Do you remember those cartoons that used to (still do as far as I know) appear in the newspaper and magazines? “How many things can you find wrong with this picture?” That’s what Ruth Marcus’s recent Washington Post column, the latest mourning prospective Supreme Court decisions, in this instance a decision on 2nd Amendment issues, reminds me of:

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, Justice Robert H. Jackson wisely observed in a 1949 free-speech case. As the Supreme Court prepares to decide its first gun rights case in a dozen years, an updated version of Jackson’s motto should be: The Constitution is not a mass suicide pact.

That is, the protections of the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, need not be interpreted in a way that forecloses reasonable limits and regulations. On that score, it’s worth quoting Jackson’s admonition in full: “There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

There have been few times in the history of the Supreme Court when its doctrinaire logic was more in need of tempering and practical wisdom.

Any day now, the court is poised to decide New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a challenge to a New York law requiring that people seeking licenses to carry a concealed handgun show “proper cause,” defined as “a special need for self-protection.”

I do not understand the legal intricacies of the decision the justices have before them and I doubt that Ms. Marcus does, either. I presume it’s the vibe of the thing that bothers her.

Here’s my point. In a common law system judges are empowered to interpret the law according to precedent and legal principles and in some cases the law simply does not apply to the situation. In the absence of applicable precedent the judges are not empowered to decide what the policy should be and rule accordingly. That smacks of a civil code system. In a civil code legal system (as prevails in almost all of the world) the law always applies to every situation and the judge’s job is to determine how.

Under our legal system while it’s true that the Constitution is not a suicide pact it’s not an Etch-a-Sketch, either. Making policy is the responsibility of the elected branches of government—the executive and legislative. If the legislative branch refuses or can’t enact the necessary law, it’s not up to the Supreme Court to do it for them. The law doesn’t get enacted.

I think that’s a good part of the blinding rage that so many progressives have about the Supreme Court today. Over the last 50 years they’ve become accustomed to the Supreme Court doing for them what they couldn’t accomplish through the legislature and, now that the ideology of the Supreme Court has shifted, they feel that something they own has been taken away from them.

There’s something we should all keep in mind. Under our legal system when the courts routinely cast away precedent and legal principle in the interest of accomplishing a social good, it erodes the rule of law. Casting that as some part of the democratic process is mistaken. It’s mob rule.

Speaking of damage control, the editors of the Washington Post leap to President Biden’s defense regarding gas prices:

The United States has hit another uncomfortable milestone: $5 gas is now the norm. More than 20 states have prices above the $5 mark (California is above $6 a gallon), according to AAA. Record gas prices are a daily reminder of how different the current economy is from what many Americans are accustomed to: Inflation is at a four-decade high, and interest rates are rising at a pace not seen in two decades. People are anxious about this economy. Consumer sentiment is at a record low since the University of Michigan began tracking it in the mid-1970s.

This is largely Vladimir Putin’s fault. Gas prices are up nearly $2 in the past year, and 75 percent of that increase came since Putin’s Russian troops invaded Ukraine. The United States and many other countries rightly responded to this unjustified war by imposing heavy sanctions and halting purchases of Russian oil and grain. But that means supplies are down, and energy and food prices have soared to record highs around the world. Putin wants — and expects — the world to cave and lift the sanctions and cede parts of Ukraine to Russia in the face of these high prices. As hard as it is, we cannot let Putin win.

They conclude by urging President Biden to prevail on oil companies to produce more oil:

Mr. Biden and his team need to engage more with domestic oil producers about what’s needed to spur more production — and remind companies that their soaring profits may please Wall Street, but they harm American families as well as the broader effort to end the war in Ukraine.

There’s a kernel of truth in what they’re saying but I don’t think it’s the whole story.

Consider the graph of oil prices at the top of this page. The green line represents when Joe Biden was elected president. The red line indicates when Russia invaded Ukraine.

As should be obvious a considerable portion of the run-up in oil prices took place before the invasion of Ukraine. Consequently, The increase in prices between those two lines, roughly half of the total, cannot be attributed to the invasion.

Consider the following pledges from Candidate Biden:

Transition from oil
100% “clean” energy by 2035
Biden’s green energy proposal

Among his first acts on becoming president were a consumption subsidy and cancelling the Keystone pipeline. Getting domestic producers to increase production isn’t like turning a faucet on and off. Not only is a substantial lead time required but investors need to be convinced that they’ll be able to reap the benefits of their investment its lifetime.

Isn’t it just barely possible that people have been taking President Biden seriously?

So I’ll blame Putin for half of the increase in the price of gasoline but President Biden deserves the other half. Look at the bright side. As oil prices continue to increase more of the run-up will be Putin’s fault. I’m sure the American people will be understanding about that.

While I agree with Christopher Leonard’s point in his New York Times op-ed that the Federal Reserve should have started raising interest rates long before it did:

It started back in 2010, when the Fed embarked on the unprecedented and experimental path of using its power to create money as a primary engine of American economic growth. To put it simply, the Fed created years of super-easy money, with short-term interest rates held near zero while it pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system. One way to understand the scale of these programs is to measure the size of the Fed’s balance sheet. The balance sheet was about $900 billion in mid-2008, before the financial market crash. It rose to $4.5 trillion in 2015 and is just short of $9 trillion today.

All of this easy money had a distinct impact on our financial system — it incentivized investors to push their money into ever riskier bets. Wall Street-types coined a term for this effect: “search for yield.” What that means is the Fed pushed a lot of money into a system that was searching for assets to buy that might, in return, provide a decent profit, or yield. So money poured into relatively risky assets like technology stocks, corporate junk debt, commercial real estate bonds, and even cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens, known as NFTs. This drove the prices of those risky assets higher, drawing in yet more investment.

The Fed has steadily inflated stock prices over the last decade by keeping interest rates extremely low and buying up bonds — through a program called quantitative easing — which has the effect of pushing new cash into asset markets and driving up prices. The Fed then supercharged those stock prices after the pandemic meltdown of 2020 by pumping trillions into the banking system. It was the Fed that primarily dropped the ball on addressing inflation in 2021, missing the opportunity to act quickly and effectively as the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, reassured the public that inflation was likely to be merely transitory even as it gained steam. And it’s the Fed that is playing a frantic game of financial catch-up, hiking rates quickly and precipitating a wrenching market correction.

but if he thinks that giving Americans a more realistic understanding of what’s been going on over the last dozen years will either exculpate President Biden or help him politically I’m afraid he’s going to be bitterly disappointed. Jerome Powell was appointed to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by President Obama. Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president. True, Donald Trump elevated Mr. Powell to chairman. And Joe Biden appointed Powell to a second term as Fed chairman.

So, while there’s plenty of blame to go around no one forced Joe Biden to re-appoint Powell. And presidents always get blamed for developments during their terms of office whether they are directly related to their actions as president or not and today’s high inflation is directly related to the consumption subsidies enacted in 2021.

It may be a coincidence but the RCP Average of polls shows President Biden’s “spread”, the difference between his approval rating and his disapproval rating, to be -15.5, the greatest of his presidency. He has no fallen through his previous approval floor of 40% to 39%. And, as I have pointed out, “doing something”, e.g. making public appearances actually hurts Joe Biden’s approval rating. Maybe it will stabilize before the midterms.

In their latest conversation Glen Loury and John McWhorter discuss one of my least favorite turns of phrase—”people of color”:

What is the justification for this? Some progressives will tell you that all “people of color” share a common experience, which is that they have suffered the oppression of white supremacy or systemic racism. Even granting the existence of such universal oppression (which I do not), would it justify describing the experiences of, say, a newly arrived South Korean delivery driver and the second-generation child of Harvard-educated Bahamian lawyers as, in any meaningful way, “the same”?

Of course not. To group two such people together, you would have to ignore everything about them except the fact that they are not white. You can’t even call this “racial essentialism,” since the only race it essentializes is the so-called white race. The “people of color” moniker doesn’t so much propose a coherent theory of non-white identity as it quietly legitimizes an even less respectable, more dangerous theory of whiteness. Advocates of “people of color”-type identity politics will tell you they oppose white identity. But I regret to inform them that they are, in fact, perpetuating and empowering white identity.

One of the fascinating qualities of language is that it allows you to talk about things that don’t exist other than in a Bellman, “Hunting of the Snark”, sort of way—”What I tell you three times is true”. And that’s probably the main reason the phrase irritates me. If its intention is to convince people of primarily European descent that they are an interest group and should vote as one, it’s quite effective.

My view is that in the United States people of sub-Saharan African descent, the descendants of slaves, do suffer from the vestigial effects, not just of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow, but of the unanticipated run-on effects of poorly constructed welfare programs and other policies. The one-two punch of racism and mass immigration coupled with the deindustrialization of America made it difficult for black men to get jobs that would allow them to support their families. Conjoin that with black women being able to get jobs as maids, cooks, etc. and AFDC that made men in the household a liability rather than an asset and you have the destruction of the black family. Young men, in need of social support, banded together in gangs. That’s part of the foundation of the self-genocide presently going on.

Those are not experiences shared by Hispanic, South Asian, East Asian, or recent African or Caribbean immigrants. Furthermore, to believe in a distinctive common cause among these disparate groups you must gloss over the competition for jobs between blacks and Hispanics and the reality that a disproportionate amount of anti-Asian hate crimes have black perpetrators, the recent murders in Dallas being prime examples.

Everyone experiences failure in life, rejection. Blaming those failures on racism can be a cheap and easy way of excusing yourself from trying again. Add to that a perverse black nationalism that considers studying in school, for example, “acting white” and you lay the groundwork for permanent failure.

I thought you might be interested in the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s take on the January 6 committee’s hearings:

The House inquiry into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot launched its TV miniseries Thursday night, and the trick for parsing the proceedings is to keep two ideas in tension. Do Democrats want to unfairly besmirch the entire GOP with the Jan. 6 disgrace, while distracting voters from 8.6% inflation and $5-a-gallon gasoline? Yes.

Yet did the committee offer a damning look at President Trump’s scheme to stay in office after losing the 2020 election? Also yes. Fresh video of the riot is a reminder that Jan. 6 was a brutal melee of fists and chemical sprays. “I was slipping in people’s blood,” said Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards. The footage is visceral, even if similar scenes were already on YouTube.

They go on to describe how the committee strengthens its case by citing testimony from Mark Milley and William Barr but weakens it by quoting unnamed sources.

They conclude by observing that Donald Trump has served his supporters poorly:

The person who owns Jan. 6 is Donald Trump. Remarkably, he seems to welcome this. “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he wrote Thursday on Truth Social, “it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”

Pity the people who went to Washington believing this nonsense, not least the more than 800 who have been charged with criminal offenses. Thursday’s hearing ended with video of rioters explaining their thinking, as their criminal charges flashed on the screen. “I did believe that the election was being stolen,” one man said, “and Trump asked us to come.”

Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on Jan. 6, and he is still doing it.

As I see it the hearings serve a number of purposes including:

• An analysis of the facts surrounding the events of January 6
• Hatred of Donald Trump
• Battlespace preparation

in declining order of probity. I also think that the committee members are misinterpreting their role as prosecutors constructing a case for the criminal prosecution of the former president. To whatever extent that is the case they are wasting energies that would be better devoted to ascertaining the facts with an eye fostering confidence in our government and politics, intent on preventing a recurrence of the events of that day.

In her Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan, remarks on the recall of San Francisco’s district attorney, the agitation among Republican senators at the prospect of reform in gun control, and the young men arrested for attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as bellwethers of the national mood:

Don’t they know what time it is? This is a nation in all kinds of crises. You can’t let your theories and abstractions have sway at such a moment, you have to let common sense step in.

The lesson of this political moment: Don’t be radical, don’t be extreme. Our country is a tea kettle on high flame, at full boil. Wherever possible let the steam out, be part of a steady steam release before the kettle blows.

A century ago in his novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway famously described how you go bankrupt: “gradually then suddenly”. The same is true of boiling water. It heats gradually and boils suddenly. In physics it’s called a “change of state”.

There are an enormous number of forces adding heat today. They include immigration, political polarization, the enormous growth in wealth of the ultra-rich while ordinary wages progress much more slowly, COVID-19, inflation, social media, and Russia’s war against Ukraine just to name a few. We’ve been seeing bubbles rising for some time now. Barack Obama’s election to the presidency—one bubble. Donald Trump’s election to the presidency—another bubble. The bubbles are coming with increasing frequency now. The breaching of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the riots following George Floyd’s murder, mass shootings, 20% of Generation Z self-identifying as LGBTQ, and on and on—bubble, bubble, bubble, bubble.

Maybe you’re certain that this will pass. We’ve had unrest in the past and greater unrest at that. The difference between a change of state in physics and a society boiling over is that changes of state in physics are reversible.

Gradually then suddenly.

Meanwhile in his Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria says this about Russia’s war against Ukraine:

America’s dominant priority must be to ensure that Russia does not prevail in its aggression against Ukraine. And right now, trends are moving in the wrong direction. Russian forces are consolidating their gains in eastern Ukraine. Sky-high oil prices have ensured that money continues to flow into Putin’s coffers. Europeans are beginning to talk about off-ramps. Moscow is offering developing nations a deal: Get the West to call off sanctions, it tells them, and it will help export all the grain from Ukraine and Russia and avert famine in many parts of the world. Ukraine’s leaders say it still does not have the weapons and training it needs to fight back effectively.

The best China strategy right now is to defeat Russia. Xi Jinping made a risky wager in backing Russia strongly on the eve of the invasion. If Russia comes out of this conflict a weak, marginalized country, that will be a serious blow to Xi, who is personally associated with the alliance with Putin. If, on the other hand, Putin survives and somehow manages to stage a comeback, Xi and China will learn an ominous lesson: that the West cannot uphold its rules-based system against a sustained assault.

What Mr. Zakaria does not explain is how the U. S. can ensure that “Russia does not prevail”. In bullet point form the sad truth is:

• Slowly but surely Russia is reducing Ukraine.
• The longer the war goes on the more Ukrainians will be killed or flee Ukraine and the weaker Ukraine’s negotiating position will be.
• The economic sanctions that have been imposed on Russia are toothless.
• The G7 countries are marginalizing themselves rather than Russia.
• The sanctions are imposing pain on the world economy.
• Were the G7 to impose such sanctions on China the impact on the global economy would be quite serious.
• For just that reason whatever the U. S. does Germany, France, and Japan probably wouldn’t go along with economic sanctions against China.
• China is being convinced that it can do pretty much what it cares to with respect to Taiwan.

Update

It’s not just me and it’s not just Russian propaganda. Individuals much more knowledgeable than I are saying the same things. Consider this observation by retired Lt. Gen. Stephen Twitty at a Council on Foreign Relations roundtable:

TWITTY: Yeah. Richard, I’m going to give a little bit more color in terms of what I’m seeing here. I think the war in the Donbas is starting to turn to the Russians’ favor, and when you take a look at—and I’m particularly talking about the eastern part of the Donbas—the Russians have transitioned from trying to pour all their combat power into the Donbas to obliterating every single town. Whether it be Rubizhne, Lyman, they’re working now on Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk as well, they’re obliterating these particular towns, and that’s how they’re making their headway. They’re not putting a bunch of combat power with infantry forces and tanks in there. They’ve taken all their artillery and they’re treating it like Mariupol and that’s how they’re making their headway. So they’re starting to make some headway in the eastern Donbas and so we have to watch that one closely.

HAASS: Given this situation, I have one question—one more question about the current situation and then I want to transition to issues of goals and war termination and the rest. Given that we are where we are and there’s more agreement than disagreement among us by far, would anyone at this point argue for a major change in Western policy, that we ought to add something that’s qualitatively—like, for example, one could say we ought to try to accelerate gas sanctions against Russia—that might be one thing. There’s the question of equipment deliveries to Ukraine. But, basically, are the contours of policy set or am I missing something?

Why don’t we reverse it? General Twitty, is there something that the president said? Are things we’re not doing that we should be doing? Is there things that you would recommend at this point?

TWITTY: Well, as I take a look at this, you know, Secretary Austin came out that we’re going to weaken Russia. We have not really defined what weaken means, because if you take a look at the Ukrainians right now, I take a strong belief in Colin Powell’s doctrine—you overwhelm a particular enemy with force. And right now, when you take a look at Ukraine and you take a look at Russia, they’re about one to one. The only difference is Russia has a heck of a lot of combat power than the Ukrainians.

And so there’s no way that the Ukrainians will ever destroy or defeat the Russians, and so we got to really figure out what does weaken mean in the end state here. And I will also tell you, Richard, there’s no way that the Ukrainians will ever have enough combat power to kick the Russians out of Ukraine as well, and so what does that look like in the end game.

I listened to the televised presentation of the January 6 committee’s hearings last night. More than ever I wish that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had allowed the Republicans to appoint the members they wanted to the committee. That would have foreclosed the claim that the hearings were a partisan witch hunt. In his Washington Post column George Will says this about the hearings:

The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the planning of it, can present facts crucial to Congress’s performing this legitimate function: supplying the public with information indispensable to understanding itself. The information’s importance can be, but need not be, related to some legislative purpose. Telling an important story can be sufficient. Assembling the narrative of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, thereby dispelling conspiracy theories corrosive of social trust, was a sufficient justification for the 1963-1964 Warren Commission.

The Jan. 6 committee will forfeit the public’s limited trust in it — and the public’s limited interest in it — if members pursue preexisting progressive agendas, such as abolition of the electoral college or other changes to election law. Furthermore, Congress has neither a constitutional power nor an institutional aptitude for building a criminal case against Donald Trump. If the committee attempts this, it will sink into the quicksand of fascinating but legally problematic definitions of “conspiracy,” and of speech that becomes illegal by “inciting” illegality.

This morning media commentators are lauding the hearings for just that.

I believe that

1. Joe Biden is the legal and legitimate president of the United States.
2. The breaching of the Capitol was wrong and those who did so should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
3. Not all of those protesting in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 were engaged in insurrection but some were.
4. Tarring everyone who engaged in those protests as an insurrectionist while not treating those protesting in support of causes you favor the same way increases the perception that the hearings are a partisan exercise.
5. Donald Trump is an arrogant dolt.

but I believed all of those things before I started listening to the hearings. I seriously doubt they will change anyone’s minds about anything.

I want to comment a (relatively) short video by Kite and Key Media on American excpetionalism to your attention. A snippet from the transcript:

There’s more than a little truth to the idea that America is different than the rest of the world.

In a lot of ways that should make us proud…

…and a few that probably shouldn’t.

They highlight a lot of the ways in which we are quite different from other OECD countries. But not all of the things that make us different. Let me mention just two.

Most of the other OECD countries are fundamentally ethnic states. We are much, much more diverse in practically every way than they are and have been for the last 200 years. Keep that in mind when people tell you how wonderful Denmark or Japan or France are (the French don’t think that France is that wonderful, by the way).

Another way in which we are different and this is based on my personal experience living and working other countries is that in every country in my experience people think that any social good worthy of the name should be administered and funded by the government. Americans tend not to think that although that has been shifting lately.

At any rate check out the video. You may find it interesting.

One more thing. We do build less road, receive less healthcare, and get less education per dollar spent than any other OECD country. I attribute that to one of the the things called out in the video, our very high level of individualism. The converse of that individualism is a very low level of social cohesion. The implication of that is that our government can do exactly the same things that, say, France does and not get the same results from them that France does.