At Military.com Alia Shoab lists six ways the war in Ukraine might end:

1. Cease-fire
2. A peace deal
3. Russian victory
4. Russian retreat, Ukrainian victory
5. Long-term war
6. Nuclear war and/or NATO intervention

while at 1945 Daniel Davis says there’s only one way it will end:

The stark, cold realities of modern warfare, however, reveal that to the contrary, there is no end to the war in sight, and the most likely case remains – however unpopular in the Western world – a negotiated settlement.

The only question that remains: how many more Ukrainians must die before this harsh reality is grasped by the leaders of both warring parties?

concluding:

Each time the opportunity for a peaceful end was rejected by the two sides, more people died and more cities were destroyed. That vicious cycle will continue, as I project we’ll be in the same no-win position this summer when the next opportunity comes to find a negotiated settlement – after God-only-knows how many more people have been killed or maimed in a pointless striving for the unattainable. Wisdom says the parties should end the war now, on the best possible terms for each side.

But wisdom is an attribute in frighteningly short supply among today’s senior leaders.

I lean more towards Lt. Col. Davis’s view. However, if the U. S. genuinely thinks that a negotiated settlement is inconsistent with its values and sticks to that, I would hasten to suggest that the six possible outcomes are not equally likely. A cease-fire would not be a resolution. The peace deal is identical to a negotiated settlement so we’re ruling that out. Russian victory is possible but unlikely as long as the U. S. is willing to keep supplying Ukraine and/or escalate its involvement. IMO outright Ukrainian victory is even less likely.

That leaves long-term war or nuclear war.

In Nouriel Roubini’s latest Project Syndicate piece he opens with a description of the “golden age” (1945-1985), and then lists the “megathreats” we face:

• great power war
• nuclear war
• pandemic
• deglobalization
• trade war
• catastrophic climate change
• public and private debt
• artificial intelligence resulting in mass technological unemployment
• deepening inequality and malaise

lamenting:

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

I wish it were only “heads stuck in the sand”. I think a lot is due to gross errors on the part of those with the power to make decisions. Politicians. Corporate CEOs. Our extremely self-centered professional class. We didn’t deindustrialize overnight and, as I have been pointing out for decades, reindustrializing will be a lot less fun than being the world’s consumer of last resort has been.

I haven’t posted a picture of Jack lately. He’s been keeping us pretty busy. As you can see now he’s not a puppy puppy but an energetic, unruly adolescent.

We’ve actually had Samoyeds who were harder to handle than Jack who’s basically a good dog but he’s pretty trying now. Fortunately, we’re better equipped to deal with him than we were 20 years ago.

At Noah Smith’s Substack artist and architect Alfred Twu waxes poetic on the American city of the future. Here’s a snippet:

Renovating the City of Today
The city of tomorrow has many familiar streets and sights of the city of today – after all, it’s a remodel, not a rebuild. While other countries have the option of building new cities or neighborhoods beyond the edge of existing ones, the US already used up most land within commuting distance in the 20th century on low density suburbs. Most of us will live in places that already exist today, but with changes.

The Economy of the Future
Healthcare, education, and technology are expected to continue to be among the fastest growing jobs over the next couple of decades, especially when it comes to high paying jobs. Related to this, and also expected to grow, are two other categories of people: students and retirees. Both those providing and those using education and healthcare services want to be close to colleges and hospitals.

While high tech / green tech manufacturing will also grow, due to automation the factories themselves are not major employment centers, and due to the massive amounts of space needed, are located outside the city.

The Lifestyle of the Future
With people changing jobs on average every four years, it pays to be close to lots of them. This is one of the biggest feature of living in a city, especially for households with multiple people: you want to be able to change jobs without forcing your family to move.

This will be especially true for multigenerational households. Already making up nearly a quarter of the population, multigenerational households as well as other forms of group living are likely to grow in popularity in the future as rising productivity in the rest of the economy makes childcare and home healthcare, which are notoriously hard to automate, much more expensive to hire someone to do.

I would like to think that he’s right but I think he’s wrong. Let’s consider three models which illustrate why I think that: San Francisco, Detroit, and Paris.

Today’s San Francisco can be summarized as apartments and condos too expensive for any but the well-to-do to afford and homelessness, crime, and filth everywhere. Yes, that’s an oversimplification but I’m dealing in archetypes here.

Detroit is my next example. In 1950 Detroit’s population was almost two million people. Now it’s just over a half million. In many ways Detroit is like a ghost town. Grand buildings now dilapidated; mile after mile of abandoned buildings and empty lots where houses used to be. I’m sure that Detroit still has many nice neighborhoods but its modern day reality is that it has shrunk, abandoned.

My third example is Paris of 40 years ago. I haven’t been back recently but forty years ago the central city was quite lovely and, indeed, loved. That central city was surrounded by miles of dreary, rundown suburbs or banlieux as they call them.

In many ways Chicago is coming to be something like that. The Loop, the Gold Coast, and Lincoln Park are all still great. The South Side is coming to resemble Detroit and close-in suburbs like Maywood, Melrose Park, and Oak Park are becoming dreary and rundown.

So, contrary to Mr. Twu that’s what I think the city’s of America’s future will be like. The new cities will be increasingly divided between haves and have nots and the old cities will either be abandoned or ringed by poor, rundown suburbs.

I’m still stewing about voting on Tuesday. The ballot is a real chamber of horrors.

I’ll vote against Amendment 1. I’ll probably vote in favor of the tax increase for the Cook County Forest Preserve. Fun fact about Illinois: Illinois has more independently taxing jurisdictions than any other state. The forest preserve is one of those independent taxing authorities.

I’ll probably leave my vote for governor blank. In all honesty I can’t justify voting for either nudnik. Darren Bailey is a dolt and JB Pritzker is wrong about just about everything. Much of the ballot is like that.

I’ll vote for re-electing my state representative. I think my state senator is running unopposed. I won’t vote for him in any event—he voted in favor of the SAFE-T Act. I think we should eliminate cash bail for a lot of offenses but not the entire list in the present bill and in particular not for violent crimes.

Some interesting observations from Charlie Cook:

It has long been my view that the final races rated as Toss Ups rarely split down the middle, they break in the direction of the last gust of wind occurring in the days before Election Day (or in more recent years with so many ballots cast early, election weeks) but that does not explain the streaky nature of this races, why the last four elections would behave differently from the previous four elections.

Given how Toss Ups have broken in the last four elections, coupled with polling continually understating Republican support, it is little wonder why Democrats are so anxious right now. For much of the last two years, this election was behaving as we have come to expect midterm elections, as a straight-up referendum on the incumbent president and governing party. In August and September however, after the Supreme Court reversed the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, and after gas prices dropped from over $5 a gallon to under $4, it seemed to be more of a choice election. But over the last three weeks, it seems to have returned to the more conventional referendum dynamic.

How this election finishes is thus an open question. When does the curtain fall on this opera? The House, where individual races and candidates matter less and the behavior is more parliamentary, the outcome is very likely to be quite bad for Democrats. My personal hunch is Democrats suffer net losses of at least 20 seats, but in the Senate, the difference between either party picking up or losing a seat or two could easily be minimal. In the upper chamber, the party that wins three of the following four contests will be in the driver’s seat: the Democratic-held seats in Georgia and Nevada, and the two Republican open seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This post will be a bit of a jumble since I’m trying to accomplish several different things in it. I’m starting out by, as they say on Jeopardy, putting it in the form of a question: did the Biden Administration cause inflation deliberately? That’s what Daniel Turner says at RealClearEnergy:

Toomey outlines the numerous times Biden promised to “get rid of” the fossil fuel industry. Biden announced executive orders on his first day in office cancelling the Keystone pipeline and ending oil and gas leases on federal land. As the title of Toomey’s report suggests: energy inflation was by design.

For two years, I’ve discussed this issue on television and radio programs and asked the same question: How did the Biden administration not know what the consequences would be of such policies? Toomey answers the question: they did know. They desired these results.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I think that events developed much more rapidly than they expected and that the real problem is actually worse.

Josh Billings put it quite well: it ain’t what you don’t know that will hurt you but what you do know that just ain’t so. Everything in Joe Biden’s lengthy career tells him that government spending is economic stimulus. That’s only true when there’s excess capacity as any good Keynesian would tell you. Otherwise it produces inflation: too much demand chasing too little supply.

They also think that climate change is a crisis or, at least, they want their supporters to think they believe that. I think it’s a risk rather than a crisis. That has implications for strategy and timing. Astonishingly, they don’t seem to relate the policies they’ve put in place with what has actually happened. I suspect from that they believe that the private sector responds instantly to new incentives regardless of what has happened before. That, too, just ain’t so. Investors need a reasonable expectation of return over the life of the investment. If that’s the way you define “corporate greed”, then Bernie Sanders is right—corporate greed is producing higher prices. But it’s only true if you define corporate greed as the inexplicable desire to make money on your investments.

You can’t even produce an instant response with government action anymore. There’s a year or so of planning and hearings followed by a lengthy and involved process during which the contracts are let. By the time any action has taken place a new administration is in office.

All of that presents a pretty gloomy outlook. Will a Republican Congress be able to curb inflation? I don’t believe so. Even with their best efforts it can only be accomplished by reducing demand and/or increasing supply while reducing spending. The spending reduction part is a necessity so that the Fed’s interest rate jiggering will work.

I have no idea what Kevin McCarthy’s priorities are but I suspect they are more minarchist than will produce any of those outcomes in the near term. We’ll see.

It’s a lot easier to break things that are maintaining a precarious balance than it is to build them back up again.

And I haven’t even touched on Ukraine yet.

I think there’s a lot of this going around. Looking at snapshots and believing they’re representative of the whole movie. I think that’s part of our political problem. It think it’s one of the causes of the high inflation we’re experiencing.

That’s how I interpret Fareed Zakaria’s remarks in his latest Washington Post column:

As an immigrant to the United States who has traveled a great deal around the world, I have always been certain that America was the best place for people like me — people who looked different, with brown skin and a strange name. I remember coming to America as a college student and feeling the openness and generosity of a country born of and made by immigrants. When visiting Britain around the same time, I could sense that I was treated politely but as an outsider.

He goes on to explain why he thinks that Britain is now more welcoming than we are.

I was a bit surprised by a number of things in the column. For one I don’t think that the United States has ever been that friendly to migrants. Please don’t quote “The New Colossus” to me or point to the Statue of Liberty. In 1883 most migrants came to the United States to farm. Those who did were tolerated to the extent that they farmed and there was lots of land seen as empty. The indigenous Americans had never seen the land as empty or available but that’s another subject.

There were anti-immigrant riots from the 1840s through the 1870s and in the early 20th century. To my knowledge there was also one immigrant lynched during World War I. That’s compared with no lynched Japanese-Americans during World War II although they were interred in camps. There’s also an anti-immigrant thread running through the riots of the 1960s and recent anti-immigrant violence going on right now.

I think that by and large my fellow Americans are good and decent people but I honestly wouldn’t characterize us as “friendly to migrants”.

I can’t comment on Britain but I would point out that the numbers are actually quite small. The United Kingdom has about 7% Asians and 3% blacks, most of whom reside in the big cities. Once you get out into the countryside you will encounter relatively few immigrants.

In his most recent Washington Post column George Will laments that the midterm campaign season has given us a master class in things we probably don’t want to know about ourselves. Here’s what was to me the most salient part:

If on Tuesday Hispanic voters continue their drift away from Democrats, the reasons might include these: Self-identified “strong progressives” are only about 10 percent of voters, but they have a disproportionate effect in setting perceptions of the Democratic Party. Sixty-six percent of them say this is not the world’s greatest country, and 94 percent say racism is built into the nation’s policies and institutions. Hispanics disagree with those propositions by 70 percent and 58 percent, respectively.

Also, many Hispanics fled socialism, or have family memories of it, and are repelled by progressives who admire it from a safe distance.

I don’t think it’s just Hispanics.