going to require something.

Now repeat that exercise for all of NATOs members. The sums involved are daunting.

Also, see Wolfgang Munchau’s post at UnHerd:

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgements are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgement has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.

As I type this I am listening to Illinois Gov. Pritzker’s press conference condemning the ICE raids being conducted in Chicago and the suburbs. I’ll post a transcript of the remarks as soon as one become available.

I agree with some of what he says; disagree with some. I agree that it should not be necessary for armed ICE agents to march the streets of Chicago or, what would be worse, with the U. S. military be used to protect ICE agents.

I agree that people demonstrating peacefully should not be accosted or assaulted by ICE agents. I agree that it should not be necessary to use tear gas to disperse crowds.

I disagree that puncturing tires, assaulting ICE agents, or throwing onesself on or in front of an official vehicle is “demonstrating peacefully”.

Update

Rob Hughes reports on the press conference at ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — The Department of Homeland Security is requesting that 100 military personnel be sent to Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said during a press conference on Monday afternoon.

Pritzker called that press conference to bring more attention to recent action by federal agents in Illinois and highlight incidents that happened in Broadview and downtown Chicago over the weekend.

“This is not about fighting crime or about public safety. This is about sowing fear and intimidation and division among Americans. It was about creating a pretext to send armed military troops into our communities. This is about consolidating power in Donald Trump’s hands,” Pritzker said.

I agree with Gov. Pritzker that the deployment is unnecessary and I agree that the reason is political. Immigration policy and its enforcement are the responsibility of the federal government. The federal government cannot dragoon state and local law enforcement into enforcing federal immigration law but there is no barrier to state and local governments cooperating with the federal government in enforcing the law.

When state and local governments decide not to cooperate with the federal government I’m not sure what the federal government’s recourse is. I think they need to send agents into the uncooperative states and localities.

And I suspect that Gov. Pritzker’s outspoken opposition to the Trump administration, part of his nascent presidential campaign, as well as Illinois’s “sanctuary state” and Chicago’s “sanctuary city” policies make us a prime target for enforcement.

There has been quite some kerfuffle over Vice President Kamala Harris’s recently published “election memoir”. At the Guardian Nasrine Malik laments VP Harris, the Democrats, and the chronic self-delusion she sees, characterizing it as “high on their own supply”:

This was not the intention, but 107 Days is a hilarious book. The kind of “you have to laugh or else you’ll cry” type of hilarity. As the second Trump administration unfolds in ever-more disastrous ways, Harris and the other timeline that was possible had she won take on a calamitous, mythical quality. Here she comes, alerting us to the fact that her defeat was no fateful tragedy, but a farce. There was no hidden, better version of Harris that was muzzled and limited by circumstance. There was only a woman with a formidable lack of self-awareness and a propensity to self-valorise.

The book reveals a politician who is all about the machinery of politics, rather than one with conviction spurred by a sense of duty, or a coherent and specific set of values that differentiate her. The “not a thing that comes to mind” answer she gave when asked during the campaign if there was anything she would have done differently to Biden was not caution, but the truth. There is no sign here that she would have liked to meaningfully diverge on Gaza, for example, other than to introduce more parity in the rhetoric of compassion. Or any indication that she would have liked to grasp the nettle on economic policy and make more of her accusation that Donald Trump’s economic agenda “works best if it works for those who own the big skyscrapers”.

This dearth of a unique Harris agenda explains why she often seemed so vague, skittish and rambling. How does she receive the news she will be the candidate? By reminding herself (and us) that she had the best “contact book” and “name recognition”, as well as the “strongest case”.

She goes pretty easy on Joe Biden by comparison with what others have written:

Biden pops up often, a self-involved and petty figure, snapping at her heels and distracting her. But she is loyal, she tells us – often. So loyal that she couldn’t disparage him in the way that people needed her to (“People hate Joe Biden!” she is told by a senior adviser). But not so loyal that she doesn’t more artfully disguise that she wants you to know the man was a real drag who mentioned her too late in his speeches, and then called her before her big debate with Trump to unsubtly threaten her if she bad-mouthed him.

From my point of view the saddest aspect is that not a thing she writes about President Biden hasn’t been apparent for 40 years. “Self-involved and petty” encapsulates the way Pat Lang, who was personally acquainted with Mr. Biden, described his interactions. And I believe those are when he was a senator.

In a sort of companion piece Nate Silver muses on the memoir, focusing on VP Harris’s remarks about Pete Buttigieg and gives us a present of a new bit of terminology:

Harris is showing why she was a mediocre candidate

Every excerpt I’ve read from Harris’s book so far and every clip from her media tour seems to reflect either Veep-like clumsiness or that she’s suffering from an acute case of Demthink.

What is Demthink? It’s what you’d end up with if you trained a large language model solely on the inner monologue of people who either work in Democratic politics or watch MSNBC for eight hours a day.

Being fluent in Demthink can be helpful for navigating the internal currents of the party, something Harris is adept at. After all, she managed to become the vice presidential pick in 2020 after what was one of the worst performances relative to “expectations” in the history of the nomination process, dropping out two months before Iowa despite idiots like me having declared her to be one of the frontrunners.

The problem with Demthink is not merely that it tends toward cynical triangulation. No, it’s that it tends toward triangulation that isn’t even politically effective because it’s so finely tuned for the in-group that it comes across as uncannily out-of-tune to everyone else.

Read the whole thing. Some of it is paywalled so I couldn’t read it in full.

One factor on which neither Ms. Malik nor Mr. Silver touch is something I believe cuts to the heart of VP Harris’s failed presidential campaign. She, apparently, continues to believe that her identity (as a black and Asian woman) was sufficient to elect her to the presidency. Her actual accomplishments in the offices to which she had been elected over a period of 30 years were meager if any. She continued to fail upwards. That is a characteristic she shares with Mayor Buttigieg. She was never a particularly skilled campaigner or politician or officeholder and continued to fail upwards. IMO there is no greater indictment of “Demthink”.

I have attempted, repeatedly, to articulate my own views as clearly as I could. I don’t think we need more or less government. We need better government and I don’t believe we can achieve that without measuring and evaluating results.

I wanted to point out that in the most recent post on his Substack James Marriott covers a lot of the same territory I have over the years here on the cognitive, social, and political implications of the abandoning of reading. I’ve categorized it as “Visualcy”. He refers to it as “post-literacy”. He cites many of the same sources I have for the last 25 years on the subject. Highly recommended.

If you don’t like the vapid, agonistic, and all-too-frequently pointless character of our present politics, a lot of what we’re seeing can be explained by the cognitive and behavioral impact of not reading.

I materially agree with Daniel Costa’s op-ed at MSNBC in reaction to President Trump’s announced $100K fee and other measures to reform H-1Bs. Here’s the meat of the op-ed:

First, U.S. employers are not required to advertise jobs to U.S. workers and recruit them before hiring H-1B workers. Employers claim there are labor shortages of skilled workers — often despite evidence to the contrary — but are ultimately not required to test the labor market to see if this is true. Instead, they can completely bypass the U.S. workforce.

Second, the rules for H-1B visas require that those workers be paid a fair wage according to U.S. standards. However, in practice, the rules allow the majority of H-1B workers to be vastly underpaid, earning less than the true market wage for their occupation and location.

Third, the way visas are allocated is problematic: As Bloomberg reported last year, staffing companies that pay the lowest wages allowed by law easily exploit the random lottery system that allocates H-1B visas and eat up a large chunk of the 85,000 visas that are subject to the annual cap. (Another 56,000 visas were issued last year to firms that are not subject to the cap.)

Fourth, lack of federal enforcement has allowed companies to underpay H-1B workers by tens of millions of dollars. While some H-1B workers do possess rare skills that benefit the U.S. economy, most who are admitted are classified as filling entry-level jobs that do not require advanced skills. Because of visa rules, H-1B workers are placed in working arrangements akin to indentured servitude. H-1B rules ultimately subsidize the outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. jobs and even incentivize firms to directly replace their U.S. workers with H-1B workers, who can be legally underpaid compared with the market rate for local workers. Just this week, two prominent senators — Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois — penned a letter calling out the biggest tech employers for laying off thousands of U.S. workers while simultaneously hiring thousands of H-1B workers.

The emphasis is mine. He continues:

There are several clear and simple steps that the Trump administration can take to fix H-1B, if this White House is serious about improving the program and protecting workers. None of these steps involve announcing a large fee that creates chaos and uncertainty: The fee is already in effect, for instance, even though there isn’t even a process or a form yet allowing employers to pay it.

The good news is that the administration is implementing or considering two regulations that could go a long way in curbing employer abuses of the visa. One is mentioned at the end of Trump’s proclamation, which directs the Department of Labor to craft a regulation to raise wage rates for H-1B workers. If a rule is ultimately proposed and the final version requires that H-1B workers be paid at least the local median wage for their specific occupation, it would go a long way to fixing the program.

No reform of the program will succeed without enforcement and companies employing H-1B visa cannot be trusted to follow the rules on their own. My modest proposal for remedying the present debacle would be to a) pay substantial bounties to individuals who reveal H-1B workers who weren’t hired, paid, etc. in conformity with the rules; b) don’t require intent to be proven to find a company in violation; c) increase the penalty for employers violating the rules. I suggest that any employer who skirts the rules should be barred from hiring H-1B workers for five years.

None of that will be enough, either. We really need to start monitoring the use of offshored workers. We have no real notion of the scope of the problem.

I only have one question about Jason Willick’s most recent Washington Post column. Here’s the opening of the column:

President Donald Trump wants his Justice Department to stretch the criminal law to target political opponents (such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James B. Comey). President Joe Biden’s Justice Department stretched the criminal law to target political opponents, including Trump himself.

Trump’s administration pressured a company (ABC) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. Biden’s administration pressured multiple companies (including Facebook and YouTube) to suppress First Amendment-protected speech during the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump’s supporters, when confronted with this administration’s depredations against civil liberty, often argue that Democrats did it first. The tit-for-tat debate is a dead end; this is all part of the same circling of the political drain. But it’s worth highlighting one systemic difference between the “liberal” version of political repression that occurred in the early 2020s and the populist version Trump is attempting now. The liberal version was veiled and superficially neutral, while the populist version is overt and undisguisedly political.

He elaborates on it a bit but that’s the gist of the column. Here’s my question: is there actually a “lesser evil” here? Is “veiled and superficially neutral” somehow better than “overt and undisguisedly political”? I think the lesson is clear: elect more virtuous leaders who actually believe in liberty and the rule of law.

I just finished reading a transcript of the address President Trump gave to the UN General Assembly yesterday. If you are so inclined you can find it here.

I’m glad I read it rather than listening to it—it was nearly an hour long. I thought it was pretty much what I would have expected. A lot of blowing his own horn and exaggerations. A lot that was contentious, some of which I believe to have been false, some true.

Rather than fisking it, I’ll just ask some questions. First, what do you think of what he said?

Second, what do you think of the United Nations? I think that Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s characterization is even truer now than when she said it 40 years ago. The General Assembly is a “Third World debating society”. The Security Council is obsolete. At the very least four new permanent members should be added: China, India, Brazil, and Nigeria. That would make accomplishing anything through the Security Council even less likely than it is now.

Third, do you think the multiple SNAFUs were deliberate?