My goodness. Are there still people complaining about the president’s tan suit? Give it a rest, for all that’s holy.

As I read William Galston’s WSJ column on what he perceives as fickle U. S. public opinion on foreign policy and how when the American people get what they wanted they don’t want it any more, I was left with questions.

For example, is there really a Russian invasion of Ukraine and how do we know? Is the present government in Ukraine really worthy of our support? How anti-Russian should we be?

Is the level of force we’re willing to apply in Syria or Iraq adequate to the task of eliminating ISIS/ISIL? Horrifying as the instances of beheadings of Americans by ISIS are, are they reasons for full “boots on the ground” warfare against it? Why not just take the pressure off Assad?

If you don’t like the chaos in Libya and you don’t want to occupy Libya to prevent chaos from occurring, why was removing Qaddafi a good idea?

Those aren’t exhaustive but they were the questions that immediately came to mind.

There’s an interesting case study illustrating at the WSJ illustrating why healthcare in the U. S. is so expensive. The author, a physician and a lawyer lays out the scenario:

As a doctor and a lawyer, I like to think I’m pretty good at navigating the health-care system. So when my wife and I found a large swollen bruise on our 3-year-old son’s head more than a week after he had fallen off his scooter, I was confident we could get him a CT scan at a reasonable cost.

We live near one of the top pediatric emergency rooms in the country. The care was spectacular. My son was diagnosed with a small, 11-day-old bleed inside his head, which was healing, and insignificant.

I was proud to see the health-care system working, to see academic medicine working, and most of all to see my son run as fast as he could out of the ER two hours later.

He or, rather, his insurance company received a bill for $20,000, half of which was for trauma team activation. If you don’t have access to the article, I’ll summarize it for you: he researched the bill, wrangled with the billing supervisor, and, ultimately, got the improperly levied charge for the trauma team activation removed.

The problem for most patients (or their parents) is that they aren’t physicians and lawyers, don’t have the understanding or backgrounds to make a good argument, and insurance companies don’t engage in minute examination of every bill that comes in through the transom.

There is a good lesson here, however, for why our healthcare system is so expensive:

• Facilities like the one the author found so helpful are expensive and maintaining their availability has to be billed somewhere.
• Medical bureaucracies are huge and growing. Being able to determine what and how to bill is enormously lucrative.
• Insurance doesn’t change either of those things and may even aggravate them. When insurers are paid on the basis of a percentage over outlays they have no incentive to keep outlays down.

This strikes me as a step in the right direction:

SOME of Britain’s most influential imams have condemned British Muslims fighting alongside Isis extremists in Iraq and Syria.

They have issued a fatwa, or religious decree, describing them as “heretics”.

The fatwa ”religiously prohibits” would-be British jihadists from joining “oppressive and tyrannical” Isis, also known as Islamic State. The imams order all Muslims to oppose Isis’s “poisonous ideology” , especially when it is promoted within Britain.

The fatwa, the first of its kind issued by British Muslim scholars, follows the elevation of Britain’s terror threat from substantial to severe, meaning an attack is “highly likely”.

What is going on in the Middle East is a political and, as a consequence of the history, customs, and culture of the region, religious struggle among Muslims. Many Muslims in the West have understandably wanted to maintain a low profile.

There are categories of evil so vile that they call for condemnation and ISIS certainly falls into one of them. It cannot be allowed to be thought a legitimate expression of political or religious action. What is it that Edmund Burke said?

I was marginally aware of this but staying in a hotel in the UK has really brought it home for me. In the UK newspapers are aligned with political parties. The Telegraph (AKA “the Torygraph”) is a Conservative newspaper. The Daily Mirror tends to support Labour (although Labour’s fortunes are so weak at present that it’s hard to find its friends). Other newspapers switch back and forth.

My point here is that I can walk down the hall here and get a glimpse into the political views of my fellow-guests by glancing at the newspapers they’ve had delivered to their doors.

There are big differences between here and the States. A large number of dailies appear to be thriving. And most of the major newspapers at least lean a bit to the Conservatives.

What complicates things is that both of our major political parties approximate the UK’s Conservatives. Meanwhile, the big political news here is UKIP.

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway:

King Abdullah Warns the West

Is it Europe and America that have more fear from ISIS/ISIL or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

Manufacturing output in the United States has not crashed:
I think that this remark by the author:

As a former auto engineer who saw millions of jobs lost and trillions of dollars washed down the drain, this really delights me. When I was an EDN editor I attended a presentation by Beacon Economics. This outfit was started by Chris Thornberg, the UCLA professor that predicted the 2007 housing crash in 2006. It was at this presentation that I learned that US manufacturing has never crashed, as many people popularly believe. Indeed, in dollar terms the output of US manufacturing has been on a pretty steady upward march.

It is manufacturing employment in the United States that has crashed.

What has declined is US manufacturing employment.

This is because computers and automation and robots have greatly increased the productivity of the American worker.

is incomplete. I do not think you can adequately discuss manufacturing employment in the United States without mentioning trade, monetary, environmental, or tax policy.

Addditionally, I have no problem with our as a society deciding and saying that “we don’t want more dirty, smelly, energy-intensive, polluting manufacturing in the United States”. I think that saying “we don’t want more dirty, smelly, energy-intensive, polluting manufacturing employment in the United States” without providing an alternative is immoral.

“Additive manufacturing” is the industrial version of what is referred to as “3D printing” at the personal or desktop level. It’s hitting the big time:

General Electric is making a radical departure from the way it has traditionally manufactured things. Its aviation division, the world’s largest supplier of jet engines, is preparing to produce a fuel nozzle for a new aircraft engine by printing the part with lasers rather than casting and welding the metal. The technique, known as additive manufacturing (because it builds an object by adding ultrathin layers of material one by one), could transform how GE designs and makes many of the complex parts that go into everything from gas turbines to ultrasound machines.

I don’t think that the adoption of additive manufacturing will do much for our employment situation (my main concern) but it will help our trade imbalance (a secondary concern) and that in turn may improve our employment situation at least a little.

This is what the Chinese really need to be concerned about: when intellectual property concerns, transportation costs, or just plain issues of control outweigh the very small benefits of China’s low wages for manufacturers. You can’t get any lower than zero and additive manufacturing is a big step in that direction.

You know, I generally believe that incompetence is a better explanation than malice, particularly when I’m talking about the government. That having been said the bill of particulars against the IRS really makes one wonder.

The only course of action you could take with a department of a private company that had been caught in so many lies, mistakes, actual crimes, and obfuscation would be to dissolve it and start over. The culture there precludes any manager turning it around,