I also wanted to bring Rob Smith’s post at RealClearMarkets to your attention. I don’t agree with everything in it but IMO it’s a point-of-view worth knowing about. Here’s a snippet:

In my last article, I explained how the real world is different from the Hollywood movie script of Putin v. Zelensky. Putin was born in 1952, and his parents survived the Siege of Leningrad, where some Russians ate each other to keep from starving. It would be impossible for Hitler’s invasion of Russia not to be permanently a part of Putin’s consciousness. Perhaps the greatest time of peace and prosperity in Ukraine was during the 263 years it was part of the Russian Empire (1654 to 1917). Crimea is overwhelmingly ethnic Russian, and Russian was its predominant language. A referendum was held, and Crimea voted to join Russia. Although it was a “rigged election,” a fair election would have certainly delivered the same result. Yes, Putin seized Crimea, but it was only after Victoria Nuland and Obama deep-state operatives executed a coup overthrowing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. At the same time, Ukraine, with the help of the United States, began to oppress the native Russian population in the Donbas. A regional civil war ensued. The majority of the Donbas are also ethnic Russians, and they too have voted for independence and to be part of a Russian federation. Isn’t self-determination mentioned in the preamble of the UN Charter? Who’s to say that the people of these regions won’t be better off, happier, and more prosperous being part of Russia?

I want to offer a few corrections. To the best of my knowledge the Donbas does not have an ethnic Russian majority and the author presents no sources. Ethnic Ukrainians held a narrow majority in the 2001 census, the Soviet census of 1970, the Soviet census of 1939, and the imperial census of 1897. Again to the best of my knowledge the territory of Ukraine has always been multi-ethnic and multi-confessional and still is.

He’s right about Crimea, though. It has never had a Ukrainian majority. In the 2014 census ethnic Ukrainians comprised about 25% of the population there.

I would also say, contrary to Mr. Smith that we don’t really know what has been happening in Ukraine. Much is a question of whose propaganda we choose to believe.

Now that President Trump’s tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports have gone into effect, I wanted to repeat my view of them. I think that tariffs on Mexican and Canadian imports are a very bad idea for the reasons that many are mentioning. They are paid by consumers. They will raise prices and the effects will be regressive—they will fall hardest on those least able to afford them.

Hopefully, the president will have accomplished whatever it was that he intended by them and they’ll be rescinded soon.

In contrast I think that much higher tariffs should be imposed on imports from China. As I’ve said before I think tariffs in the amount of the total of the value of American intellectual property infringed on by the Chinese, the costs borne by American companies and governments to defend themselves against state-supported Chinese hackers, and the subsidies China provides to state-owned enterprises that export to the United States should be applied. I haven’t checked lately but the last time I did that amount was a multiple of total U. S. imports from China.

I wanted to call attention to George Friedman’s guest post at Rod Martin’s Substack blog. His thesis is that Russia has lost its war with Ukraine:

Wars are fought with an intent formed by an imperative. A prudent leader has to take steps to avoid the worst possible outcome, and Putin, as a prudent leader, prepared for the possibility that NATO would choose to attack Russia. He expressed this fear publicly so the only question was how to block an attack if it occurred. He needed a buffer zone to significantly impede a possible assault.

That buffer was Ukraine, and he on several occasions expressed regret that Ukraine had separated from Russia. The distance from the Ukraine border to Moscow, on highway M3, is only about 300 miles (480 kilometers). Russia’s nightmare was that Germany could surge its way to Moscow. Three hundred miles by a massive force staging a surprise attack is not a huge distance. He rationally needed Ukraine to widen the gap.

I predicted years before the war that Russia would invade Ukraine to regain its buffers. That Russia wanted to take the whole of Ukraine is confirmed in its first forays into the country. The initial assault was a four-pronged attack, one thrust from the east, two from the north and one from the south via Crimea. The two northern prongs were directed at the center of Ukraine and its capital, Kyiv.

The long and the short is that Russia does not have its buffer; therefore it lost.

I don’t disagree with Mr. Friedman but I would go farther. All parties including the Ukrainians and the Americans have lost this war.

Ukraine’s losses are obvious—you only need look at the death and destruction. But we have lost as well. Our losses are not just the billions we have given to Ukraine but any remaining vestiges of our sole superpower status. I don’t think we look nearly as invulnerable nor as potent as we used to.

I had an eye exam yesterday and having your pupils dilated really impedes your ability to look at computer screens. I did watch President Trump’s speech last night or, more accurately, I watched the first half. Then I went to bed.

The first half was about what I had expected—full of superlatives and exaggerations with churlishness from supporters and opponents alike. I thought the handling of the Democratic congressman who attempted to disrupt the speech was about right.

CNN’s spot poll found that almost 80% of those who listened to the speech approved of it. What did you think?

I agree with some of what the editors of the Washington Post have to say although I may disagree with them in others and the reasons:

Treating allies less kindly than adversaries reflects naiveté about the threat a revanchist Russia poses to the Western world, including NATO. Zelensky does want to end the three-year war that has ravaged his country, but he is clear-eyed that a bad deal is worse than no deal because he knows that, absent ironclad security guarantees from Ukraine’s allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted to uphold a ceasefire.

I agree that President Trump and Vice President Vance should have been kinder to President Zelensky. He’s in a trying situation, a novice, and under enormous pressure. I’m skeptical that Russia is a threat to Western Europe or even to Poland although Russia is undoubtedly a threat to Poland’s regaining the territory it held once upon a time. Neither Germany nor France is behaving as though they believe that Russian invasion is a likely contingency.

Their reading of history is highly selective. My own view is that we should refrain from embroiling ourselves in the grievances of other countries and focus more narrowly on our own interests.

I was preparing a post on what the body language of the parties in the meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelensky told us when lo! and behold Victoria Craw did it for me in the Washington Post:

The decision not to use an interpreter, the power imbalance among the parties and Zelensky’s “warrior energy” after three years of conflict all contributed to the Washington meeting boiling over, body-language analysts said.

Trump is often polite with leaders, but relations with Zelensky, never particularly warm, have been souring. Trump has claimed, falsely, that Zelensky is a dictator and that Ukraine started the war, matching the Kremlin line. Zelensky has said Trump lives in a “web of disinformation.”

Goyder likened the exchange to a performance in which Trump and Zelensky were acting out different scenes.

Trump was acting out a court scene; Zelensky was acting in a war movie and make no mistake he was acting. He’s not a warrior; he plays one on TV. It began with how he was dressed. Why was he dressed that way? Why did Fidel Castro wear fatigues? It was to project an image.

And he was acting aggressively right from the outset rather than in reaction to Trump and Vance as some have said:

To Darren Stanton, who studies and comments on body language and behavior, Zelensky appeared “quite angry from the outset” and got “caught up in his own ego.” When Vance is talking, Zelensky moves from leaning forward to leaning back with his arms crossed, showing a “dramatic change in inner emotion.”

Or, as I’ve said before, he badly misread the room. As somebody said, all he had to do was come in, say “Thank you”, sign the economic agreement, and then ask what was for lunch. That’s it. Instead he went out of his way to antagonize the president and vice president of the United States, Ukraine’s single largest benefactor.

What was he thinking? I think he was still chafing under Trump’s comments about his being a “dictator”; he was responding emotionally and, again as I’ve said, that was a rookie response.

Why did President Zelensky not use an interpreter? I think he overestimated his command of English and that failed him since it took him a while before he understood when Trump, speaking colloquially, said he “didn’t have the cards”.

There is another interpretation and that is he is acting in the way he has been encouraged to act by our European notional allies and the Biden Administration. Contrary to what some are saying, the default attitude of European leaders towards the United States is disdain and has been for over 200 years. That hasn’t changed. They don’t respect us. When they act as though they do, it’s because they want something from us. That has been true since before the time of Our American Cousin and remains true. However, as in Our American Cousin, it’s not the Americans who are the “rubes” but the Europeans.

I wanted to share some reactions to the “fiery exchange” between Presidents Trump and Zelensky today. First, I don’t believe that either of these men should be president of any country. One is a real estate developer and reality show host and the other a stand-up comic. There are issues of temperament and protocol involved. It was a mess.

Second, and in this case I’m speaking as someone who has meetings including people with as many as six different mother tongues every darned day, at one point President Trump was speaking colloquially (“hold the cards”) and President Zelensky clearly did not understand what was being said.

President Zelensky did not do any good for his cause.

Ethan Siegel has a post at Big Think that might interest you:

In every civilized society around the world, there’s a trade-off that must be made. The protection of individual freedoms, on one hand, enable the people living there to pursue their own goals, dreams, and ideals, whatever they may be. But those pursuits must not infringe on the rights?—?including the health, safety, and general welfare?—?of others. When it comes to issues like the health, safety, and long-term prosperity of our society, there is no greater tool or resource we have to assess them accurately than science.

It might seem like, at the start of 2025, we’re headed in absolutely the wrong direction. Mass firings and layoffs at the NIH, the NSF, the CDC and more, coupled with the installation of a number of prominent anti-science cabinet members, the first deadly measles outbreak among children in a decade, and the USA’s withdrawal (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement all signal a national move away from science.

But this is not new. The fact is that Americans have been resistant to heeding the scientific consensus on matters of public policy for many decades, preferring stances that agree with their ideological preferences instead. This was highlighted in 2020 and beyond, as many refused to mask, vaccinate, or isolate at even the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This disregard for scientific facts extends even to the vilification of the scientists that find them, resulting in policies that recklessly endanger not only the health and safety of Americans today, but provide new generations with long-term challenges that they’ll need to either reckon with or face the consequences.But hope remains, as we’re just four key steps away from putting America back on the right track. Here’s what we can do.

His “four steps” are

1. Put an end to the “false equivalence” game
2. Make “reckless endangerment” illegal.
3. Value society’s right to benefit from humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
4. Fund science—including basic, fundamental research?—?as a national priority.

Although I agree with his point in the abstract I’m not sure that his “four steps” will accomplish anything.

There are several points I don’t think he recognizes. First, the history of science is littered with cases in which the “scientific consensus” was wrong. At one point or other the scientific consensus was that the sun revolved around the earth; that species could not become extinct; that the shapes and locations of the continents were immutable; that the material world was composed of fire, water, earth, and air; that bad air was the primary cause of disease (the “miasma theory”), and so on. My conclusion from that is that science and scientists are not the same thing.

Related to that is that is impossible to “fund science”. We can only fund scientists and considerable effort is required to ensure that we are not encouraging people to provide grants to their friends or pursuing something other than science rather than to advancing science. Furthermore, no amount of research would have proven the existence of the ether. That’s why I favor funding mass engineering projects over funding basic research. Basically, we’ve gotten better results in basic science from mass engineering programs than we have from funding basic scientific research directly.

I also found this passage amusing:

We have the means, the knowledge, the resources, and the capability of:

• making every municipal water supply in the country safe to drink
• practically eradicating preventable diseases that have resurged (such as measles) in recent years
• supplying 100% of our energy needs with green (nuclear, solar, wind, or other renewable) sources by 2050 or sooner
• drastically curtailing the spread of respiratory diseases, including the flu and COVID-19, in the American population

This:

supplying 100% of our energy needs with green (nuclear, solar, wind, or other renewable) sources by 2050 or sooner

is something I might agree with but I cannot think of a single politician who believes that or, at least, has articulated it in public. Additionally, I think that it is equally true that we could supply 100% of our energy needs with nuclear power but NOT with solar, wind, or other renewable sources. The reasons that an “all of the above” strategy makes sense are cost and expense.

Also, wouldn’t it require vaccinating 100% of the population against, say, measles which I believe is an unachievable goal, to eradicate measles as long as we are admitting unvaccinated individuals from other countries into the United States? To the best of my knowledge only five countries have actually eradicated measles: Bhutan, North Korea, Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste. Two of those are isolated and the other three relatively small islands. Consequently, I’m skeptical we can eradicate them but we might be able to “drastically curtail them”.

At any rate read the whole thing. You’ll find things you agree with and things you’ll disagree with.

China perma-hawk Gordon Chang has been predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy for decades. That was what I was prepared for when I read his most recent offering at Newsweek. However, I was somewhat surprised when what I read made a certain amount of sense:

In 2008, China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao decided they would not allow the economy to suffer, so they embarked on perhaps the biggest stimulus program in history.

The result was historic overbuilding, and the country now has too much of almost everything. For instance, He Keng, a former senior statistics official, in 2023 publicly revealed that China had enough vacant apartments to house the entire population of 1.4 billion people. He noted that some believed that empty homes could hold three billion.

To deal with the severe imbalance, some Chinese localities are demolishing newly completed but vacant apartment buildings. Yet this is only a temporary fix. After all, destroyed buildings cannot produce revenue to pay for their construction and demolition.

“Without paying for the bad investments—largely real estate—the economy can’t grow,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research, author of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy. “And it definitely can’t pay for the bad investments. At least within the next decade.”

The crisis will almost certainly last a long time. “China has grown almost entirely through capital investment,” notes Stevenson-Yang. “Because there isn’t enough to invest in, a lot of good money chases bad, and they have reached a limit. The Chinese economy is having a heart seizure.”

The seizure looks fatal. China’s total-country-debt-to-GDP ratio is extraordinarily high. After taking into account so-called “hidden debt” and adjusting for inflated GDP claims—the country did not grow anywhere near the reported 5.0 percent pace last year—the ratio could be, according to my estimate, 375 percent. Higher figures are also plausible.

That dovetails with what I’ve been saying literally for decades. I should interject that Ken Rogoff’s and Carmen Reinhart’s empirical findings remain controversial but unrefuted: debt overhang impedes economic growth (please take note, Trump Administration).

In the 1990s and early Aughts, China invested in productive capacity. That resulted, for example, in having enough excess capacity in automobile production to supply all global demand for cars and trucks for the foreseeable future. That is now the case for a vast array of goods. Then they turned their attention to real estate and built enough apartment buildings for their entire population if China’s population had continued to grow which it did not.

The U. S. economic system has certain weaknesses but one of the strengths of our semi-market system is that it tends to wring out excess productive capacity. China’s semi-market system suffers from an inability to do that.

Decades ago I observed that China needs to consume more and import more. To date the CCP has been reluctant to let that happen, preferring to build excess capacity despite chronic over-building. The difference between now and twenty years ago is that 20 years ago keeping China’s economy sustainable depended on consuming and importing more. Now the global economy does.