The golden thread connecting not just the three articles to which I’ve linked today but also to Afghanistan, Iraq, the January 6 committee hearings and any number of other undoubtedly important matters is that they’re all trying to accomplish the wrong things in the wrong way. They remind me of the old wisecrack dating from the earliest days of the popularization of golf, variously attributed incorrectly to Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson: golf is a game in which the object is to insert a small ball into a small hole using implements singularly unsuited to the task.

Take Afghanistan. What was the objective? A reasonable objective would have been to uproot Al Qaeda from the country and punish it. Another completely reasonable objective would have been to render Afghanistan incapable of hosting Al Qaeda in the future. How did that transmogrify into turning Afghanistan into a modern secularized country with a modern military? And what sense did it make to use our military to accomplish that objective? None as far as I can tell.

Completely reasonable objectives for the January 6 committee hearings would have been to inform the American people about what happened on that day and prevent the Capitol from being breached again. That has rather clearly been twisted into battlespace preparation for the 2024 presidential election—preventing Donald Trump from running again and any amount of exaggeration, misquoting, and misrepresentation is clearly seen as worth the cost. The cost is threatening those two reasonable and legitimate objectives in favor of a partisan gain. As I see it the truth is bad enough but it puts the partisan objectives of the hearings at risk.

Let’s consider Jason L. Riley’s column through that lens. Providing a workforce for American businesses is a legitimate objective. Having a juster, kinder, more effective system of immigration is a legitimate objective. Conjoining the two is only legitimate to the extent that the one solves the other but that isn’t the case. Our problem is that we’re trying to do the wrong things in the wrong ways. Millions of fast food and other low- or no-skill jobs are a consequence of a large and reliable supply of workers willing to take such jobs. The way to solve the problem is by changing what we’re looking for not bringing in more workers who can only command minimum wage. Maybe fast food restaurants need to use more automation. Maybe fast food restaurants occupied a niche in the economy that is impractical to maintain.

Which brings up another factor. You can build a pyramid with thousands of sweating peasants using their muscles or you can build it using power tools, earthmoving equipment, etc. Should we really be building pyramids at all? And if we must build pyramids should we be building them with thousands of sweating peasants using their muscles?

Let’s consider the Russia-Ukraine War from the same perspectives. What are our objectives? Not the Ukrainian objectives, our objectives. What I hear frequently is something along the lines of “We can’t let Putin win!” How can we prevent that outcome? I don’t believe it is within our power or, at least, we can’t accomplish it without risking starting a thermonuclear war.

Speaking of prescriptions in his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley has a prescription for addressing the need of American businesses for workers:

If President Biden and the Democrats who control Congress want to do something constructive about the labor shortage and its impact on inflation, they might turn their attention to our broken immigration system. Unauthorized immigration takes up most of the oxygen in this debate, but our system for admitting legal foreign workers is also in need of repair. A recent labor-market analysis by Goldman Sachs details the extent to which lower levels of legal immigration in recent years—stemming both from Covid and from the Trump administration’s more restrictive policies prior to the pandemic—have reduced the number of available workers.

“From 2010 to 2018, foreign-born workers accounted for nearly 60% of the growth in the U.S. labor force, but growth in the foreign-born population slowed to around 100k/yr between 2019 and 2021, leaving the U.S. population around 2 million smaller than it otherwise would have been, and the labor force around 1.6 million smaller,” the report finds.

Let’s just consider that last number (2 million).

According to that graph more than 3 million prospective workers are just on the sidelines. Where are they? According to this they aren’t in school. The fulltime enrollment in institutions of higher education has actually decreased by a third of a million so that’s no explanation.

In addition I think this is an instance of the “lump of labor” fallacy. I’ll get to that in my next post.

One last point. As of this writing we have the highest proportion of immigrant population in the last century—more than 1/7th of the population. IMO our society has a carrying capacity for immigrants and we reached it some time ago. Consequently, if you plan to import a workforce, you’ve got to start excluding some people from the country. I’m extremely skeptical that the migrants who are crossing our southern border every day are the workforce that we need or that Mr. Riley has in mind.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius provides his take on what needs to be done to help Ukraine against Russia. Here’s his assessment:

Ukrainian officials have argued that they need more heavy weapons, fast, to hold the line against the Russian offensive in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in the east. To take just one example, Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior Ukrainian official, tweeted this week that his country needs 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, or MLRS — nearly 30 times what’s on the way.

The example illustrates a weapons-supply problem that worries many American experts. Just four MLRS rocket launchers have actually been delivered, officials say, with eight more arriving soon. “Twelve is not enough. Not even close,” counters retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who commanded U.S. Army troops in Europe. “It seems like we keep pulling our punches, and all that does is prolong the war.”

And this is his prescription:

Administration officials are right that this isn’t a time for panic about Ukraine. But President Biden needs to demonstrate, in a way that gets attention in Kyiv and Moscow, that he is truly prepared to deliver on his promise to give Ukraine “the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression,” as he put it in his May 31 op-ed in the New York Times. He can underline that statement by providing Ukraine with more weapons, more quickly, as it battles a brutal Russian offensive.

Is it my imagination or does that smack of the “Green Lantern theory” of the presidency? That the president can do anything if he or she has the will to do it?

There are several questions Mr. Ignatius does not address. How many weapons are the Ukrainians capable of handling? Is the barrier to providing more weapons to the Ukrainians our will or our ability to produce them? Do we actually have the ability to ship more weapons to the Ukrainians or will we just be providing targets for the Russians? And what about our European allies, Germany in particular? Is Mr. Ignatius’s view that we should stand up so they can stand down? Or doesn’t he trust them?

There is a common thread joining all of the posts and articles that caught my eye this morning. More about that later. But let’s turn to the first of those articles, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’s terse analysis of the present state of Russia’s war against Ukraine:

The Russians are running out of precision-guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of patience for the war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chinese are watching.

He goes on to explain the implications of each of those sentences and they’re not nice. Here’s his prescription:

What more can the Biden administration do? It needs to take two calculated risks, based on one conceptual breakthrough.

The calculated risks: First, as retired Adm. James Stavridis has proposed, the U.S. should be prepared to challenge the Russian maritime blockade of Odesa by escorting cargo ships to and from the port.

That will first mean getting Turkey to allow NATO warships to transit the Turkish straits to the Black Sea, which could entail some uncomfortable diplomatic concessions to Ankara. More dangerously, it could result in close encounters between NATO and Russian warships. But Russia has no legal right to blockade Ukraine’s last major port, no moral right to keep Ukrainian farm products from reaching global markets, and not enough maritime might to take on the U.S. Navy.

Second, the U.S. should seize the estimated $300 billion in Russian central bank assets held abroad to fund Ukraine’s military and reconstruction needs.

What are the risks of those calculations? The calculation in the first case is that Putin is willing to lose the war rather than confront the U. S. directly in the first case. Not to mention that it’s a violation of President Biden’s commitment not to engage Russia directly or the risk of thermonuclear war. The calculation in the second case is the risk is that no other country will retaliate in kind. Need I point out that the U. S. is far more exposed to that risk than any other country?

I’m not as confident as Mr. Stephens is in our ability to accomplish the first calculated risk or in Mr. Putin’s hesitancy. And I don’t believe he has actually assessed the risks of his second calculated risk at all. Basically, it’s risking a complete collapse in global trade.

In a piece at Science Meredith Wackman makes two good points. First, there’s actually a financial incentive not to declare that the COVID-19 pandemic is over:

Moderna has pledged not to enforce patents on its messenger RNA vaccine until the pandemic ends, although a company spokesperson declined to say this week how it will identify that moment. Pfizer has not made a similar vaccine pledge, but it and Merck have agreed to allow generic drugmakers to make their drugs targeting SARS-CoV-2 until WHO declares the PHEIC is over. Dozens of companies have now signed up to make Merck’s molnupiravir and Pfizer’s Paxlovid for a long list of mostly low- and lower-middle-income countries.

Ending the PHEIC will also impact major pandemic-related programs such as the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility and its parent, the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator—cooperative global networks that aim to acquire and distribute affordable drugs, diagnostics, and vaccines. “The emergency operations of COVAX and ACT-A will go away—it’s hard to keep that up,” says Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which is integrally involved with both efforts. “The hope is that the core innovations—the ways of working all of that—will be kept warm” for the future.

If we were to follow the WHO’s published criteria for a pandemic strictly, the pandemic is over. But the definition is actually a bit fuzzy:

But Osterholm is making no predictions. “If there was ever a time for humility among scientists and policymakers with this virus, it’s now,” he says. “We are in totally uncharted territory from the perspective of understanding what a pandemic is, how it starts, how it unfolds, and how it ends.”

To my layman’s eye here in Illinois the pandemic is actually over and COVID-19 is now endemic, like flu. There’s also an argument that has been true for some time. One thing I notice is that there appears to be a correlation between increases in the number of cases reported and the outside temperature being very hot or very cold. If that bears out, Illinois should have at least a minor uptick in cases starting in a week to ten days.

You can check out Daniel L. Davis’s explanation in his post at 1945 for yourself but here’s his conclusion:

It would be a near-impossible feat for the West to provide enough heavy weaponry to Ukraine – and the massive volumes of large-caliber artillery ammunition the howitzers need – that would bring back into balance the major disadvantage Ukraine has in firepower. Even the modern rocket launchers the U.S. and UK recently committed will not materially change the negative balance for Kyiv.

Zelensky and the Ukrainian people will soon come face-to-face with the ugly prospect that continuing to fight will only bring more death and destruction to its people, cities, and armed forces – but be insufficient to stave off defeat. The truth is, military fundamentals and simple capacity are in Moscow’s favor. It is unlikely those factors change in time to avoid defeat for Kyiv and its brave people. That is the ugly, bitter reality of war.

Don’t confuse such observations with being pro-Russian. Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s merely a steely-eyed assessment of the realities. Also, we should bear in mind that we (including the Biden Administration) have been receiving propaganda from Ukraine and that the economic sanctions imposed on Russia to date have been nearly as effective as was hoped.

In a lament at The Hill Harlan Ullman remarks on one of the things that the January 6 committee hearings have revealed:

The first hearing also ironically answered the question of whether the nation’s political divisions are overstated. Is the nation as divided as it was in 1861 or even 1776, when most American colonists favored remaining part of Great Britain? Or is this phenomenon a consequence of social media and the ubiquitous coverage and sensationalism of the news cycle?

The answer is chilling. Not only is the nation divided on virtually every issue. Every issue has become a single massive attack of disruption. Jan. 6 is just one example.

Consider the past eight decades. In December 1941, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor rallied a highly divided nation over the ongoing war in Europe. More Americans have died of COVID-19 than were killed in battle in every war America fought since 1775. Yet COVID didn’t unite the nation but disrupted and divided it over lock downs, masks, vaccines and super spreader events.

The same divisive effects apply to inflation, immigration, the price of gasoline, mass shootings and guns, gestation periods and transgender rights. The sheer number of divisive issues is unique. Historically, divisions have been dominated by single issues such as states’ rights in 1860 or Vietnam and race a century later. The critical question is whether the Constitution and a system of government based on checks and balances can survive this onslaught of massive attacks of disruption.

Please note that his observation is self-refuting: Vietnam and race are two issues not one. Dr. Ullman is old enough to remember that more than two issues were dividing us in the 1960s: there were also environmental issues. And I seem to recall a rash of airline hijackings, about one a week by the end of the 1960s, many of them by Cubans but also by Palestinians.

Here are his remarks on the actual committee proceedings:

Assume Trump truly believed the election was stolen and he was the legitimate president. Does that then give him the authority and reason to use all means, fair or foul, to prove his case and reverse the results? What are the legal and constitutional restraints on a president under these circumstances, if any, despite the unanimous body of evidence and court cases proving well beyond a reasonable doubt that Joe Biden was the duly elected president? If Trump’s actions are allowed to stand, will it mean that there is no rule of law and that the Constitution has been permanently revoked?

The implications are frightening to consider. Yet this is the dangerous state of America today. The Jan. 6 commission opened a Pandora’s box. That will not rid the nation of an ex-president. But it will release all the harpies from a political hell.

I want to make two observations about that. First, my contention is that believing that he is a winner, unable to lose, is part of Donald Trump’s essential self-image. If that is the case any shred of evidence will be taken as proof of cheating or fraud.

Second, statistical analysis is not proof. Unlikely events happen every day.

Last night we had some rough weather—thunderstorm and tornado watch—during which we lost power for three hours. It was only the third time we had lost power over the last 35 years.

Having grown up in Tornado Alley, such events bother me less than they do my wife who grew up in California where such meteorological fireworks are relatively rare. St. Louis has pretty much everything: thunderstorms, tornados, hurricanes (they come up the Mississippi), hail, derechos, blizzards, you name it. I don’t recall any dust storms but I don’t feel particularly deprived by that. At any rate my wife, the dogs, and I spent a half hour in the basement until the threat of tornado had passed.

I need to assess the likelihood of our experiencing frequent power outages. If we’re increasingly likely to have them, I’ll think about getting a generator. The gas line is already run so installation shouldn’t be too costly.

This story from The Hill via Yahoo News by Monique Beals strikes me as big news:

Former senior Obama adviser David Axelrod warned that President Biden’s age could be a “major issue” in the 2024 presidential election.

“The presidency is a monstrously taxing job and the stark reality is the president would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term, and that would be a major issue,” Axelrod told The New York Times of 79-year-old Biden.

“He looks his age and isn’t as agile in front of a camera as he once was, and this has fed a narrative about competence that isn’t rooted in reality,” he added.

Maybe Mr. Axelrod is speaking only for himself in which case it’s only marginally interesting. However, if he’s giving voice to what the Democratic establishment is thinking, it’s the flip side of the damage control coin we’ve seen lately from of the usual suspects. It would indicate that Democrats are starting to distance themselves from President Biden, hoping to stave off the wave election that many are predicting at this point.

I happen to think that Mr. Biden is, indeed, too old to be president. I thought so in 2020 and said as much and, not to belabor the point, but he’s only older now. And the observation that the presidency tends to age the incumbent is pretty quotidian. You need only look at a sequence of pictures of the president, starting on election day and proceeding throughout the presidency. I feel a certain amount of authority in saying that, being closer in age to Joe Biden than I am to most of my readers.

I also think that Mr. Axelrod is correct in observing that the degree to which Mr. Biden is suffering from, say, senile dementia (to use the old-fashioned term) is grossly exaggerated. But you don’t have to think that he’s senile to think that he’s lost a step or two over the years.