You will find more infographics at Statista
In a column in the Wall Street Journal Brenda Cronin says it’s time for the Oscar ceremony to return to its roots:

Not only the Oscars have the long-in-the-tooth whiff of best-dressed lists and landlines. All the entertainment awards shows that have run on television—the Grammys, the Golden Globes, the Emmys—have worn out their welcome. It’s a rare blind spot for industries that prize youth and are ever on the prowl for the next big thing. These ceremonies cast a financial halo that can shine on even those tangentially involved, such as the aesthetician tending a nominee’s cuticles or eyebrows for the red carpet. Perhaps that is why the shows lumber along zombielike, even as streaming has transformed movies, music and all entertainment.

Would people set aside an evening to watch doctors or plumbers honor their own? True, the entertainment business has an outsize share of good looks and glitz. But audiences today seem to prefer their stars not in red-carpet regalia but in character, slaying villains, slogging through battlefield trenches, falling in love, or rocketing to outer space.

with this proposal:

Perhaps Hollywood should take a page from other industries and confine its honors to banquet rooms, where the only cameras are on smartphones. Don’t tweak or refresh or reimagine the awards show. Focus instead on making new and dazzling entertainment. We’re ready for it.

The first Academy Awards ceremony was in 1929; it was private. It wasn’t until 1945 that the awards ceremony was broadcast coast-to-coast (on ABC). Since it was an evening affair Pacific time, that was pretty late for the rest of the country. It was first televised in 1953 and at that time was the only awards show that received that treatment. Nowadays there are a half dozen, maybe a dozen awards shows televised per year.

I find them boring; judging by the graph of viewership at the top of this post a lot of Americans agree with me. Even the entertainment sections, e.g. the opening acts by the emcees, are tedious. Time for the Oscars to be relegated to history.

At Project Syndicate Michael Ignatieff makes a number of points I’ve been making here plus a few of his own:

The West has entered a proxy war, and in proxy wars, the proxy defines the objectives. When proxies do well, it is tempting to start envisaging more ambitious objectives, from forcing the opponent into a humiliating stalemate to effecting regime change. Yet this raises the risk of strategic hubris. We risk forgetting that Russians have long experience enduring economic hardship. They can absorb a great deal of economic punishment before rising against the regime. It is also hubristic to predict that Putin’s inner circle will rise up and dethrone him.

It is far too early to conclude that Putin is losing the war. He has already shifted to more destructive and effective tactics, with the hideous destruction of Mariupol and Kharkiv indicating what may be in store for Kyiv. Neither the West nor its proxy are in any position to announce regime change as the strategic goal, which would risk provoking Putin into pursuing an even more violent and dangerous escalation.

The West has been congratulating itself on the severity of the sanctions regime, but sanctions are weapons that hit both sides. Every Western leader knows that higher gasoline prices mean political trouble back home, especially in an election year. If the West cuts back further on Russian energy imports, or if the Russians turn off the tap themselves, a recession or even depression will loom.

We are, as he points out, walking “a fine line”. What outcome will the Ukrainians be willing to accept? What outcome will we be willing to accept?

Strategic planning requires that you plan for the worst rather than hoping for the best. I hope our political leaders understand that.

Update

In a similar vein at RealClearDefense Seth Cropsey writes:

Identifying a desirable end state requires precisely what the Biden administration has yet to do, identifying U.S. interests in Ukraine. NATO unity is not an end in itself. Nor is Ukraine a thriving liberal democracy. Zelensky’s election did signal a sea change in Ukrainian politics, demonstrating that civil society could assert itself against oligarchy and zombified nomenklatura. However, even absent the war, it would have taken decades of structural reforms and civil development for Ukraine to become a non-corrupt liberal democracy. Similarly, Ukraine would have been a target for Chinese investment, reducing American willingness to accept it into NATO. Ideological reasons, therefore, are insufficient to explain America’s engagement in the Ukraine question.

For the United States, the Ukraine question gains its relevance from power-political considerations. Ukraine is a large, populous country with a long Black Sea coastline. Putin’s decision for war had multiple drivers, including chauvinistic post-imperial nationalism, religious messianism, domestic pressure, poor intelligence, and fear of NATO. But it also stemmed from a concrete military concern, specifically Russia’s desire to secure the Black Sea, and its link to the Eastern Mediterranean. Crimea was a crucial acquisition in 2014. But until February, it was isolated and running low on water. By smashing a hole from Donbas to Crimea, Putin could ensure the Russian navy’s resupply, and allow it to project power more effectively against NATO’s vulnerable Black Sea or Mediterranean members.

Moreover, if Putin can take Odesa, a more ambitious goal, Russia then holds the entire northern Black Sea. A vulnerable Georgia would be a logical next target. Finishing the job against Tbilisi would give Russia control up to Turkey’s coastline, leaving only Romania and Bulgaria as Black Sea rivals. This could have been Putin’s objective from the war’s start. He has now shifted decisively to this objective, reducing the pace and intensity of northern operations, and focusing on Mariupol, the final city he must hold to take Ukraine’s Azov Sea coastal road, running from Rostov-on-Don to Melitopol, and onward to Crimea, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

My concern at this point is less that Russia will win than that U. S. political leaders will be surprised when it wins.

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser the the president of Ukraine, says that the Europeans a talking a good game in terms of their support for his country but not delivering as much as they could—for one thing they’re continuing to buy oil and gas from Russia:

Shutting down Mr. Putin’s cash flow is an urgent moral and strategic imperative, but Europe is frozen in the headlights.

Some European experts claim that the war is not being financed by energy exports. This is entirely wrong. Mr. Putin’s regime is seeking to buy military equipment. With much of the central bank’s reserves frozen, Mr. Putin needs the hard currency he receives every day, and therefore Russia has continued to pump oil at full prewar capacity. The euros that Mr. Putin receives now goes directly toward firepower that kills Ukrainian civilians and destroys our cities.

The economic and energy minister of Germany, Europe’s largest economy, said that any reduction in current purchases of oil and gas would cause his country’s economy to crater.

But Europe already has enough gas to get to next winter, and the International Energy Agency has laid out a viable plan for conservation and alternative supplies, which would reduce European imports of Russian gas by more than one third. Germany is particularly dependent on Russian gas, but a study from the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina pointed out that a short-term suspension of Russian gas would be “manageable.” Additionally, given that Germany has low debt relative to G.D.P., the potential effects on lower-income people can be addressed.

In the meantime, payments for Russian gas should go into escrow accounts, so that the proceeds cannot be used to buy weapons. This is standard practice when there are sanctions. Russia has already imposed its own escrow requirement on foreign investors who receive coupon payments on their ruble-denominated corporate bonds.

He should get used to it. Our European allies write a heckuva press release. They remind me of the W. C. Fields line: “Giving up drinking is easy—I’ve done it hundreds of times.” They announced their intention of eliminating their use of fossil fuels completely by 2030. Don’t be surprised if they make another announcement that they’ll eliminate their use of fossil fuels by 2040.

In a similar vein Brahma Chellaney writes at Project Syndicate:

Despite the raft of financial and economic sanctions it has imposed on Russia, Europe continues to support the Russian economy’s mainstay: oil and gas exports. This undermines the West’s own mission, especially as the confrontation drives up energy prices. But Europe’s longstanding dependence on Russian energy supplies has left it with no good alternatives – at least for now.

Such a tradeoff may not arise in the future. The European Union has already vowed to eliminate its dependence on Russian energy by 2030. At the same time, countries that want to uphold trade ties with Russia are seeking solutions outside Western-controlled channels. For example, India is buying Russian oil with rupees. Similar moves elsewhere – for example, Saudi Arabia is considering renminbi-based oil sales to China – threaten to erode the US dollar’s global supremacy.

concluding:

International law may be powerful against the powerless, but it is powerless against the powerful. The League of Nations, created after World War I, failed because it could not deter important powers from flouting international law. Its beleaguered successor, the United Nations, may be facing a similar reckoning. How can the UN Security Council fulfill its mandate of upholding international peace and stability if its five veto-wielding permanent members are arrayed into two opposing camps?

The world is headed for an era of greater upheaval. However it plays out, the pretense of a shared commitment to international law will be the first casualty.

Don’t expect the Europeans to acknowledge that. They’re willing to defend the rules-based order to the last Ukrainian.

The map above was prepared by TonyCohen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22679181

This op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh criticizing the “pivot to Asia” caught my eye this morning. Ignoring the partisan posturing as well as I can, here’s the meat of it:

At home Democrats partly justified exorbitant domestic spending as a means of rebuilding an America better able to resist China. Yet Mr. Biden hasn’t taken any serious military measures, or reinitiated a free-trading alliance, to confront Beijing. This disconnect between words and deeds might have been starkest when, soon after his inauguration, Mr. Biden held a summit meeting with Mr. Putin—whom Democrats had denounced throughout Donald Trump’s presidency as a threat to democracy—where he pressed for a “stable and predictable” relationship with Moscow.

Much of the cheap talk about pivoting stems from U.S. frustrations in the Middle East. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused the political class to question its assumptions about American power. Yet the Middle East remains. Energy markets are still global. Fracking hasn’t made Persian Gulf oil less important to America’s national security. The perverse interplay between Arab authoritarian states and Islamic radicalism (the former feeds the latter) continues. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, unimpeded by arms-control diplomacy, will soon confront the international community. As Mr. Putin has shown, a revisionist leader, armed with nuclear weapons and nursing grievances, can easily rattle, if not upend, financial markets and cherished assumptions.

For the foreseeable future, the Far East will have a prominent place in America’s strategic imagination. China’s conversion from a communist laggard to a rich and militarily powerful fascist state has Western leaders in a bind, given that they literally bet the bank on the hope that investment and trade would somehow pacify Beijing’s ambitions. But China’s rise doesn’t mean that Europe matters little or that the Middle East can be ignored. The U.S. isn’t Sweden. When America retreats, everyone suffers.

Although I think they have a point, I would state things differently.

The map at the top of this page illustrates trade flowing to and from the United states. You can click on it for a larger view. The red arrows illustrate our imports; the green arrows illustrate our exports. To take the most obvious example, our imports from China are a large, red arrow. Inside that arrow is a much smaller dark green arrow—we export a lot less to China than we import from China, i.e. we run a large trade deficit with China.

Our total volume of trade is about $4.5 trillion/year. Imports from China account for about half of our imports. Our top 15 trading partners account for about 70% of our imports. Our imports have been growing slowly over the years while our exports have been pretty flat:

U. S. GDP is around $21 trillion/year.

Rather than paying attention our interests in Asia to the exclusion of all else or to our interests in the Middle East over all else or our interests in Europe over all else I think we should be focused on U. S. interests.

We have an interest in reducing total trade with China, particularly our trade in strategic goods. President Biden can accomplish that with executive order alone and should. He said it pretty well in his State of the Union Address this year:

Instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America.

It could be tricky to write such a directive and even trickier to enforce. I would be a little broader than that. Supply chains for strategic goods, from raw materials all the way to finished good, should be, to the greatest degree possible within the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, and the rest of our top 15 trading partners with the exception of China and Russia and we should have and use our military to secure that trade. I believe that will mean greater emphasis on our navy and less on our army or air force but I am not an expert in such matters. If we need to continue to import, say, cobalt from the DRC, then we need to be able to secure that part of our supply chain as well.

The Glittering Eye was out of commission yesterday. I’m still trying to determine whether I was hacked. So far it doesn’t appear so but I have no other explanation for what happened.

Update

Yes, I was hacked. It has been cleaned up. I’m still not sure how the breach occurred.

This piece at UnHerd by William Deresiewicz pushes a lot of the right buttons:

Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a couple genuinely brilliant. All, needless to say, were expensively educated and impressively credentialed. I assumed that they’d arrive with a fairly good idea of how to make an argument with an academic context and that I would be teaching them how to apply those skills to a very different set of rhetorical occasions.

What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analysing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

and his experience is not unique:

These problems weren’t confined to Claremont. Later that same year, in a piece about the differences between the way his students read Shakespeare and the way that students used to, Stephen Greenblatt wrote this:

“Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility… In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.”

Here’s a pretty disheartening statistic:

The whole creaking machine is lubricated by the magic grease of grade inflation. As of the early Sixties, 15% of grades at American colleges and universities fell within the A range. By 2013, the proportion had reached 45%. To paraphrase the joke from the old Soviet Union, students pretend to work, and professors pretend to grade them.

I think he’s wrong in attributing the problem to “wokeism”—I think it goes back farther than that and is more pervasive. Basically, I blame the change on a loss of true literacy in favor of visualcy. Reading and understanding long form written tracts is becoming increasingly rare. Nowadays in order to communicate and foster comprehension you’ve got to have pictures, graphics, charts, and, preferably, videos. So what? (I hear somebody ask.)

The reason it’s important is that reading lengthy texts develops different cognitive skills than short passages, tweets, slogans, memes, etc. Those skills include longer attention spans and abstract reasoning. The present method of communication also cultivates increasingly agonistic expression. I’ve explored this in some detail—you can find my previous posts on this subject under “Visualcy”.

My point here is that everything he’s attributing to “wokeism” can be even more credibly attributed to the decline of true literacy in favor of visualcy and that process has been going on for nearly 60 years, long before many people in the U. S. had even heard of post-modernism. “Wokeism” is at most a contributing factor.

I found this piece from UK financiers Argonaut Capital pretty appalling in its implications for the adoption of wind and solar power. Here’s the gist of it:

The UK government has congratulated itself that between 1990 and 2019, carbon dioxide “emissions fell by 44% while GDP rose by 76%, with the UK decarbonising faster than any other G20 country since 2000.”6 What is not admitted is that this was mainly achieved by replacing coal with natural gas as the main source of reliable baseload7 power (with roughly half the emissions). The UK energy mix has changed substantially from the 1980’s when it was largely coal based with some nuclear and the only renewable power was hydro (see Fig 3. UK Power Generation since 1985). Scottish and UK governments decided to switch off fossil fuel investment before it was prudent to do so. With declining North Sea production, over half of UK natural gas is now imported either via pipeline or LNG ships, creating a now obvious energy security problem.8 Rather than wash its hands of fossil fuel production, the UK will now need to bring energy production back onto its own balance sheet.

Nuclear power generates reliable carbon-free baseload power. Enthusiasm for new projects has until recently10 been limited owing to misplaced safety fears, cost overruns on new builds and legacy technology (a lack of innovation caused by over-regulation). Solar was never going to work in the UK. The least difficult political option was wind. Energy policy then pivoted away from onshore wind when local opposition to eyesore developments resulted in Prime Minister Cameron promising to end all onshore wind subsidies in the Conservative election manifesto of 2015. Through offering the most generous government subsidies11 the UK ended up as the proud global leader in the previously nascent offshore wind industry.

Onshore wind power got scotched, so to speak, because it’s unsightly and takes up land valuable for other purposes. Offshore has some serious inefficiencies. This graph tells a pretty sad story:

especially the part I’ve circled.

The first thing that’s apparent is that a significant part of the UK’s reduction in emissions has been due to replacing coal-fired power generation with natural gas-fired. That’s much what we’ve done here. Additionally, as you can see a considerable part of the decrease in nuclear has been offset through the use of “biomass” which they explain like this:

“Biomass” – ironically highly carbon dioxide emitting wood pellets imported from the US, burned by power company Drax, but classified as “renewable” and oddly recipient of government subsidies3 – another 8%. Over the year, natural gas accounted for 44%, coal 2%, offshore wind 11%, onshore wind 10%, solar 2%, nuclear 18%, hydro 2%, and biomass 8%. In other words, over half of the UK’s power generation in 2021 came from fossil fuels and just a quarter from wind/water/solar renewables

That’s a complete misuse of burning wood. When someone living in a hut in Ghana burns wood for heat or cooking, it’s one thing. When someone in Germany does I begin to have a problem with it. But when wood is burned to generate electricity which in turn is used to heat or light a home or business or cook, it’s too inefficient.

Trees capture light from the sun. Burning wood releases a fraction of that power in the form of heat. Converting the heat to electricity wastes even more of the power and converting direct current to alternating current so it can be transported on power lines wastes an enormous amount of the power. Consequently, nearly all of the energy originally captured from the sun is wasted in the process.

Theoretically, wood is a renewable but wood derived from new growth which could reasonably be called renewable can’t be differentiated from wood from old growth forests—that can by no stretch be considered renewable. There’s a serious risk that old growth forests in the United States, Canada, and Brazil are being clearcut just so politicians and bureaucrats can claim they’re meeting goals that appear to be more arbitrary with each passing day.

Maybe a short way of saying all of this is

Electricity from burning switchgrass = Okay
Electricity from burning wood = A lot less okay

If you have wondered why India has not followed the lead of the U. S. and Europe in imposing economic sanctions on Russia, Mihir Sharma may have an explanation for us at Bloomberg. Although it may come as a surprise, India has national interests:

To India and many other developing countries, Western powers and the institutions they dominate appear to have different standards for conflicts close to home. While the World Bank has been slow to address the concerns of other war-torn nations, it has put together a $700 million package for Ukraine in record time. Some economists say the International Monetary Fund may be skirting its norms to send $1.4 billion in emergency funding to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, those same Western nations are proving themselves poor stewards of the global commons. Take the cutoff of several Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system. We have grown accustomed to thinking of interbank communications as a global utility; they’ve now been turned into a tool of Western foreign policy.

This was a unilateral decision by the countries that control SWIFT which, besides the U.S. and Japan, are all European. Little thought was given to how countries such as India, which rely on SWIFT to pay for oil and fertilizers from Russia, would manage the fallout. It should come as no surprise that India’s reaction has been to look for a way around the sanctions by settling trade with Russia in rupees and rubles.

Criticizing India for continuing to buy oil from Russia is especially galling, given that European nations have yet to wean themselves off Russian energy supplies either. And, unlike them, India can hardly afford such bills. If oil remains above $70 a barrel for months, the rupee will collapse, the government will run out of spending money, inflation will skyrocket and the country will have to start worrying about a balance of payments crisis.

I’m honestly not sure what the resolution of this is. For the economic sanctions to have real bite, we’re going to get more countries to go along with them. Additionally, China, India, Brazil, etc. cutting deals with Saudi Arabia or the UAE to accept, say, the yuan rather than dollars for oil could transform the sanctions into a Pyrrhic victory for the United States. While winning the Russia-Ukraine War and punishing Russia for its aggression, we could lose the ability for the federal government to spend more than it receives in taxes as easily as we’ve become used to.

I suspect we’re going to need both carrots and sticks which raises the question of whether we’re actually willing to sanction China, India, or other countries that don’t go along with the sanctions. And what do we have for carrots that we’re not already doing? That’s why I’m uncertain.

As President Biden’s Supreme Court appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson prepares to be questioned by the Senate, I want to repeat my views on her confirmation. I think that as a general matter a president’s appointments should be confirmed. Therefore barring some severe impediment arising which seems unlikely given her previous confirmations by the Senate, she should be confirmed as a Supreme Court associate justice.