I encourage you to read this New Yorker interview of Samuel Charap by Keith Gessen. Sample passage:

Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, goes further. “Fighting for every last inch of Ukrainian territory,” he told me, is “morally justified. It’s legally justified. But I’m not sure that it makes a lot of strategic sense from Ukraine’s perspective, or from our perspective, or from the perspective of the people in the Global South who are suffering food and energy shortages.” He said that the U.S. Administration needs to let the Ukrainian counter-offensive play out. But at the end of this year, or maybe early in 2024, it will have to talk with Zelensky about negotiations. “I wouldn’t say, ‘You do this or we’re going to turn off the spigot.’ But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what’s in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion.”

At the Wall Street Journal Joseph Epstein makes what to my eye is the suggestion of the day: Trumpless Thursday:

During the rationing days of World War II, there was the weekly event called Meatless Tuesday. To save meat for the troops, civilians were asked to cut it from their diets one day each week. I don’t remember anyone complaining about it. It was considered an act of patriotism. Everyone, as far as I knew, went along with it.

With Meatless Tuesday in mind, I wonder if the country wouldn’t do well to declare Trumpless Thursday. This would entail an agreement on the part of all media—television, radio and print—not to run any items about Donald Trump, show his face on screen or in photographs on Thursday of every week. The country would be given a weekly 24-hour rest from Trump talk.

I think we could use the rest.

The editors of the Washington Post make a good point about Elon Musk’s StarLink satellites and service. They provide a lot of power for one individual to hold. Shouldn’t the federal government act?

What’s to be done? While a president theoretically has the legal option of nationalizing Starlink in a worst-case scenario, as Woodrow Wilson did with the country’s railroads during World War I, that would be neither politically popular nor prudent. A better solution might be for the United States to try to build satellites of its own. The $1.5 billion contract the Pentagon awarded last week to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to create a low-orbit satellite constellation is the start of such a strategy.

At least in theory the Outer Space Treaty allows the United States to regulate private use of space by its citizens but it is not self-enforcing. I think I would argue that U. S. contracts with SpaceX are de facto authorization of its actions. I’m not sure what the WaPo’s proposal would accomplish.

Furthermore, I question the relevance and legality of their other proposal—nationalizing StarLink. To the best of my knowledge Wilson’s nationalizing the railroads was never tested in court. Would nationalizing the railroads be constitutional? I can think of a number of grounds on which to challenge it. And there’s a big difference between railroads and StarLink: U. S. railroads ran entirely within U. S. territory.

The real problem is Mr. Musk’s ability to affect foreign policy. Every CEO of every large company does that every day. It’s a bit late to start worrying about it now.

Today is Mamie’s sixth birthday. With Kara gone she’s the dowager of the pack!

Like all Aussies Mamie likes things to be very orderly, just so. She tolerates our disorderliness, sometimes not with particularly good grace.

Scott Sumner reminds us that economic fundamentals still apply in a piece at Econlib:

1. Price controls are bad (whether on wages, prices rents or interest rates.)
2. Large budget deficits are bad, even if interest rates are low at the time.
3. Persistent inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
4. Free market economies do better than statist economies. Emulate Denmark, not Argentina.

I don’t think he means that last sentence. At least I hope so or that he means it only in part. Denmark is 86% ethnic Danish (down from 96% 50 years ago). The United States has never been 86% anything including American.

In the piece he provides some good examples of how those thing are true along with this observation:

But what about global warming? Didn’t something need to be done? Here it’s worth noting that the approach most favored by economists (a carbon tax) would have actually reduced our budget deficit. That would have been the logical approach. Instead we went with a set of open ended subsidies that boosted the budget deficit. Even worse, we favored local producers over imports, even if imported goods could address global warming more effectively. We were told that global warming was such a big problem that we could no longer rely on a free market economy, but then implemented mercantilist policies that prioritized subsidizing domestic special interest groups over addressing global warming.

Apparently global warming was merely a pretext for industrial policies that were being implemented for other reasons.

That’s my problem with today’s politics generally. A tremendous number of things are being advocated for reasons other than their own merits and possibly for personal gain. Some deviate so far from their own merits one can hardly escape concluding they’re being espoused for gain.

It is becoming nearly impossible to question any policy of the present administration. When you do so, there is an all-purpose response: what about Trump?

IMO major factors in Trump’s rise to power have been disgust with the political establishment and civil bureaucracy. Why are people surprised that Trump’s legal woes have not discouraged his supporters much? Why should they? His legal woes are his 2024 campaign.

Today I have read articles claiming that Ukraine is on the verge of triumph in the war against Russian aggression and that it’s on the brink of defeat. I don’t see how both can be true simultaneously. Just too simple-minded, I guess.

I have also read claims that Putin is wily genius and that he’s a blundering fool. Again, I have no idea how these opposite views are maintained simultaneously.

For my part I have no idea what is going on in Ukraine and I do not understand the thinking of the Kremlin’s inner circle.

or at least too big to understand. Although he is undoubtedly better informed than I, I disagree with Edward Luttwak’s claim that Xi Jinping has bankrupted China and China’s economy is on the very of collapse. He does provide some interesting examples:

How do wonderful infrastructures destroy wealth? One example is sufficient. In 2018, on a drive along the North Korea border, I encountered a vast and beautiful white six-lane highway suspension bridge across the Yalu river. It was built to connect the Chinese city of Dandong with North Korea, to service the trade boom Xi expected with the promised opening of the North’s economy. Naturally, it would require a customs house, duly built as a very impressive high-rise, warehouses and more than 10 blocks of commercial offices. Yet when I visited, the bridge ended in a North Korean potato field, traffic was exactly zero, the customs house was empty and so were the office blocks and warehouses, some paid for by private border merchants who were bankrupt when I met them in Dandong (they openly cursed Xi for going along with the US-sponsored Security Council Embargo).

Savings that could have enriched many Chinese citizens, including the 180 million officially counted as “very poor” and the further 300 million or so still trapped in poverty, were instead wasted on the Yalu bridge complex, with uncountably greater waste on infrastructure all across China.

I am quite confident that China is virtually littered with bridges to nowhere, highways that remain unused, and apartments that will collapse before they are occupied. Those are completely foreseeable consequences of the web of incentives that the central government has imposed on or provided to local governments and private companies in China.

Still, as Adam Smith observed 300 years ago, there is a great deal of ruin in a country and, as the world’s most populous (or second more populous) country, China has more than most.

My own suspicion is that contrary to what many experts are saying, China will survive its slowing economy. What will actually happen may be even worse than collapse. I think that China, like the Soviet Union before it, “grew its economy”, to use Bill Clinton’s infelicitous phrase by transferring relatively none productive labor resources from agriculture to manufacturing. The Chinese authorities were more skilled than the Soviet; China has managed the feat without reducing agricultural production. Still, that’s a strategy that can only go so far and in China it has now run its course.

The Chinese authorities have put a number of short-sighted policies in place whose full impact will be seen in due course. Not just the “One Child Policy”. An over-reliance on factory jobs for which the preferred workers are woman of childbearing age will have long-lasting effects as well. China also appears to be following a pattern seen in many developing countries in which most people with college educations are employed by the government. When the government does not need as many people with college educations as are being produced what will they do?

Don’t be too smug. Here we’re even crueler—we arrange things so many young people with college educations will never earn enough to escape their debts and lower entry-level wages by exporting jobs while importing a labor force.

Ruy Teixeira lists some propositions he deems commonsensical ones with the polling data to support them:

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not. (73 percent agree/13 percent disagree)
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country. (81 percent agree/14 percent disagree)
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society. (70 percent agree/24 percent disagree)
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair. (77 percent agree/15 percent disagree)
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country. (78 percent agree/14 percent disagree)
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. More and better policing is needed for public safety and that cannot be provided by “defunding the police.” (79 percent agree/15 percent disagree)
• There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong. (82 percent agree/12 percent disagree)
• There are basically two genders, but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and far from settled. (73 percent agree/17 percent disagree)
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races. (74 percent agree/16 percent disagree)
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith. (76 percent agree/14 percetn disagree)

along with an eleventh for which he does not have polling data:

• Climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an “all of the above” strategy, energy must continue to be cheap, reliable and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

I agree with all of those and I would venture to say that a majority of people in both political parties do. Maybe I’m kidding myself but the polling data certainly suggests I’m not.

He then asks two questions. How comfortable would most Democratic Party politicians be in endorsing the full range of those positions? How about Joe Biden?

I would say they would be extremely uncomfortable and I believe I know why. The views they dare to articulate are not the views of the people they notionally serve but the views of people who contribute to political campaigns or work in campaign organizations and those people are much more radical than most Americans. There is little likelihood of that changing. At least not peacefully.