Andrew Sullivan reacts to the “elite meltdown” over the Supreme Court’s presumed overturning of Roe V. Wade with observations that resembles those expressed here:

What strikes me about all of this is not the emotive hyperbole — that’s par for the course in a country where every discourse is now dialed to eleven. What strikes me most in these takes is the underlying contempt for and suspicion of the democratic process — from many of the same people who insist they want to save it. How dare voters have a say on abortion rights! The issue — which divides the country today as much as it has for decades — is one that apparently cannot ever be put up for a vote. On this question, Democrats really do seem to believe that seven men alone should make that decision — once, in 1973. Women today, including one on SCOTUS? Not so much.

Is this the case in any other Western country? No. Even the most progressive countries regulate abortion through the democratic process. In Germany, it’s illegal after 12 weeks of pregnancy — more restrictive than the case before the US Supreme Court that bars abortion after 15 weeks. European countries where the legal cutoff is even more restrictive: Austria, Spain, Greece, Italy, France, Belgium and Switzerland. Abortion enshrined as a constitutional right? Not even in super-progressive Canada.

The United States, in other words, has been an outlier in the past and, if Roe is reversed, will return to a democratic politics of abortion, in line with most of the Western world. And so I wonder: why is this so terrifying for pro-choicers?

The answer to his question is actually pretty obvious: the majority of Americans don’t agree with the extreme position that pro-choice supporters are advocating. Since, as Mr. Sullivan also notes, some of those advocating extreme pro-abortion views are the same as those loudly declaiming that they want to save democracy, it does raise the question of what they mean by “democracy”. It certainly doesn’t mean the rule of law and it certainly doesn’t mean majority rule. I think it means getting their way whatever that happens to mean at the time. That isn’t democracy. It’s totalitarianism. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

I think we should also ponder on why there has been no serious attempt has been made at remedying the manifest defects of Roe v. Wade from a legal standpoint by codifying it into Constitutional law. I think it’s because, first and foremost, abortion advocates always thought their views would be imposed by the least democratic institution in the federal government, the Supreme Court. But second they knew it would lose. Americans recoil at infanticide and the closer a fetus comes to term the more abortion looks like infanticide. That’s what I think is going on in the states that have enacted more serious restrictions on abortion (most not as serious as those of secular France). Rather than theocracy I (although religion may play a role) I think it’s squeamishness. Modern imaging technology has made second trimester abortions look a lot more like infanticide.

Mr. Sullivan concludes:

Leftists, if they could only snap out of their disdain for democracy, can make a powerful case for moderation on this issue against right-extremism. To do that, of course, they will have to back some restrictions on abortion in some states — which some seem very reluctant to do — and even allow some diversity of opinion within their own ranks. There are forces aiming to prevent that — forces that Biden could confront if he hadn’t long been beaten into learned helplessness. But surely someone can take the initiative.

So let’s stop the hyperventilation and get back to democracy. Persuade people, if you can. Get them out to vote. Stop demonizing those you disagree with and compromise with them in office, however difficult that may be. What Roe did was kickstart the extreme cultural polarization that has defined and blighted the last few decades of American politics. Maybe the end of Roe can mark the beginning of a return to living together, and negotiating a way to make that bearable.

I’m not hopeful. All of the trends in our politics, e.g. the enormous increase in “safe seats”, the self-segregation into “Red States” and “Blue States”, the transition from “colleagues with whom we disagree” to “evil enemies”, mean that, at least at the national level but increasingly at state an local levels, the muscles that allowed legislators to craft compromises with their political opponents have atrophied. They literally don’t know how to compromise any more.

There’s a story making the news here in Chicago about a man who’s in critical condition after being shot three times, resisting a robber in Lincoln Park. While in no way faulting the poor man who was shot, I wanted to take this opportunity to make some basic observations about self-defense.

First, don’t walk around alone at 3:00am in Chicago. Even in a pretty nice neighborhood like Lincoln Park.

Don’t display possessions that would catch the eye of a thief. Jewelry, purses, cellphones.

Maintain situational awareness. Be aware of your surroundings and the people in it.

Don’t check your emails or text messages on your smartphone (see the second and third suggestions above).

Don’t resist a thief who’s pointing a gun at you. Once the gun is being pointed at you it’s too late to take other defensive measures, e.g. running away—always the preferred method of self-defense, right after avoiding putting yourself in a situation in which you’ll need to defend yourself.

If you resist an armed assailant, don’t hold back. Use every bit of force you can. Be prepared to kill—you’re surrounded by weapons: your teeth, your nails, your elbows, your knees, the ground, the pavement, walls, lampposts. A display of genuine ferocity might gain you that fraction of a second you’ll need.

The first choice is the best: don’t put yourself in a situation in which you’ll need to defend yourself.

Some of you may be familiar with David Stockman’s name. He was Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, possibly the most controversial individual to hold that job. He is called by some the “Father of Reaganomics”. Today Mr. Stockman has a post at Brownstone Institute, arguing that the Federal Reserve will need to take much more strenuous steps than those it already has if inflation is to be reined in. In making his argument he cites real return on U. S. Treasuries, Federal borrowing requirements, the Consumer Price Index, the Producer Price Index, and the Commodity Price Index (lots of interesting graphs), but the point that really caught my attention was this one:

Among the many sectors that would be battered is nonfinancial business. Total debt in that sector now stands at $18.54 trillion. That’s up 83% from the already burdensome level of $10.14 trillion outstanding on the eve of the financial crisis in Q4 2007 and is 6X higher than the $3.1 trillion level which prevailed when Alan Greenspan took the helm at the Fed in mid-1987.

More importantly, the debt burden relative to gross value-added of the nonfarm business sector has climbed relentlessly higher for the past five decades. That is to say, American business has levered-up big time.

Nonfarm Business Debt As % Of Gross Business Value Added:

• 1970:64%;
• 1987: 82%;
• 2000: 83%;
• 2007: 92%;
• 2019: 99%;
• 2021: 102%.

In a word, the business sector (corporate and noncorporate combined) is leveraged like never before. Accordingly, when interest rates on term debt double and triple during the Fed’s impending struggle with inflation the impact on profits, cash flows and investment will be powerfully negative.

The possibility that Mr. Stock is attempting to avoid the finger of blame has not eluded me but that’s neither here nor there. I see no prospect for businesses escaping that incredibly mound of debt. What foreseeable revenues could possibly do so?

I have additional questions. What has become of all of that borrowed money? Has it been used for acquisitions? It certainly hasn’t been paid out in dividends.

And why has the return on investment been so poor? Low-hanging fruit already picked? No good prospects for expansion or improvement?

Doesn’t this suggest that there will be a lot of Chapter 11s or even Chapter 13s as the Fed raises interest rates. That isn’t a happy prospect.

Speaking of rankling, I suspect this post by Andrew Day at The Week is sure to rankle some. In it he argues that NATO should bar the door to Ukrainian admission to its ranks permanently:

We’ll never know whether serious diplomacy could have averted the war, but it may yet resolve the crisis. The Biden administration should work with European allies to broker a settlement that makes Ukraine a neutral state. Formal neutrality is far better than being a battleground of great powers — and cuts both ways. If Russia withdraws all military forces and stops interfering with its smaller neighbor, NATO’s door should stay closed to Ukraine.

My purpose in this post is not to argue the merits of his proposal but to ask a different question. When did NATO stop being a purely defensive alliance and become an aggressive one?

I would suggest it was in 1994 when NATO aircraft attacked a target within the Sarajevo Exclusion Zone at the request of UNPROFOR, the United Nations Protective Force. I believe it could reasonably be argued that the attack was illegal since UNPROFOR did not have the authority to make such a request but whether that is true or not the attack was not in defense of NATO or a NATO country.

Since then, of course, NATO has been involved in a number of aggressive actions including in Serbia (1999) and Libya (2011).

The significance of this is that the transition from a strictly defensive alliance to one pursuing, um, other objectives was not in response to Soviet or Russian aggression but stepped into the vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

My own view is that I think that NATO as originally constituted should have been dissolved in 1990 following German reunification or, possibly, 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, possibly succeeded by another alliance with who knows what objectives. But after 1991 NATO has been a military alliance without a clear purpose.

When James Taranto edited the “Best of the Web” feature for the Wall Street Journal, he had a recurring feature titled “Fox Butterfield Is That You?” in which he highlighted things claimed to be paradoxes which were actually completely comprehendable. I nominate Joel Kotkin for today’s “Fox Butterfield Award” for this sentence in a piece of his at Spiked!:

Rural America, once powerfully populist and even radical in its politics, is now heavily pro-Republican, as Democrats have made themselves toxic.

What’s puzzling about that? Rural America is still “powerfully populist and even radical in its politics” but the parties have to a large degree changed sides. There’s very little truly conservative as Edmund Burke or, more recently, William F. Buckley would have understood conservatism in today’s Republican Party. It has become increasingly populist and even radical, especially at the national level even as the Democratic Party has become increasingly elitist and, yes, radical but particularly social radicals. The cartoon that Elon Musk tweeted last week rankled because it was true, at least as far as it went. It would have been completely true if it had depicted “the right” dashing farther to the right even as “the left” dashed farther to the left.

That’s what I find frustrating about today’s politics. At the national level there is no party of good governance. Republicans have become the party, again at the national level, of less government or no government (at least notionally) while the Democrats have seemingly lost interest in good national governance while tilting at socially radical windmills. At the local level, at least here in the innermost wilds of Chicago, there does appear to be some good governance, particularly by Republicans, which I think goes a long way to explaining the greater point that Mr. Kotkin makes in his article: young people and minorities are fleeing deep Blue metropolises for Redder places. There is precious little good governance here in Illinois, of course.

I found this article by Linda Greenhouse, from the Atlantic via MSN, puzzling. In it she question whether the courts should be evaluating the sincerity of religious beliefs:

It was no surprise back in March when the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had to oblige a death-row inmate’s wish for the company of a pastor who would pray with him and touch him as the lethal cocktail dripped into his veins. Such execution-chamber companionship was “part of my faith,” the inmate claimed, and if anything could penetrate the Court’s wall of indifference toward the death penalty, it figured to be religion. The vote was 8–1.

But there was in fact something unexpected about the decision in Ramirez v. Collier: The lone dissenter was Clarence Thomas. Furthermore, Justice Thomas got it right.

Although I don’t often find myself in agreement with Justice Thomas, I have been hoping for a dissenting opinion like his as I’ve watched the Supreme Court’s majority nurture an expanding theocracy that seems to have no stopping point. Justice Thomas is usually an avid part of that majority. This time, however, he ventured where I can’t remember any other justice, liberal or conservative, having the nerve to go: He questioned a religious claimant’s sincerity. His colleagues had granted relief, he complained, “for a demonstrably abusive and insincere claim filed by a prisoner with an established history of seeking unjustified delay.”

Why did Justice Thomas, of all people, jump off the theocratic bus?

I was surprised that she was surprised. The courts have been considering whether religious beliefs were sincerely held for as long as I can recall but the charges of a “theocratic bus” have been few.

Consider, for example, conscientious objection to military service. In both Sicurella v. United States 1955 and United States v. Seeger (1965) one of the issues considered was whether an individual actually had sincerely held religious beliefs. Or consider the many cases that have been brought regarding religious exemptions for performing abortions or sterilization procedures, e.g. Taylor v. St. Vincent’s Hospital (1973) or Brownfield v. Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital (1989). I’m sure others better informed than I could come up with thousands of examples in a wide variety of areas.

My dad used to complain about lawyers whose only knowledge of the law was the U. S. Constitution. Maybe it’s time to start worrying about journalists whose only knowledge of the law if Roe v. Wade.

In the New York Times Spencer Bokat-Lindell wonders whether arming the Ukrainians will actually end the war in Ukraine:

As Noam Chomsky recently put it in an interview with The Intercept, there are, broadly speaking, two ways for a war to end: The first is for one side to be destroyed; the second is for the two sides to negotiate a settlement.

At the moment, the prospects for a negotiated settlement look grim, as Ishaan Thanoor explains in The Washington Post:

• Negotiations have stalled, and after Ukrainian forces sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in April, Putin reportedly “lost interest in diplomatic efforts to end his war.”
• The Ukrainians, Thanoor writes, “say that Russian atrocities against their civilians make any prospect of territorial or political concessions impossible and that, with support from abroad, they are beating Russia on the ground.”

Chomsky, for his part, believes that Russia’s military is simply too strong to lose; in the absence of a settlement, Ukraine will be destroyed.

He goes on to claim that Washington has never been interested in diplomacy:

“We can’t know for certain whether more rigorous U.S.-Russia diplomacy — including discussions surrounding NATO expansion and Ukrainian neutrality — might have succeeded in preventing Russia’s invasion,” writes Alex Jordan at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “We won’t know because it was — according to White House officials — never really tried.”

and that NATO’s objectives aren’t entirely clear:

NATO itself also needs to clarify its objectives, what it is willing to compromise on and how, argues Rajan Menon, a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Does NATO want to maintain sanctions indefinitely to diminish Russia’s power, or are there conditions it could meet to lift them? “It is within Putin’s power to wind down this war,” he writes, “but what NATO does matters as well.”

NATO’s plan is predicated on the assumptions that 1) the Ukrainians can prevail on the ground and 2) that if the war is made expensive enough, Russia will sue for peace. What if those assumptions are false?

The editors of the Washington Post are impressed that the members of the European Union are discussing an end to their purchases of Russian oil and gas:

Soaring energy prices are clearly a hardship. But it’s important to remember how much progress has been made. Germany is a good illustration; it has reduced its Russian oil imports from 35 percent of its needs last year to 12 percent now, coal from 45 percent to 8 percent, and natural gas from 55 percent to 35 percent. It’s better late than never for the E.U. to wean itself off Russian energy.

Their observation: it’s about time.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are similarly supportive:

Russian energy exports to Europe fuel Vladimir Putin’s war machine. Europeans are getting serious at long last about neutralizing this strategic weapon by proposing an embargo on Russian oil imports. Good for them.

The European Union’s latest round of sanctions seeks to ban imports of Russian crude over the next six months and refined products by the end of the year. Hungary and Slovakia, which rely more on Russian oil, will be granted until the end of 2023 to comply. The ban won’t have an immediate impact on the war, but it’s an important political and economic step.

There’s an old adage: sell on the rumor buy on the fact. We’re still at the rumor stage on this. I’ll be a lot more impressed when they actually stop buying Russian oil and gas.

There is a world of difference between ending purchases of Russian oil and gas within months and by the end of 2024 as some of the EU members want. Most importantly a lot fewer Ukrainians might die. Were Europe to stop buying Russian oil and gas immediately it could end the war, at least it could if there is any economic basis to it at all. If they wait a year or two years, Russia might well have made other arrangements.

It may be hard to believe given the reporting in the American media but Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. A piece in the Washington Post reports that the Russians now appear to be pursuing an organized deliberate attack on Ukrainian infrastructure:

The Kremlin is carrying out strikes on infrastructure that is critical to Ukraine’s efforts to resupply its forces in their defense against Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian officials and the Pentagon said Wednesday.

A senior U.S. defense official, speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon, said Ukraine is still able to move weapons through the country.

Russia’s targets on Tuesday and Wednesday included electrical substations, a railroad facility and a bridge in two major cities in western and central Ukraine. Strikes on Tuesday night caused severe damage at three electrical substations in Lviv, a critical hub for assistance entering the country from Eastern Europe, delaying trains and wiping out power for about a quarter of a million people.

“It was a deliberate blow to supply chains,” Lviv’s regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyy, said in a statement.

I don’t actually believe that this is a new effort although I suspect the Russians are more focused on it than they were previously. I think that Russia’s initial attacks against Kiev and other major population centers were a botched attempt at ending the war quickly and relatively cheaply. It was accompanied by attacks and raids against power stations, particularly nuclear sites. Now that Russian forces have been concentrated on eastern Ukraine attacks on infrastructure are more apparent. I also think that attacks on Ukrainian civilians should be viewed in that light. The Russians see the enemy’s will to fight as a legitimate target of war. To us it’s a war crime but to them it’s war.