Now that the House has passed a Ukraine aid bill and its passage in the Senate seems assured, it appears that the insufficiency of U. S. aid will decline as a likely excuse for Ukraine’s ability to retake territory that Russia has seized from it over the course of their now two year war. However, as Robert Clarke observes at RealClearDefense:

While complex and advanced systems like tanks, armored personnel carriers, and sophisticated anti-air weapons are important for Ukraine’s ability to fight back, the United States is struggling just to produce enough of the relatively simple artillery ammunition that Kyiv relies on to push back Russian front lines. In early 2023, American factories were producing just over 3,000 155mm artillery shells a month. As Ukraine’s needs became more apparent, factories surged production — working overtime to up production to 28,000 a month, or 336,000 a year. Ukraine fired 6,000 shells a day during its counteroffensive, and could need over 2,100,000 shells a year to maintain the kind of high intensity effort that failed to push back Russian forces last year. These hard realities lead many to question the feasibility of Ukraine retaking the rest of their territory from Russia.

Taking old inventories of munitions off the shelf is one thing. Producing new munitions at the enormous pace at which Ukraine is expending them is something else again. That doesn’t simply require funding. It requires entire supply chains.

Deindustrialization, demilitarization, and consolidation have their costs. We could transition to a wartime footing and start rebuilding our capacity but that, too, would take time and would entail such pain that it’s unlikely to happen in an election year.

I wonder what excuse we’ll use now?

I encourage you to read Daniel Bessner’s article at Harper’s Magazine, “The Life and Death of Hollywood”. In it he crafts a narrative of an industry in which there was a Golden Age of “prestige television”, roughly 1995-2015, during which:

TV had become a place for sharp wit, singular voices, people with vision—and they were getting paid.

It was the era of Frasier, The West Wing, Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. The article has a considerable amount of information about Hollywood’s structure and inner workings. He attributes the decline from the heights of 20 years ago to a number of factors:

• Consolidation
• Deregulation
• Financialization
• Pursuit of international audiences
• Changes in how the product was produced

But the business of Hollywood had undergone a foundational change. The new effective bosses of the industry—colossal conglomerates, asset-management companies, and private-equity firms—had not been simply pushing workers too hard and grabbing more than their fair share of the profits. They had been stripping value from the production system like copper pipes from a house—threatening the sustainability of the studios themselves. Today’s business side does not have a necessary vested interest in “the business”—in the health of what we think of as Hollywood, a place and system in which creativity is exchanged for capital. The union wins did not begin to address this fundamental problem.

Currently, the machine is sputtering, running on fumes. According to research by Bloomberg, in 2013 the largest companies in film and television were more than $20 billion in the black; by 2022, that number had fallen by roughly half. From 2021 to 2022, revenue growth for the industry dropped by almost 50 percent. At U.S. box offices, by the end of last year, revenue was down 22 percent from 2019. Experts estimate that cable-television revenue has fallen 40 percent since 2015. Streaming has rarely been profitable at all. Until very recently, Netflix was the sole platform to make money; among the other companies with streaming services, only Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms may have eked out a profit last year.

His prescriptions are, somewhat unsurprisingly, given his analysis of the problem for the federal government to step in and break up the media conglomerates and for reregulation to prevent their re-establishing themselves. I would completely agree with one of his prescriptions: actual creators (rather than the companies that employ creators) should hold full copyrights to their works. I would add that I believe the terms of such copyrights should be for 25 years or until the natural death of the creator, whichever comes first.

While the author’s contribution is valuable, I think he’s ignoring some fundamentals. First, supply and demand. When the first screenwriters union was founded in 1921 there were fewer than 20 members. The relatively small number of screenwriters remained the norm for decades. Today the Writers Guild of America has more than 10,000 members.

Second, Hollywood is obsessed with making pictures that Americans don’t want to see. Rather I think they’re making the pictures they want to make with the stories they want to tell and the messages they want to send. When they make pictures that Americans do want to see, e.g. Barbie and Top Gun: Maverick, they do well and people are even willing to go to the theater to see them.

Third, when you can make a quality production with an iPhone and a personal computer and whose production costs can be crowdsourced I think that Hollywood is doomed. The only thing keeping it afloat is a lock on distribution and streaming is weakening that lock.

Finally, when everything is a spin-off, reboot, remake or otherwise derived from something made before and smart, creative dialogue is actually an impediment to the work’s being suitable for the overseas market, generative artificial intelligence might actually be a better fit for writing those works than real live writers.

Eric Hill gives us his formula for Ukrainian victory in 2025 at The Hill:

When it comes to military aid, the top priority must be to provide Ukraine with more air defense missiles and artillery shells. Russian assault groups have rushed toward the frontline with infantry-laden vehicles in an effort to break through Ukraine’s defenses. Ukraine needs responsive and heavy artillery fire to defend against this onslaught. Providing Ukraine with around $2.5 billion for artillery shells would enable it to sustain its defenses; $7 billion would allow its armed forces to stage substantial counter-offensives.

Additionally, long-range weapons will counter Russia’s firepower advantage by allowing Ukraine to target artillery pieces and ammunition depots behind the frontlines. Ukraine has done this successfully before. In 2022 and again in 2023 Ukraine used a handful of Western-supplied HIMARs to strike Russian depots, supply lines and command centers.

To win, Ukraine will also need large quantities of tanks and mechanized vehicles. If Ukraine is to win the war, it will not be in a single offensive, but rather through a series of smaller offensives, each of which build on the others.

Without belaboring the point too much what he’s proposing exceeds our capacity. We don’t produce that many munitions. There is no real prospect for our producing that many. Do we actually have the ships to deliver that many?

I also have an uncomfortable question. Do the Ukrainians have enough artillery crews at this point to fire that many? You can’t just call for more from Artillery Crews-R-Us. And you can’t draft a green kid and put him to work immediately firing artillery pieces.

Additionally, he’s assuming that the Russians wouldn’t respond to such an increase.

I wanted to share Mike Kerrigan’s poignant words from the Wall Street Journal about his nightly ritual with his elderly blind, deaf Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Rudy:

After dinner my ailing dog and I sit together. I play songs that remind me of him, hoping they won’t be impossible to enjoy when he’s gone. Sometimes it’s Neil Young’s “Old Man”; less often it’s the poignant “Feed Jake” by Pirates of the Mississippi. I hold Rudy close before taking him to bed.

Strangely, this routine has calmed me at least as much as it has Rudy, for our time together reminds me of something important: Whether life is long or short, all anyone possesses is the present, and all that matters is what is done in it. In that precious moment, the Old Man simply basks in love.

What a wonderful way to go through life—choosing to give and receive love, both acts of the will, in every moment. For me, what a triumphal reminder that the source and summit of the created universe is the perpetual presence not simply of something loving, but of Love itself.

It certainly rings true for me. I sleep with an Australian Shepherd at my head and another at my feet every night. I’m not sure who’s comforting whom.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius provides his rather counter-intuitive, at least to me, explanation for Israel’s restrained response to Iran’s barrage last week:

Here’s my take: Israel is behaving like the leader of a regional coalition against Iran. In its measured response, it appeared to be weighing the interests of its allies in this coalition — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan — which all provided quiet help in last weekend’s shoot-down. It’s playing the long game, in other words.

This would amount to a paradigm shift for Israel. Rather than seeing itself as the embattled Jewish state fighting alone for its survival against a phalanx of Arab and Muslim enemies, Israel knows that it has allies. Top of the list, as always, is the United States. But America is joined by Arab states that oppose Iran and its proxies as much as the Israelis do.

Is he right or is that just a vivid imagination? I have no idea. I guess time will tell.

What I found interesting was the participation of Jordan and, perhaps, Saudi Arabia in Israel’s air defense from the barrage. It stood in stark contrast to, for example, Jordan’s Queen Rania’s harsh words against Israel and “the West”. In its entirety it reminds me of the flag of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. Say one thing to pacify the “Arab street”; do another to pursue your actual interests. In its way I suppose that supports Mr. Ignatius’s speculations.

The editors of the Washington Post, prudently, come down on the side of those wanting to be able to ban unregulated camping in public spaces:

Of the 653,000 people who experience homelessness in the United States, 41 percent live in the nine westernmost states, according to the most recent federal survey. That includes the five states with the highest rates of unsheltered people. There are many reasons for this, from patterns of poverty and drug addiction to the benign weather in California — 68 percent of whose 181,000 homeless people were unsheltered, more than any other state. A little-known but crucial factor, however, is that all these states are under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, whose unique legal doctrine has effectively barred most enforcement of local public camping bans.

Though started with good intentions — to prevent “criminalization” of poverty and to incentivize cities to offer shelters — the 9th Circuit approach has shown itself to be counterproductive. Without a credible threat of sanctions against public camping, officials have little leverage to induce people to take shelter beds when they are available. Arguably, this has undermined quality of life not only for those who live or work near unsafe encampments but also for the homeless people themselves.

That’s why a broad bipartisan coalition including leaders from big blue cities and small red towns in the 9th Circuit, and elsewhere, is begging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Grants Pass, Ore., a small city in the south of the state whose civil fines for public camping were invalidated last year by the 9th Circuit. Oral argument is Monday, and we, too, hope the justices side with Grants Pass.

I don’t know why the 9th Circuit made the decision that it did but I do believe that it got out of its lane in doing so. The courts should be deciding what the law is rather than what it should be or what policy should be.

It must be difficult navigating Nicholas Kristof’s world. Judging by his New York Times column not only does he contend against imaginary, fantastical Israels and Gazas but a fantasy Joe Biden as well:

During the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago, then-Senator Joe Biden passionately denounced then-President George W. Bush for failing to act decisively to ease suffering. Biden expressed outrage at China for selling weapons used to kill and maim civilians, and he urged me to write columns demanding the White House end needless wretchedness.

Darfur and Gaza are very different, of course, but I recall the senator’s compassion and urgency — and I wonder, where has that Joe Biden gone?

Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign — and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.

The only way it could “draw in the United States” is if we inserted ourselves into it. We have no defense treaty with Israel nor should we have. The entire source of Mr. Kristof’s fantasy Biden is in this phrase: “Darfur and Gaza are very different”. One of the things on which Joe Biden has been consistent is his full-throated support of Israel.

If, like me, you suspect that Biden’s support for Israel has been a matter of political expedience rather than conviction, the conundrum in which Mr. Biden and, more importantly, the Biden campaign find themselves becomes clearer. They are caught between the Scylla of Jewish support and the Charybdis of Muslim and progressive support.

I think that Joseph C. Sternberg misses some very important factors in his latest Wall Street Journal column critiquing the Federal Reserve:

Jerome Powell owes us an explanation. The Federal Reserve chairman this week confirmed what investors already had guessed: Surprisingly persistent inflation is dissuading the Fed from cutting its short-term policy rate as soon and perhaps as quickly as Wall Street had hoped.

It’s the right call. The Fed committed its worst error in 40 years when it acted far too slowly to tame inflation following the pandemic. Its institutional credibility—on which hangs a lot in a fiat-money system—now depends on Mr. Powell’s success in suppressing that inflation.

The problem is that the central bank keeps making new versions of the same old mistake, granted with a better policy outcome this time around. It’s still getting its inflation forecasts badly wrong and then acting on those forecasts in ways that exacerbate confusion in markets and the broader economy.

concluding:

While we wait, Mr. Powell needs to make policy today. What to do? Note here that one of the things that makes the Fed’s broken economic models so embarrassing is that the central bank keeps talking about them. Predictions are central to the Fed’s forward guidance—the press conferences, wordy policy statements and quarterly dot plots about future interest rates by which the Fed seeks to guide financial markets. Were it not for all this forward guidance, we wouldn’t know what the central bank’s models have been erroneously predicting in recent years.

Mr. Powell increasingly acts as if he understands this. One of his achievements over the past year has been to convince markets that concrete new data points such as the recent inflation uptick matter more to the Fed than the often bogus projections spit out by its computers. Yet the Powell Fed still relies on forward guidance to an unhealthy degree, a legacy of the Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen eras. To adapt the old saw, perhaps if you don’t have something right to say, don’t say anything.

The first factor is that unlike the situation in, say, the early 1980s, monetary policy and fiscal policy are working at cross-purposes. That’s not unusual—it’s almost always the case. What was unusual is that in the 1980s that was not the case. The second factor is closely related to that one: the markets expected and expect a spending spree, i.e. monetary and fiscal policy will continue to work at cross-purposes.

The third factor is how different circumstances are now than they were in the 1980s, so different that I’m not sure how anyone could realistically expect Fed actions to have the same effects in the same timeframe as they did then. Just to cite one example of the differences in 1980 there were 192 banks with assets over $1 billion and more than 12,000 with assets less than $100 million. Now there are 250 with assets of $6 billion or more and about 4,500 banks in total. Banking has seen enormous consolidation over the last 40 years.

That isn’t the only difference. In 1980 the ratio of debt to GDP was about 30%; now it’s around 120%. Empirically, that has been demonstrated to make a significant difference in an economy’s performance. What effect does that level of debt overhang have on the Federal Reserve’s ability to control inflation with interest rates? We can guess but we don’t really know.

The last factor I want to mention is that inflation is a lagging indicator. Here’s a graph of the M2 money supply over time:

M0 is money in circulation plus commercial bank reserve balances. From the Richmond Federal Reserve:

M1 is defined as the sum of currency in circulation, demand deposits at commercial banks, and other liquid deposits; it is often referred to as “narrow money.” M2 is everything included in M1 plus savings accounts, time deposits (under $100,000), and retail money market funds. M3 is everything in M2 plus larger time deposits and institutional money market funds. (Because the cost of estimating M3 was thought to outweigh its value, the Fed stopped reporting it in 2006.)

What do you see when you look at the graph above keeping in mind that inflation is a lagging indicator? I conclude that the inflation that began to show up in the first quarter of 2021 was probably a consequence of the spending in excess of aggregate product in 2020. And we kept spending in excess of the increase in aggregate product. We’re still doing it.

I could go on listing factors. It’s a wonder that the Fed’s models reflect the behavior of the real economy at all.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Michael O’Hanlon considers the question I asked earlier this week—what would it take for Ukraine to win in its war with Russia? He proposes a counter-offensive consisting of what is essentially a “human wave attack” against a particular point (unspecified) in the Russian lines. I have no basis for assessing the prudence of such a course of action in the absence of air superiority, something not considered by Mr. O’Hanlon, either. Here’s his analysis:

Popular lore notwithstanding, an offense does not need a 3-to-1 advantage in manpower or equipment across a whole military theater to have a good chance of success. But when attacking a prepared defense head-on, that kind of superiority is probably needed in the place where the army attempts to break through.

At or near this vicinity, Russia could be expected to have 40,000 to 50,000 troops within weapons range, or able to get there within a few hours — about 10 percent of the half a million troops it now has stationed along its 600-mile front line. To give itself a 3-to-1 advantage, Ukraine would need about 150,000 troops — at least 100,000 more than it would normally have along such a short length of front.

If Ukrainian troops punched through Russian lines, they could then work to widen the breakthrough corridor and penetrate farther. Eventually, they would look for an opportunity to encircle and cut off all the Russian forces holding Ukrainian land to the west of the breakthrough corridor — up to a quarter million Russian troops.

At this point, geography and topography would favor Ukraine, as it could attack Russian forces from behind. However, Ukraine still would probably not wish to fight Russia with less than an equal number of troops, and this means it would want at least 250,000 troops of its own (including the 150,000 deployed in the breakthrough). Some of these soldiers might be found by thinning out Ukrainian front-line positions elsewhere. But most will need to be fresh recruits or draftees. Ukraine’s current military strength of a little under 1 million troops would need to increase by at least 200,000 (and maybe even more, should Russia further strengthen its forces in Ukraine prior to a Ukrainian attack).

That’s a long-winded way of saying that Ukraine doesn’t have the soldiers it would need to carry out such a campaign. Where would it get them? By expanding conscription? That may be easier to say than accomplish. Millions of presently sub-draft age Ukrainian men have already left Ukraine. Furthermore, sending raw, notionally trained troops into frontal assaults against enemy lines with plenty of opportunity to fortify them is a formula for mass slaughter.

Do the NATO countries severally or corporately have the production capability to provide the munitions required for such a force? The existing evidence suggests not.