You have undoubtedly heard of the “mystery leaks” of the Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 pipelines that carry gas from Russia to Germany. Multiple sources are stopping just short of declaring that the pipelines have been sabotaged. Let’s assume that’s the case.

Whodunnit? I think there are several candidates:

the United States
Russia
Poland
Ukraine
Germany

just to name a few. Multiple sources have claimed that the United States sabotaged the pipeline with various motives being presented to explain it. The Ukrainians among other sources believe that the Russians sabotaged the pipelines. Again various motives. I’ve seen some claims that Poland was responsible. It’s not clear to me what Poland’s motive might have been other than to give Germany no choice other than to stop Germany from buying Russian gas.

Ukraine might have been responsible for similar reasons to those suggested for Poland.

And there’s an outside possibility that Germans might have sabotaged the pipelines.

It also might be the case that the culprit is deferred maintenance. That sounds pretty likely to me. Although it might be possible I think it’s unlikely that any actor other than a government engaged in deliberate sabotage. The pipelines are too deep for scuba divers.

I genuinely wish that the United States including our government and media would maintain a low profile with respect to the demonstrations presently going on in Iran. The last thing we want to do is convince the mullahs that the demonstrations are foreign-sponsored.

At 1945 James Holmes argues that, from a Clausewitzian standpoint, right now may be the perfect time for China to attack the United States:

Brands and Beckley are professors at Johns Hopkins and Tufts, respectively. Though they don’t mention the sage of nineteenth-century Prussia in their lucidly written new book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, they apply Clausewitzian logic to Communist China, arguing that the world is witnessing “peak China.” If China stands at the zenith of its power, and if Chinese Communist Party magnates know it, then they might reason that now is their best opportunity to use military might to settle longstanding grudges.

My own view is that practically all of that is premature but a lot including the survival of the United States, the survival of China, and, possibly, the survival of the human species depends on China’s objectives and how the Chinese authorities evaluate the relative strengths of the U. S. and China.

There’s another possible scenario: China and the U. S. may be co-dependent with both recognizing that. In that event regardless of their relative strengths, it would be highly unlikely for China to engage the United States.

I would also point out that China’s military doctrine is completely untested while ours is proven. We continue to be strong militarily and weak politically as Soviet, Chinese, and Russian leaders have all recognized. I suspect that China’s way of war more closely resembles Russia’s than it does ours.

Would a second Pearl Harbor have a different outcome than the first?

What struck me about Sebastian Mallaby’s latest Washington Post column was the gap between its caption, “These signs show that China is starting to crack”, and the actual material of the column. That suggests to me that the editors have an axe to grind which the column doesn’t actually grind enough for them.

Here’s the meat of the column:

In the first decade of this century, China manipulated its exchange rate. This boosted exports, but it also led to an unsustainable trade surplus, the recycling of the receipts into vast piles of U.S. financial instruments and, ultimately, to a queasy feeling of dependence when Wall Street blew up in 2008.

The Communist Party’s next trick was to order banks and local governments to fuel a construction boom. Again, this boosted growth, but it replaced unsustainable foreign-bond buying with unsustainable domestic debt. Sure enough, the country’s largest property developer has defaulted. Buyers of unbuilt apartments are furious. A mortgage boycott has spread to more than 100 cities. Home prices have fallen for 12 straight months. Since real estate drives more than a quarter of the economy, the collapse of the sector threatens a wider slump.

The third snag casts a cloud over China’s strength in tech. For political reasons, again, China cannot tolerate tech titans who aspire to become Elon Musk-style influencers, who list their companies on foreign stock exchanges, or who found companies that help Chinese students apply for colleges abroad. So it has cracked down on the lot of them. This won’t encourage the next generation of technologists to start companies in China.

And then there is demography. In 1979, in yet another fit of statist hubris, China’s leaders imposed a harsh one-child policy, resulting in sex-selective abortions, a gender imbalance, and a fertility rate that cratered even faster than it would have if China had followed the standard pattern of a developing country. Far too late, the government recognized the fuse it had lit, eventually moving to a two-child policy in 2016. Last year, in a panic, the government announced a three-child policy along with programs to encourage childbearing. Fertility shows no sign of picking up.

I would say that China started manipulating its current in the last decade of the last century but that doesn’t affect his point.

There’s very little with which to disagree in those points. You might object to his diction (his choice of words), e.g. “manipulate”, “trick”, “cloud”, “hubris”, but the list are simply facts. Their significance remains to be seen. I think the problems to which he’s calling attention are all failings of the Chinese Communist Party.

I have a somewhat unorthodox view of the CCP. I don’t think that they have masterfully navigated China’s path to prosperity, an overly simplistic statement of what I think is the prevailing orthodoxy. I think they’ve impeded China’s rise in the interest of their retaining the reins of power. Whether China can overcome the roadblocks Mr. Mallaby calls out while the CCP retains power remains to be seen. I don’t think it can for reasons I’d like to explain.

You might find the title of this post mystifying. Do you know who killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century? You might say Hitler, Stalin, or Mao but at best Stalin and Mao only tell half the story.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Russian agronomist whose divergent theory of genetics and inheritance led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese by famine. His theory was called “Lysenkoism”. The danger of Lysenkoism was not merely that it was wrong but that, since it was politically attractive to Stalin, it became the established orthodoxy first in the Soviet Union and then in China. The episode is a cautionary tale of the dangers of politicized science.

That’s what I think the risk in China is. It is quite true that China is devoting an enormous amount of time, money, and energy into research and scientific education. That time, money, and energy is bearing some fruit, e.g. hypersonic weaponry, 5G.

The risk is that the investments that China is making are only means to an end and the end is not prosperity, economic growth, technological development, or the furthering of science. It is the continuance in power of the Chinese Communist Party. Only science and technology that further that goal will be acceptable. Anything else will be stamped out. That’s the lesson of politicized science, supported by the treatment of China’s tech entrepreneurs.

The case in point from China’s recent history is its infrastructure development. The reason that China builds buildings, bridges, and railways that collapse just a few years after construction is that they were politicized infrastructure investments. They were supposed to look good rather than be good.

There was an additional matter I wanted to point out. The supply chain bottleneck seems to have changed. At the beginning of the year the bottleneck was largely in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Hundreds of ships were backed up in harbor or out at sea, waiting to be unloaded, their contents shipped by truck and train all over the United States.

Now there are only a handful of ships waiting in port in those ports. It’s not entirely clear to me what the nature of the bottleneck is today but, judging by the hundreds of ships waiting in China’s harbors or out at sea, waiting to enter China’s harbors, today’s bottleneck is China. I don’t know what the underlying problem is. It could be China’s recurring COVID-19 lockdowns. It could be a deliberate slowdown. I doubt that the Chinese harbors don’t have the ability to load and unload ships fast enough.

I have long believed that we were too dependent on China for strategic goods. An example of that emerged recently in which key components for a U. S. military jet were delayed because the metal used in manufacturing them was obtained from China. I don’t know about you but I find that confidence-shaking.

Now it appears that excessive dependence is not limited to strategic goods.

Occasionally, I refer to the “ethnic states of Europe”. Which countries do I mean by that? Very nearly all but the very smallest European countries define themselves in ethnic terms. The Baltic countries, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Romania, Greece, etc. Modern France has organized itself around the notion of “Frenchness” but it remains a country overwhelmingly populated by the “ethnic French”. You need to strain the notion of ethnicity a bit to understand “ethnic French” but if you squint you can still see that France remains an ethnic state. So is Germany although similarly you must engage in a willing suspension of disbelief to recognize German ethnicity (Bavarians, Swabians, and Westphalians make more convincing ethnicities than German).

Let’s consider the example of Hungary. Hungary is a country of roughly 10 million people. Its official language is Hungarian which bears only the most distant relationship to any other language and, with the exception of a few provinces of other countries, is spoken only in Hungary. Very few people born in other countries who visit or even emigrate to Hungary speak Hungarian—it’s of little use to them other than in Hungary.

The present prime minister, the head of government in Hungary, is Viktor Orbán. Mr.Orbán has gained the ire of progressive media in the United States, castigated as “far-right”, “right-wing”, “right-wing nationalist”, “far-right nationalist”, authoritarian, etc. largely for the crime of nationalism. Espousing ethnic nationalism and opposing LGBT rights and abortion are heresy if not apostasy among those who believe that every country should ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse not to mention very open sexually with few if any limitations on abortion.

Nationalism and, possibly, the other “far-right” views espoused by Mr. Orbán are gaining strength in the ethnic states of Europe, not just in Hungary but in practically all of them. Sweden has its farthest right government in decades. AfD in Germany and FN in France are actually gaining in power.

I’m in no position to say whether the political parties and positions gaining strength in the ethnic states of Europe are good, bad, or indifferent. I don’t know enough about the political history or context in those countries to make such a judgment. I wish other Americans wouldn’t leap to the (to me) weird conclusion that because a foreign political party is called “right-wing” in the press and they consider themselves “right-wing” that they should support that foreign political party. Or, as should be obvious, “left-wing”, mutatis mutandis.

Right now the America progressive media are running around with their hair on fire because Italy is poised to have its farthest right-wing government in power since Mussolini. It’s not hard to explain why: immigration, largely from the Middle East and Africa, are putting substantial strains on the social and now political fabrics of these ethnic states. How many immigrants are producing this strain? In most countries they constitute 5% or less of the population. In France it’s around 15% but they’re not deemed immigrants—they come from France’s African former possessions. 85% of the French are français de souche, the rest are mostly ethnic Arabs or sub-Saharan Africans.

What about Ukraine (I hear someone ask)? The same thing is true there. The present Ukrainian government is a Ukrainian nationalist government. That’s one of the reasons the Russians invaded. Once again I’m not justifying it but explaining it. In Ukraine as in other countries that were parts of the former Soviet Union, ethnic Russians tend to see themselves as minorities experiencing discrimination. Don’t confuse that with their wanting to return to Russia or be part of Russia. They aren’t the same thing—mostly I think they just don’t want to be discriminated against in the countries in which they were born and which they think of as their homes. Their view of “not being discriminated against” may conflict with the goals of ethnic nationalists in those countries.

I’ve posted my views on how our immigration system should be changed several times but what may not be recognized is its subtext: I don’t want to abolish immigration to the U. S. but to preserve it. The last time our percentage of immigrants in the country was as high as it is now we effectively prohibited immigration for 40 years. I think the strains of the loss of control over our southern border are starting to show. Said another way Trump was a symptom not the disease.

Update

It isn’t just in the EU that nationalism is on the rise. It’s on the rise in Russia—Russian nationalism, too, is one of the factors behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And it’s not just in Europe. President Xi’s policies are broadly nationalist ones. And in India the rise of Hindu nationalism is the most important development there in decades.

In this op-ed from the New York Times Jessica Grose makes some interesting points but I don’t think she’s pointing in quite the right direction. Here’s the kernel of her piece:

In an overview of issues from the 2018 midterms, Pew Research didn’t include education when surveying voters about what they considered “very big” problems; the closest one mentioned was “affordability of a college education.” In Pew’s 2022 midterm overview, however, education ranked sixth, with 58 percent of registered voters saying it’s a matter that’s “very important” to them. This election year, according to Pew, voters care more about education than abortion, immigration and climate change. (Notably, this poll was conducted during the first two weeks of August, after Roe v. Wade was overturned.)

All of this dovetails with what the longtime pollster and communications analyst Frank Luntz, known for his work with Republican candidates and campaigns, has been hearing in focus groups over the past couple of years: Many children are still reeling from the challenges of the pandemic, and not all parents have faith that the public school system can help their kids recover. “I’ve done work with so many education reform efforts, and parents just felt forgotten,” he said.

Luntz added that some parents say: “It’s my number one issue, my major source of frustration. I’m furious at the Democrats for turning it into an ideological issue and at the Republicans for dropping it, and for turning to other things.” Even if they don’t change their votes, they are moving with their feet: A recent survey cited by The 74 found: “Between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9 percent drop in families saying their children are enrolled in traditional public schools.”

and

While I think the leaching of trust in public education may not be so dire that it determines something like control of Congress, Luntz isn’t so sure. “It’s not slow. It’s fast,” he said. “That is the difference between you writing the story three years ago and you writing the story today. They were losing faith in 2020, 2019; they lost faith in 2022. That is a very important distinction.”

So, has the public school system lost the faith of the American people? I have long believed (and written) that the schools have a split personality. Are they a method of educating children or are they a strategy for employing adults? I certainly don’t believe that you can shutter the schools for months at a time and accomplish the first objective which leaves the second one.

Furthermore, as the percentage of adults with children declines, how long do you expect support for public schools to be as high as it traditionally has been?

Add all of these factors together and I think we may be nearing a tipping point.

Speaking of political corruption, here’s a good illustration that’s big news here in Illinois. From ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Illinois state Senator Emil Jones III is set to be arraigned Friday on bribery charges.

Governor JB Pritzker called on Jones III to resign from office Thursday.

Jones is accused of taking $5,000 from a red light camera company in exchange for voting against legislation that would require traffic studies for the camera systems.

Jones was also charged with bribery and lying to the FBI.

The Far South Side state senator has given up his Senate leadership posts, but still remains on the November ballot and is running unopposed.

Gov. Pritzker demanded he resign immediately, saying it would send a clear message to Illinois residents that, “corruption and abuse have no place here.”

Mr. Jones’s father, Emil Jones Jr., was a member of the Illinois Senate from 1983 to 2009 and its president from 2003 to 2009. His son has succeeded him in his district.

There’s an old saying that covers this: the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. Barack Obama got his start as Emil Jones’s protégé.

Update

I just noticed that the post which was supposed to precede this one somehow never got published. I republished it.

“Speaking of political corruption” was certainly a non sequitur wasn’t it?

I think the conclusion of the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s remarks regarding the indictments of Donald Trump, his organization, and his family deserve some consideration:

Mr. Trump has made a business and political career of getting away with whatever he can, and it’s easy to imagine he crossed a line. But the Democrats pursuing him have become Captain Ahabs bent on taking him down by any means necessary. Ms. James is a partisan prosecutor, and her charges and evidence need to be examined in that context.

As I have said many times before I think that Mr. Trump should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but those who detest him should keep in mind that extent may be more limited than they might like. We’ll see how these cases work out.

Meanwhile, I’m reminded of Vyshinsky’s famous wisecrack: “Give me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” I think you’d be very hard put to find a completely honest individual in high elective office in politics, Democrat or Republican. If that’s not clear enough it’s an indictment of our politics, our system, and us.

The cartoon at the top of this page was drawn by Rivers for Cagle Cartoons.