I don’t have much more than what amount to tweets this morning.
- The Schiff memo, like the Nunes memo before it, is a purely political document.
- I’m still content to let the Mueller investigation work its way through.
- My disinterest in the Winter Olympics, now concluded, is extreme. I didn’t watch a single event.
- Why are we supporting Nazis in Ukraine and Al Qaeda in Syria? I think we’ve lost our way.
By far the most significant news was China announcing it would amend the constitution to allow Xi Jinping to serve for life.
It throws out the framework Deng put in place 40 years ago that’s worked so well for the CCP and the Chinese; whether what replaces will be better is an open question.
I watched part of the Olympics because my wife watched them. Overall I was completely bored. The scoring in so many events seems like a black box.
Don’t know if you’ve been following, but Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex posted the first in a series of posts looking at technological unemployment. As usual, it’s very long, but he concludes there isn’t any or at least there isn’t any that we can see.
It’s been obvious for some time that Xi is the new Mao. There are all sorts of ways to interpret that from a strengthening party to a party desperately trying to hold on to power.
At the very least it should put to bed the notion that economic liberalization and growth would inevitably lead to political liberalization. How the new middle and educated class will respond to Xi’s consolidation of power is beyond my understanding.
Andy:
It’s obvious that there isn’t any technological unemployment or, at the very least, that what technological unemployment exists is so overwhelmed by unemployment due to bad policy decisions as to be inconsequential.
That the collapse of manufacturing employment in this country is a direct consequence of China’s WTO admission is also obvious.
If you haven’t already noticed more is being used to arrive at decisions in the judged events (as opposed to the timed or otherwise objectively measured events) than just the present performance. There are political implications and past performances being taken into account just to name to of the factors. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be but that’s the way it is.
“The Schiff memo, like the Nunes memo before it, is a purely political document.”
Let’s be more precise. It is a political document that was not allowed to be released until 2 weeks past the Nunes memo so that the GOP version of events would have time to settle in as the “truth”. Also, I still can’t figure out why they chose Carter Page if the goal was to destroy Trump. Why did they wait until he left the campaign to file the FISa warrant? Why choose him to begin with? I don’t remember the guy ever being that important, but then it was a difficult campaign to follow so maybe i missed something.
Steve
The passage of time makes it less political? That its release was controlled for political purposes makes it less political?
The passage of time makes it less effective. Like when a newspaper published something that is wrong, then publishes its retraction two weeks later on page 25. So, even the timing of the release was political.
Steve
Long term it strengthens Xi but less obviously weakens the party and the civilian government. Dictatorship is not compatible with ogliarchy any more then it is with democracy.
I cannot reason it out; but I intuition the odds of a Brezhnev style of stagnation have gone up a lot.
steve,
I haven’t followed these memos’ closely, I consider them to be, at best, a distraction.
However, my understanding is the GoP started the process to release their memo well before the Democrats started to the process to release theirs. Hence the GoP memo was released first and the Democrats felt obligated to respond in kind.
In other words, I don’t see any evidence that the Democratic memo was purposely not allowed to be released in order for the GoP memo to dominate a couple of news cycles.
Not that any of it matters. These memos convince no one who isn’t already in the bag for one side or the other.
They chose Carter Page because he was available. They needed some excuse. If anyone actually believes Carter Page was a Russian spy I don’t know how to help them. If the FBI did then what we have is the Keystone Cops.