David Ignatius, the Stentor of the prevailing Washington wisdom, states his preference in his Washington Post column—he doesn’t want President Biden to seek re-election. The crux of his argument appears to be that:

1. President Biden is too old and a supermajority of Americans (not just Republicans) think he is too old
2. He has no workable alternative for a running mate and Vice President Harris is even less popular than he is

concluding:

I hope Biden has this conversation with himself about whether to run, and that he levels with the country about it. It would focus the 2024 campaign. Who is the best person to stop Trump? That was the question when Biden decided to run in 2019, and it’s still the essential test of a Democratic nominee today.

Democratic Party camp follower and noted Clintonista Sidney Blumenthal on the other hand says that Democrats have no choice but for President Biden to run again in his piece in The Guardian:

The election of 2024 will be the second referendum on Trump, but the first held on the attempted coup of January 6t. Just as the 2004 election, which President George W Bush won, was in effect a referendum on the terrorist attack on September 11, the only election since 1988 in which the Republican won the popular vote, January 6 is the overwhelming political factor that establishes Trump’s assertion to his party’s nomination by means of incumbency. His forthcoming trials are not peripheral, but central to his claim.

When the illusion of a counter-factual alternative fades, and the choice is between the incumbent and the false incumbent, then Democrats may consider something other than the age of Biden and whether they wish to contribute to a new political age of Trump.

The point of disagreement between the two appears to be that Mr. Ignatius seems to believe that Joe Biden’s running for re-election will effect what Mr. Blumenthal wants to forestall by his running. One potential fly in Mr. Blumenthal’s ointment is that present evidence does not suggest that Americans, generally, share his view either of the Biden presidency or January 6.

My view is that I find it incredible that four years later the only candidate the Democratic Party seems able to produce is over 80 years old. I mean that literally. I don’t find it believable.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal intone:

After Democrats impeached President Trump over his phone call with Ukraine’s President in 2019, we wrote that “the House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely.” Well, here we are, as House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday that Republicans will open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

Unless concrete evidence of some quid for the quo can be found, I do not believe that President Biden should be impeached and certainly not removed if impeached. However, I do think that members of the president’s family if not the president himself have been engaging in influence peddling, that influence peddling is a corrupt practice, and that such corruption is as undemocratic as disorderly conduct and occupying official offices and meeting places.

I think that the available evidence leaves little doubt of that and that the best you can say about the web of shell companies that have been created and receiving emails under multiple pseudonyms is that they look bad, guilty.

If the evidence for President Biden’s knowledge of the influence-peddling is sufficient, I think there is a case for censuring him whether he is guilty of breaking the law or not.

Here’s an interesting finding. The hydroxyl radical isn’t formed in the atmosphere the way that was thought. From The Brighter Side:

Scientists have made a groundbreaking discovery that could change the way we think about air pollution. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that a strong electric field between airborne water droplets and surrounding air can create a molecule called hydroxide (OH) by a previously unknown mechanism.

This molecule is crucial in helping to clear the air of pollutants, including greenhouse gases and other chemicals.

Hydroxide is known to affect the methane lifetime. This finding is bound to affect climate models in ways I can’t even speculate on.

Here’s a bit of good news reported by Carly Cassella at ScienceAlert:

An ancient supervolcano in the United States may be hiding the largest deposit of lithium found anywhere in the world.

A new study hypothesizes that the McDermitt Caldera, which sits on the border between Nevada and Oregon, contains more than double the concentration of lithium seen in any other bed of clay globally, around 20 to 40 million metric tons in total.

As should not be surprising there is some controversy:

Many scientists, environmentalists, ranchers, and First Nations people are concerned by the US government’s recent decision to approve the Thacker Pass Lithium mine in the McDermitt Caldera, which sits on land that is sacred to several Indigenous tribes and contains precious wildlife habitats.

The project is owned by a subsidiary of Canadian company Lithium Americas whose largest shareholder is Ganfeng, a Chinese company tied directly to the CCP.

Don’t underestimate our ability to screw this up.

The graph above was sampled from this analysis by engineering prof Mark Mills.

I’ve said before that there is no Moore’s Law for battery technology and this graph is a good illustration of that. The present trend in lithium battery energy density is very slow, nearly flat. Maybe it will change. Lithium batteries are not the only technology. Maybe some other technology will come along.

I thought that this development deserved more attention. Google is facing an anti-trust suit. Dave Michaels reports at the Wall Street Journal:

Google, the country’s dominant search engine, faces its biggest legal threat ever this week when the company goes on civil trial in Washington on allegations of violating U.S. antitrust laws.

The Justice Department’s case is aimed at Google search, and whether the company has used illegal agreements to sideline its rivals and harmed consumers and advertisers in the process. Google pays billions of dollars to Apple, for example, to be the default search engine on the Safari browser.

Alphabet-owned Google grew up during an era of more relaxed antitrust enforcement, particularly against technology companies that developed innovative—and often free—ways to explore and use the internet. Efforts to regulate Google and other technology giants have failed to advance in Congress in recent years. In the absence of such rules, the government is trying to use antitrust law to govern competition on the web and put curbs on the internet’s gatekeepers. Here are some crucial questions about the biggest U.S. antitrust trial since the government challenged Microsoft more than 20 years ago.

while at NPR Dara Kerr remarks:

The case against Google focuses on the company paying billions of dollars each year for exclusive agreements with phone makers, like Apple and Samsung, and web browsers, like Mozilla, which runs Firefox.

Those agreements let Google be the default search engine on most devices. The Justice Department say that by securing this position, Google has been able to box out smaller rivals.

DuckDuckGo is one of those smaller rivals. It has centered its search business around privacy and ensuring users aren’t tracked — unlike Google, which has long tracked users for targeted advertising. Kamyl Bazbaz, DuckDuckGo’s vice president of public affairs, says she’s glad this case is headed to trial.

“Google has used its monopoly power to block meaningful competition in the search market by putting a stranglehold on major distribution points for more than a decade,” Bazbaz wrote in an email. “So even though DuckDuckGo provides something extremely valuable that people want and Google won’t provide — real privacy — Google makes it unduly difficult to use DuckDuckGo by default.”

The key point is that being a monopoly is not illegal but using your monopoly to extend or preserve your monopoly is.

I don’t know whether the United States has a basis for this suit or how it will turn out. We’ll know in several months. They say three but I have my doubts. My own view is that I think that Congress has been remiss and the business model used by Google (and Meta and others) should be outlawed on privacy grounds.

I don’t know how much of this suit is rent-seeking and how much is a shot across the bow but some of both of those are bound to be the case.

What struck me in Robert Kelly’s argument in 1945 that Ukraine will ultimately prevail militarily in its war against Russia was this passage:

Ukraine is slowly being well-equipped by the West, while Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel by soliciting the North Koreans for help. Sanctions on Russia make it hard to reconstitute its forces with modern weapons. And Ukraine’s will to fight is high, where Russia has had to rely on conscription.

Leaving the “well-equipped by the West” portion for a later post, I was surprised by his using a reliance on conscription as a measure of will. Not only do both Russia and Ukraine employ conscription to staff their armies, I have seen it claimed that both Ukraine and Russia are exploiting conscription as a sort of backdoor ethnic cleansing, Ukraine of ethnic Russians, Russia of Crimean Tatars.

I don’t know how to verify or refute either of those claims confidently but they are certainly interesting.

To my eye the most significant passage in Anatol Lieven’s post at Responsible Stateraft is this:

Instead of a Communist-led nationalist movement to reunify Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communists were portrayed as a force that could start toppling a row of “dominoes” that would end with Communist victory in France and Mexico. Instead of a tinpot regional dictator, Saddam Hussein became a nuclear menace to the U.S. homeland. The Taliban, an entirely Afghan force, supposedly had to be fought in Afghanistan so that we would not need to fight them in the United States.

And today, U.S. officials in their rhetoric somehow manage to combine the supposed beliefs both that Russia is so weak that Ukraine can completely defeat the Russian army and catastrophically undermine the Russian state, and that Russia is so strong that if not defeated in Ukraine it will pose a mortal threat to NATO and freedom around the world.

On the surface that appears to be a very severe case of cognitive dissonance. Or is it possible for Russia to be weak enough it can be defeated on the ground by Ukraine but strong enough that it poses a threat to all of Europe?

It is undoubtedly a case of forgetting. We are forgetting Vietnam. We are forgetting Iraq. We are forgetting Afghanistan. We are forgetting 9/11.

I wonder if the South Side voters who voted for Mayor Johnson expected him to set up tent cities for migrants in their neighborhoods. Based on their reactions I expect not.

Perhaps it’s ghoulish of me but I couldn’t help but notice that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his New York Times op-ed on fixing our immigration system identifies the influx of migrants crossing our southern border as a crisis. The message is clear. When too many migrants cross our southern border into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, it’s a curiosity. When there are too many migrants in New York City, it’s a crisis. Here’s his statement of the problem:

We have a system that essentially allows an unlimited number of people to cross our borders, forbids them from working, offers them free housing, and grants them seven years of residency before ruling on whether they can legally stay. It would be hard to devise a more backward and self-defeating system.

which is a jumble of failures of national policy and problems local to New York. While I’m in broad agreement that our system needs revision and that there is a crisis, I’m not entirely in agreement with his arguments which are a combination of the persistence theory and an appeal to emotion or his proposals which, while reasonable enough, do not appear to me to be a crisis response. He proposes that the federal government appropriate enough money to handle the influx, allow the migrants to work immediately, and pay for their shelter, food, etc. until they can pay their own way. I challenge Mayor Bloomberg to prove their is a grave demand for workers without college educations. I do not believe there is such demand and his proposal has a serious moral hazard problem.

My response to the crisis at our southern border would be to send our military to the border to control it including enough JAG officers to adjudicate the asylum claims and handle them immediately. Mayor Bloomberg is right about one thing: the preponderance of people coming across our southern border are fleeing poverty and gang violence which are not legitimate causes for asylum. Undoubtedly, that’s why the overall percentage of asylum claims granted is under 50%. The job-seekers impede our ability to handle the claims of people fleeing political and religious persecution which are legitimate causes for asylum.