I found these statistics in Freddie deBoer’s most recent post interesting:

The first, obvious answer is that people don’t want simply to create, but to make a living creating, to create as a profession. And this is vastly more difficult to achieve. Making a living on Etsy is notoriously difficult, with about 90% of Etsy stores earning less than $400 a month. Estimates for payouts for a thousand views on YouTube are around $18 dollars; less than 12% of videos even reach that threshold. 90% of Twitch’s users stream to six average viewers or less, and a quarter of even the top 10,000 highest-paid accounts make less than minimum wage. The average OnlyFans account earns just $150 a month. It’s estimated that 99% of podcasts make no profit. 98.6% of Spotify artists make an average of just $36 a quarter. On Patreon, a platform that creators of all kinds use to monetize their work, less than 2% of users make even the federal monthly minimum wage. I have no numbers for Substack, but we can be sure that it’s a similar trend. That’s because the creator economy follows a power law distribution; the vast majority of people in it get tiny amounts of money and attention, while a small sliver of users are handsomely rewarded with both. Any individual creator might become one of the winners. But at scale, almost everyone is going to fail. The growing number of people who are hungry to get rich in the creator economy—who believe themselves to be deserving of success by dint of their education and hard work—coupled with the awareness that almost all of them will fail is an example of elite overproduction. We have an artistic class which is predominantly made up of people who enjoy none of the financial rewards afforded to artists.

Here’s another statistic. You’ve got to be in the top 3% of Youtube creators to receive more than $16,800 in ad revenue. And it’s practically impossible to reach that level. Again, power law—early movers garner most of the views.

Of course except for a relatively tiny sliver of time there were few “financial rewards afforded to artists”. If you had a wealthy patron, you got paid. Otherwise there was nothing. Shakespeare wasn’t poor but he wasn’t wealthy, either, and he was basically at the top of his profession of playwright, theatrical producer, and actor. Rembrandt had money from commissions and was paid as a teacher. He earned on the high end for skilled craftsman at the time but he was far from wealthy. But for his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have starved.

Most of the post is about “elite overproduction”. IMO most of the discussion has it completely backwards. I think that holding out college educations as the key to prosperous, fulfilling careers is cruel. It’s cargo cult thinking. Fifty years ago college educations were pre-professional or pre-managerial training. A college degree was largely a signifier that you were prepared to assume a role in the professional class and a significant part of the college experience was making contacts among other young people who were part of the professional class.

However, the ranks of professionals are still limited to a relatively tiny 14% of the population while we’re trying to give half of the population college degrees. No wonder there are so many dissatisfied young people. Saddled with debts they’ll never pay off, unable to make a living in their chosen fields, no real prospect for ever doing so.

The 51st Iditarod has begun! If you’re wondering why the first musher to start was issued bib #2, #1 was issued to four-time Iditarod winner, the late Lance Mackey, who died this year at the too-young age of 52.

The number of mushers participating this year is 34, the lowest since the race started 51 years ago. The low number of entries is attributed to costs, inflation, and dwindling sponsorship.

I want to commend Peter Nimitz’s lengthy history of Ukraine to your attention:

History is a complex tapestry with many threads, and is constantly rewoven. Sometimes threads decay and disappear. Other times old threads are strengthened. Some threads are ripped out, and replaced with new threads. The shapes made on the tapestry are usually agreed upon, but the story they tell is usually disputed.

To understand the roots of the Donbass Wars and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, one must first identify the important historical threads. Some such as the recent growth of Protestantism in Ukraine are quite new. Others are very old, and to understand them one must go back deep in the past.

I found it fair, balanced, and amazingly complete given that it’s only a couple of thousand words long. The TL;DR version is:

• Many countries and people have ruled the territory within Ukraine’s present borders over the last thousand years or so including Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the Turks, the Mongols, and the Greeks.
• Prior to 1954 no country with borders approximating those of present day Ukraine had ever existed.
• Without substantial ethnic cleansing bringing peace and order to eastern Ukraine within a united Ukraine is unlikely.

You will find more infographics at Statista
The chart above illustrates how much aid the largest donating countries have provided to aid the Ukrainians in their defense against Russia. But what about aid as a percentage of donor GDP (I hear someone ask)?
You will find more infographics at Statista
That chart tells a clearer story. Aid is proportional to how threatening countries deem the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right up at the top are Baltic countries, then Poland. Slightly below that are the United States and the United Kingdom. Where, you say, is Germany? Where, indeed. The German commitment has been around .17% of GDP.

My interpretation of that is that the Germans are shrewd. The more we provide, the more it allows them to reduce their aid.

This post was inspired by a remark in comments to the effect that Americans, conservatives in particular but I think it applies to Americans in general, are not patriotic because they are not “willing to fight/risk one’s life to defend the country”. Let me state my thesis first and then I’ll return to it to build my case.

My thesis is that

1. U. S. foreign policy should be focused on defending the United States and keeping it secure
2. We don’t really face any foreign threats. Actually, we’re our own worst enemy

I think that we haven’t actually had a need to defend the U. S. in 150 years, since the American Civil War. Let’s work backwards. Pretty obviously, we are not defending the United States by our activities in Syria which are ongoing at present. How do I know that? Let’s define “victory”. You have achieved victory in war when you accomplish the political goals of the war.

What were the objectives of the war in Afghanistan? I would say its objectives were to

1. Eject Al Qaeda from the country
2. Install a government there that would be an ally of the U. S. and would not support Al Qaeda

We failed at both of those objectives. Consequently, we lost the war in Afghanistan. If the intention of those objectives in Afghanistan was to defend the United States, does it not follow that, since we are not experiencing attacks from Al Qaeda on the U. S. homeland, that either we failed in defending the United States in the war in Afghanistan or that defending the U. S. was irrelevant to our objectives in Afghanistan, i.e. they were based on false assumptions about the threats we faced. I think it’s the latter. If fighting Al Qaeda does not defend the United States or make it more secure, our activities in Syria cannot against DAESH cannot achieve those objectives.

We can now be confident that our invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with defending the U. S. or making us more secure—it was based on bad assumptions. I’ve already dealt with Afghanistan.

We lost the war in Vietnam. Losing in no way weakened us or threatened us except, possibly, politically. Consequently, the assumptions made in that war were wrong, too.

Although we didn’t lose the Korean War, we didn’t win, either. The same argument applies. Since the stalemate there did not weaken or threaten us, our entire involvement there was clearly predicated on bad assumptions.

If you are very, very expansive we were actually defending the U. S. during World War II. But let’s be very clear: you need to be very expansive. Neither Germany nor Japan ever succeeded in attacking the U. S. homeland. Japan attacked U. S. overseas possessions. Its balloon attacks against the U. S. failed. We weren’t defending ourselves against the Japanese but our role as a colonizing power, defending the American Empire. The most Germany accomplished was landing eight saboteurs by U-boat. They failed in their plans. Germany did threaten the British but they didn’t threaten us.

The threat posed by the Central Powers during World War I was even more distant than that. We weren’t threatened and there’s a pretty good argument that our entry into the war ultimately led to World War II.

When was the last time there was actually a need to defend the United States? I would argue that the last time was 150 years ago during the American Civil War. Again, what about 9/11? I would argue that we were actually threatened by our own extremely lax approach to immigration and travel. The nineteen militants who boarded and seized flights in the United States were here on travel and student visas and, basically, completely unmonitored. That problem remains. We’ve done little about it in the 20 years that have intervened.

What about Russia? Doesn’t Russia threaten us? I don’t think so. Obviously, not only does it threaten Ukraine but also Poland, the Baltic countries, and other countries that border it. It will continue to do so as long as there is a Russia. There’s nothing we can do about that and, since there is no achievable goal there, we cannot be the guarantor of their security. They live in a tough neighborhood. It will always be a tough neighborhood.

We squandered the opportunity to reduce the threat posed by Russia to its neighbors by rebuffing Russia’s offers to join NATO and the European Union and by expanding NATO right to Russia’s border.

But what about China? I don’t think that China threatens us, either. What actually threatens us is our eagerness to export our industry and manufacturing offshore. We aren’t being forced to do that. We’re doing it to ourselves. Furthermore, no one forced us to make China a Most Favored Nation trading partner. That was a self-inflicted wound.

That’s what I mean by our being our own worst enemy. We have foreign policy, trade, environmental, and immigration policies that don’t make us stronger, wealthier, or more secure and arguably do the opposite. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Here’s David Axelrod’s take from CNN on Lori Lightfoot’s defeat:

When she ran for mayor, her status as a crusading outsider with prosecutorial zeal was core to her appeal.

But those pugilistic qualities quickly became obstacles in a job that often requires an ability to cajole, and not simply command.

Early in her term, Lightfoot stubbornly took a teacher’s strike many deemed avoidable, and then settled on the union’s terms.

Deeply suspicious of the motives of other politicians, she systematically alienated Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Democrat-led state legislature and the Cook County leadership, all of whom are fellow Democrats.

As a result, she lost key legislative battles, including a law that over the next three years will shift control of the Chicago public schools from mayoral appointees to an elected 21-member school board, far larger than what she had wanted and the largest by far in the country.

She ran on limiting the prerogatives of City Council members, then humiliated them in her inaugural speech and alienated them in the job, prompting one of her once-allies Alderman Susan Sadlowski-Garza to say, “I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with. Police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing.”

The exodus of some high-profile businesses – and the likely, unthinkable departure to the suburbs of the city’s beloved Chicago Bears – contributed to a sense of a city backsliding.

By the time of the election, more than half of Chicago voters gave the mayor negative ratings.

In winning and losing, Lightfoot did it her way. Now Chicago will have a new mayor – and a race that will be the most ideologically divergent in recent history.

which I think is remarkably lacking in insight. As I have noted before she was put in office not by Lakeshore liberals or black activists but by white voters on the Northwest Side. She achieved victory because she was not Toni Preckwinkle but that alone didn’t light her path to a re-election that she lacked the political skills to bring about, especially since Toni Preckwinkle was not on the ballot.

I recommend that you read Ruy Teixeira’s latest offering, on “The Democrats’ Patriotism Problem”. He’s not talking about all Democrats but about the relatively small cadre of activists and those who work on political campaigns who wield exceptional power within the party as this passage makes clear:

In my October piece, I noted that:

Democrats have a bit of a problem with patriotism. It’s kind of hard to strike up the band on patriotism when you’ve been endorsing the view that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis. Of course, America today may be a racist, dystopian hellhole, but Democrats assure us that it could get even worse if the Republicans get elected. Then it’ll be a fascist, racist, dystopian hellhole.

As I opined then, that doesn’t seem very inspirational.

What, if anything, has changed since then? Not much, I’d say. Of course, not all Democrats, especially normie working-class Democrats, subscribe to this nightmarish version of their own country. But among Democratic activists and cultural elites such sentiments are very common—and among those who lean progressive, dominant.

and I want to endorse this particular recommendation:

It’s all pretty weak tea compared to what’s really needed: a robust revival of the American civil religion in Robert Bellah’s formulation. This is the nonsectarian, quasi-religious faith based around national symbols, founding documents and ideals, holidays, heroes, epic events, rituals and stories that has bound—and can bind—Americans together across social and regional divisions.

But, since the 1960’s, as Brink Lindsey observes:

[F]aith in American civil religion has been wrecked on the shoals of disillusionment…[T]the critical spirit of the mass adversary culture was able to break through the complacency of “national self-worship” and bring into much wider awareness the darkest and most tragic elements of the American past. Among progressives, this revisionist understanding of our history has led to an ebbing — and sometimes, an outright renunciation — of patriotism, in the latter case dismissing it as nothing more than another species of bigotry….For progressives to recover faith in their country, they don’t need to avert their eyes from its dark side. But they likewise cannot turn away from America’s world-historically unique promise — and the immense amount of good which commitment to that promise has made possible, both here and all around the world.

Reviving the American civil religion is a noble cause which is also a precondition for building the robust coalition across social and regional divides that Democrats seek. Democrats have tried uniting the country around the need to dismantle “systemic racism” and promote “equity”….and failed (and will continue to fail). Democrats have tried uniting the country around the need to save the planet through a rapid green transition…and failed (and will continue to fail). It’s time for Democrats to return to something’s that’s tried and true.

That is precisely what Chesterton wrote about when he declared that “America is a country founded on a creed”. We lack the ties of blood and history that bind other countries together. We undermine that creed at significant risk. I will leave it to you to explain why the 10% of Americans Mr. Teixeira laments are seeking to undermine it. Without it the only ties that bind us together are those of family and neighborhood and those are eroding day by day.

I don’t believe that anything good will emerge from that erosion. I think that more likely is a continuation of the sort of individualism on steroids we’ve seen from both extremes of the political spectrum for the last 40 years.

This morning David A. Graham’s piece at Atlantic, “Big Cities Are Ungovernable”, caught my eye. I suspected that I knew what it was about and I was right. It was a reaction to Lori Lightfoot’s rejection at the polls. Here’s the meat of it:

A mayor can try to hire more police officers or reform the department, but that’s slow. She can seek new leaders, but Chicago, for example, has churned through police superintendents recently to little effect. (The current one yesterday announced plans to resign, facing the alternative of being sacked by whichever candidate wins the April runoff.) Pushing too hard risks alienating police, who can either come down with “blue flu,” potentially sending crime higher, or line up behind a challenger; the Chicago police union endorsed Paul Vallas, the top vote-getter on Tuesday. Most cities have little control over gun regulations. A mayor can try to address root causes through economic development, but that, too, is slow and subject to larger trends.

Lightfoot proved (ironically enough) not to be fast enough on her feet to navigate these currents, but her failure should be seen not just as one politician’s misstep but as a sign of the ungovernability of big cities today. She’s the biggest major-city incumbent to get turned out in some time, but she could be a trendsetter.

I reject the thesis. Cities are not “ungovernable”. Neither presidents nor governors nor mayors are sovereigns. Cities, states, and countries have always been complex. What has changed is that relatively inexperienced people are being elected to high political office and they don’t have the political skills to do their jobs.

What do I mean by that? Creating a base of support, carving out alliances, and rewarding supporters are all parts of the job of mayor, of governor, of president. Those aren’t written into the statutes but they’re parts of the job nonetheless. Lori Lightfoot had never held elective office before being elected mayor of Chicago. She had no constituency. She didn’t try to create one. She tried to rule by fiat. She built no alliances. She didn’t think she had to. She alienated lots of people with her imperious manner and occasionally bizarre behavior.

Now she knows better but it’s too late to do Chicago any good.

The obvious solution is not a popular one: leave outsiders outside. Elect governors to the presidency; elect mayors to be governor; finding good mayors is hard. You can elect individuals who’ve served on the city council but they may lack the organizational skills to be mayor. County states attorneys are good possibilities—that was the job Richie Daley held before he ran to be mayor but in the Daley home the kitchen table conversation was obviously Chicago politics and the mechanics of being mayor. Some business executives might be a possibility, particularly if their companies are large enough for bureaucracy and politics to be significant parts of running them.

When you look at a failed mayor like Lori Lightfoot in all likelihood you will see someone without any of those skills. Paul Vallas had been CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. He is light in experience with elective office. Brandon Johnson has never held a job that required significant organizational skill. He undoubtedly has political skills and he has a constituency—the CTU. Is that a qualification or a disqualification?

I am taking the rare step of quoting in full this letter to the editors of the New York Times, published as an opinion piece titled “America Is In Over Its Head”:

The greatest blunder President Vladimir Putin may have made so far in Ukraine is giving the West the impression that Russia could lose the war. The early Russian strike on Kyiv stumbled and failed. The Russian behemoth seemed not nearly as formidable as it had been made out to be. The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots.

Such expectations naturally ratcheted up Ukrainian war aims. President Volodymyr Zelensky was once a member of the peace-deal camp in Ukraine. “Security guarantees and neutrality, non-nuclear status of our state. We are ready to go for it,” he declared one month into the conflict. Now he calls for complete victory: the reconquering of every inch of Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea. Polls indicate that Ukrainians will settle for nothing less. As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow.

The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. (Never mind that such a deployment would most likely shorten the odds of one of the grimmer prospects of the war: The more Russia loses, the more it is likely to resort to nuclear weapons.)

Absent NATO involvement, the Ukrainian Army can hold the line and regain ground, as it has done in Kharkiv and Kherson, but complete victory is very nearly impossible. If Russia can hardly advance a few hundred yards a day in Bakhmut at a cost of 50 to 70 men, since the Ukrainians are so well entrenched, would Ukrainians be able to advance any better against equally well-entrenched Russians in the whole area between Russia and the eastern side of the Dnipro delta, including the Azov Sea coastline and the isthmus leading to Crimea? What has been a meat grinder in one direction is likely to be a meat grinder in the other.

Moreover, Russia has nearly switched its state onto a war economy setting, while the United States has yet to meet the war production needs of its foreign partners. The war has already used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger antiaircraft missile production and five years’ worth of Javelin missiles, while the United States has a $19 billion backlog of arms delivery to Taiwan. Western news reports have focused on the Russian men avoiding Mr. Putin’s draft orders, but the Kremlin still has plenty of troops to draw on, even after its call-up of 300,000 soldiers last September.

The debate about sending heavy war materials to Ukraine — which has consumed the German press in particular — is in this sense beside the point. It is not clear when all of the Leopard 1 and 2 and M1 Abrams tanks promised by NATO will be operational. Ukraine has requested 300 to 500 tanks, and NATO has promised only about 200.

That Mr. Zelensky has staked so much of his diplomacy on these armament shipments makes sense: He needs to communicate to the Kremlin that Ukraine is prepared for a long, slogging conflict. But in terms of battle-ready material for the next six months, very little of the promised bounty will be deployable. If Mr. Zelensky wants to complete his self-image as Winston Churchill sooner rather than later, he will want to hasten the day when he can toast NATO’s — which is to say, America’s — entry into the conflict.

The problem for Kyiv is that — public assurances aside — Washington has no interest in directly entering the war. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already voiced his view that total victory for either Russia or Ukraine is unachievable in the near term. President Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have been adamant about keeping the United States from directly entering the conflict. The American public has shown no appetite for direct involvement, either. The United States may even have an interest in keeping the fighting going as the war reduces Russia’s ability to operate elsewhere in the world, increases the value of American energy exports and serves as a convenient dress rehearsal for the rallying of allies and coordination of economic warfare against Beijing.

Less noticed is that the Kremlin’s war aims may have — out of necessity — been scaled back. Apparently reconciled to its inability to effect regime change in Kyiv and capture much more of Ukraine’s territory, Moscow now seems mostly focused on maintaining its positions in Luhansk and Donetsk and securing a land bridge to Crimea. These are territories that even in the best of circumstances would be difficult for Ukraine to reincorporate.

As it stands today, Ukraine’s economic future appears viable even without the territories currently occupied by Russia. Ukraine has not been turned into a landlocked country and it remains in control of seven of the eight oblasts with the highest G.D.P. per capita. Ukraine would risk jeopardizing this position in a counteroffensive. Paradoxically, continued fighting also serves some Russian interests: It allows Moscow more chances to pummel Ukraine into being a de facto buffer state, making it an ever less attractive candidate for NATO and European Union membership.

The historian Stephen Kotkin recently argued that Ukrainians may be better off defining victory as accession to the European Union rather than a complete recapture of all Ukrainian territory. And yet, except for countries that were neutral during the Cold War, each historical case of E.U. accession has been preceded by membership in NATO, which since the 1990s has acted as a ratings agency in Europe, guaranteeing countries as safe for investment. This fact is hardly lost on the Ukrainian population: Polls (which have mostly excluded Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014) show that interest in the country’s joining NATO appears to have jumped since the start of the conflict.

Only Washington ultimately has the power to decide how much of Ukraine it wants to bring under its umbrella. The actual official reluctance to include Ukraine in NATO has rarely been clearer, while the public embrace of Kyiv has never been more florid. In the meantime, European leaders may soon find themselves in the unenviable position of convincing Ukrainians that access to the common market and a European Marshall Fund is a reasonable exchange for “complete victory.”

I don’t agree with it in full. I do agree with this passage:

The trouble is that Ukraine has only one surefire way of accomplishing this feat in the near term: direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time.

If you think otherwise, please present your plan.