At CRN Wade Tyler Millward reports that Amazon is laying off 18,000 people:

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services parent company Amazon, said that the company plans to lay off “just over 18,000” employees with cuts expected in the coming weeks and factoring in layoffs from November.

In a post on Seattle-based Amazon’s website, Jassy said that the majority of the cuts will be at Amazon stores and the People, Experience and Technology (PXT) organization—Amazon’s human resources department. The company had more than 1.5 million employees as of September.

That translates into about 1% of Amazon’s workforce. It’s hard to say whether this will be the extent of Amazon’s layoffs or whether these are just the opening move in what will be a lengthier process to cut costs.

Here’s an interesting turn of events. From Just the News:

In a stunning rebuke, the FBI’s retired chief of criminal investigations says his old agency has yielded the independence Congress gave it under the law and is now subservient to a group of liberal ideologues inside the Justice Department who have pressured agents to stray into unwarranted domestic spying and censorship.

Ex-FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker on Tuesday became the latest law enforcement or political figure to support creating an independent commission modeled after the U.S. Senate’s 1970s Church Committee to investigate the FBI’s practices and impose reforms on the storied law enforcement agency.

He told Just the News that the bureau’s problems start with the politicization of its ranks by DOJ.

“What I see is that it’s basically a wholesale takeover by the Department of Justice, which is filled with political appointees in every top position, and then by extension, right into the administration,” Swecker said in a wide-ranging interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“You see DOJ people — and many of the top executive positions inside the FBI now — you see people that have made a career out of bouncing in and out of silk-stocking law firms between the Department of Justice and then these law firms. And I have to say they are incredibly liberal in their politics. And that has now sort of taken over the FBI, and they are inserting that ideology into their high-profile investigations.”

I don’t care whether they’re progressive or conservative—I care that they’re political at all. What do we need a federal bureau of investigations for, anyway? Nowadays every federal agency has its own armed police section. We certainly don’t need political police.

It has always been the case that the Attorney General has been a political hatchet man. You might not like it but it’s a fact and it goes right back to Edmund Jennings Randolph. The contagion has apparently spread to the FBI. I have one caution if you like things the way they are: you have lost any basis for complaint if the new Stasi are used against you.

There’s an article in Nature by Max Kozlov that quantifies something I have been saying here for some time. The pace of scientific breakthroughs has declined sharply:

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

The author is basically at a loss to explain what has happened. Here are some possible causes:

• We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit
• Research organizations are larger and more bureaucratic than they used to be
• The cost of producing new breakthroughs increases exponentially and we aren’t willing to spend as much as is necessary to produce them faster

Whatever the reason it’s a reality. Don’t expect technological progress to save your pet plan. Elaborations will come but don’t expect breakthroughs.

Notice the chart at the top of this page. Breakthroughs in the physical and life sciences are on the floor and in technology and the social sciences not far behind.

In a sense that’s encouraging. If you’re adhering faithfully to the scientific method, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Here’s the meat of Ryan Hass’s advice to the Biden Administration for managing our relations with China in his piece at Brookings:

Rather than reacting to Chinese efforts to negotiate principles for guiding the relationship, the Biden administration would be wise to present its concrete objectives for the year ahead. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China in the first quarter of 2023 provides an opportunity for the United States to set the agenda. By laying out concrete goals and signposts for advancing them, Blinken could orient the relationship toward America’s top priorities and concerns. China’s focus on positive optics for Xi’s visit to the United States in November will offer an opportunity to leverage form for substance.

On the security front, both sides could take practical steps to lower risk. These include reaching agreement on limits around uses of new and emerging technologies in areas where both sides are vulnerable and no rules presently exist. For example, both sides would benefit by establishing limits on uses of artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous weapons systems. As a first step, both sides could agree that humans must be responsible for all nuclear launch decisions and that such decisions must never be delegated to artificial intelligence-enabled systems. Similarly, both sides have demonstrated destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons systems. They could agree to limit future testing of ASAT weapons to prevent the creation of orbital debris.

Both countries also are vulnerable to future pandemics. They have mutual self-interest in the creation of a global disease surveillance network to detect future virus outbreaks before they spread. A similar logic applies to climate change. Methane plays a major role in rising temperatures. Both sides would benefit from pooling capabilities to advance research into methane emission reduction challenges and solutions.

The opioid epidemic in America also demands attention. Chinese officials argue that the problem is one of demand, not supply. Nevertheless, U.S. and Chinese officials must think more creatively about practical steps to reduce the flow of fentanyl with Chinese-origin precursor chemicals into the United States.

This list of priority issues is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

My own view is that we should worry a lot less about China and managing our relations with China and a lot more about the United States and how we operate in the world.

We can no more be dependent on China for rare earths and other strategic materials and goods than we were dependent on Germany or Japan for oil or steel in 1941. If that means we must pay more or manage environmental controls better, so be it. That’s just the cost of doing business.

We need to produce more of what we consume and stop treating increases in the prices of services as economic growth. We need to interfere less in the internal affairs of other countries than we do at present and, again, that’s the cost of doing business. We need to return to what was said a century ago: the business of America is business.

If we do those things, U. S.-Chinese relations will manage themselves. If we don’t in two years we’ll be back stewing about managing U. S.-Chinese relations, just with less security, lower economic growth, and a more assertive China than at present.

As I reflected on the kerfuffle over picking a new Speaker of the House, I thought that Republicans ought to think long and hard about precisely why they wanted a House majority in the first place. As it turned out the editors of the Wall Street Journal had similar thoughts:

The problem any GOP leader faces today is that too many Republicans don’t really want to hold and keep political power. They’re much more comfortable in opposition in the minority, which is easier because no hard decisions or compromises are necessary. You can rage against “the swamp” without having to do anything to change it. This is the fundamental and sorry truth behind the Speaker spectacle and the performative GOP politics of recent years.

It’s sorrier still because the country desperately needs an effective check on the excesses of the progressive left that dominates today’s Democratic Party. That’s what voters said when they gave Republicans the House majority, which they seem intent on squandering.

Also of interest is their characterization of the last two Republican House Speakers:

It’s true the Speaker is third in line to be President, you get your name in the history books and your portrait hung in the Capitol, and you can sit and applaud uncomfortably behind President Biden during his next two State of the Union addresses. Other than that, there’s not much to recommend the job.

That was true for John Boehner, who became Speaker in 2011 but was ousted in 2015 by a rump GOP faction after he failed to show enough enthusiasm for futile political gestures. Paul Ryan took over and was able to push through the 2017 tax reform, among other things, but he left after 2018 rather than have to deal with the growing Crank Caucus.

I believe that Republicans and Americans more generally should reflect on just what would happen if Republicans’ “crank caucus” were to gain as outsized a role in policymaking as the Democrats’ equal and opposite “crank caucus” has had for the last two years. I see no evidence that it would result in greater fiscal prudence or effective and limited government. Why should we want that?

It has long been my suspicion that the ownership of purebred dogs is at least in part aspirational. Ross Pomeroy’s report on a study of canine intelligence at RealClearScience makes one wonder about that:

Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland put over 1,000 dogs from 13 distinct breeds through a battery of cognitive tests in perhaps the largest laboratory study of canine intelligence ever conducted. Their findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Between March 2016 and February 2022, the authors invited dog owners to bring their one- to eight-year-old pups into a large indoor field to undergo the smartDOG test battery, which was developed by study author Katriina Tiira.

AS will surprise no one Border Collies are the smartest. Labrador Retrievers on the other hand were the dumbest. They’re also the most popular breed in the United States.

I wonder if Danny Ervin will actually get any traction with his plea in this piece at RealClearEnergy to resume mining and processing of rare earths here in the United States:

We should stop pretending that domestic mining is unessential. The best way to keep the competition for minerals from erupting into a conflict with China is for the U.S. to do what has served it so well for over a century: to offer a viable alternative to imports based on increased domestic mining. Congress should approve without delay a bill that would streamline the permitting process.

I suspect not but hope springs eternal.

It would be prudent for us not to lose track of the reality, lamented by Ryan Morgan at American Military News that the Russia-Ukraine War is a very dirty one with both sides perpetrating atrocities and committing war crimes:

The head of a U.S. private military contractor training and assisting Ukrainian forces said, in a recent podcast interview, that Ukrainian forces have violated conventions on the rules of warfare and he repeatedly alluded to Ukrainian forces abusing and killing surrendering Russian troops.

Andrew Milburn, a retired U.S. Marine colonel who now leads a private military contractor called the Mozart Group, appeared on an episode of the Team House Podcast. Max Blumenthal, an editor at The GrayZone, shared an edited clip of several of Milburn’s comments on the podcast, where he shared his concerns about potential Ukrainian war crimes.

The Russians and Ukrainians are more like one another than either are like the Americans. We’re on the side of the Ukrainians but neither side is really aligned with our interests and we disregard that to our own detriment.

I found Andrew Latham’s post at The Hill considering the U. S.’s next grand strategy pretty interesting:

The five competitors he discuses are:

• liberal internationalism
• deep engagement
• strategic competition
• restraint
• “progressive” grand strategy

That last candidate emphasizes “environmental justice, countering authoritarianism and in general addressing the world’s social ills”,

Unlike in most of the rest of the world U. S. grand strategy is not a coherent policy as such but an emergent phenomenon composed of the competing interests of different factions of Americans. Consequently, try as they might I doubt that any interested party will succeed in making their own preferences dominate. It is likely to be some not particularly coherent combination of those grand strategies, I suspect some combination of liberal internationalism and strategic competition with lip service paid to the interests of progressive grand strategy. My own preference would be restraint which I doubt will gain much traction.