Does anyone have any remarks about Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s visit to the U. S.? IMO the complaints about his stumping for Harris are not entirely off the mark but overblown.

Presumably, his visit is to make another pitch for striking targets in the Russian interior which if we are prudent we will reject. My understanding is that

1. the Ukrainians cannot do that targeting without the direct participation of U. S. personnel
2. Putin has made it quite clear that he will consider that an act of war by the United States

and to his credit President Biden has resisted that to date.

I think that Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column is one of his best. It is primarily a critique of the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy. After cataloguing the administration’s many failed overtures, he arrives here:

Mr. Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do. As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.

He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.

However, I think he errs here:

In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China. What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.

Japan invaded China (Manchuria) in September 1931. I honestly don’t know if Americans considered the invasion immoral. What I have read does not reflect that. I suspect that American missionaries in China did but that is not synonymous with Americans. What is unclear to me is whether Americans saw that as damaging to American interests or were largely disinterested. I suspect the latter. Smoot-Hawley had been enacted the year before and what little trade we had with China had been sharply curtailed. IMO during the 1930s Americans were more concerned about survival.

The second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. I think that Japanese atrocities during that war aroused some humanitarian concerns in the United States. Lend-Lease, considerably more expansive than our support for Britain and France, began in 1941, in significant part a response to those concerns. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was at the end of 1941 and it was a “Hail Mary”on Japan’s part, intended to prevent active U. S. participation in war in the Pacific and at least some Japanese leaders understood that at the time. Note that I do not sympathize with the Japanese. I do think they held a very bad hand and they gambled and lost.

I think that Dr. Mead is not particularly well-informed on pre-WWII U. S.-China bilateral trade. I suspect he’s imposing neoliberal ideas on the 1930s. I also suspect that racism played a role in the U. S. response to Japan’s invading Manchuria and then China proper. I haven’t studied the matter in detail but I think it’s a reasonable presumption.

Dr. Mead continues:

Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.

That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.

I think that Dr. Mead has the diagnosis wrong here. American prestige due completely to

1. American economic might and
2. American military might

with the latter being downstream from the former. We have had multiple military failures since 2001 including

• the attack on 9/11
• invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
• invasion and occupation of Iraq

and how do you characterize actions like removing Qaddafi in Libya? Or supporting Saudi Arabia in its war with Yemen? Were those moral and in our national interest?

I don’t honestly see how the U. S. can retain military and economic preeminence while deindustrializing and reducing our military budget. And that doesn’t even get into the “magical thinking on diplomacy” theme that is Dr. Mead’s main topic.

I’m not sure I see the Biden Administration’s problem as “magical thinking” so much as the strategy it, apparently, learned from the Obama Administration: preconceding what your interlocutor actually wanted. I do not understand the reasoning behind that. The other party will be so grateful it will do what you want in exchange? Now that’s magical thinking.

Yesterday Chicxago’s longest-serving alderman reported to serve his prison sentence on corruption charges. Judy Wang, Angelica Sanchez, and Marisa Rodriguez at WGN report:

CHICAGO — Chicago’s longest-serving alderman reported to federal prison on Monday.

Former Ald. Ed Burke faces a two-year sentence and a $2 million fine. Last year, he was convicted of corruption for using his position to benefit his law firm.

On Monday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed to WGN News that Burke is in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution Thomson in Thomson, Illinois. The low-security prison is home to nearly 2,000 inmates and just over 100 inmates in an adjoining camp.

I honestly believe that if all members of the Chicago City Council guilty of corruption were imprisoned the only way a quorum could be convened would be in the prison yard.

The chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party has been indicted on charges of corruption. Whether he will be convicted I can’t say but I doubt that anyone doubts he is guilty.

There are a number of Chicago stories that are receiving national attention. One of them is the ShotSpotter saga. ShotSpotter, somewhat ungenerously described by our mayor as a “walkie-talkie on a stick”, was installed in Chicago. The mayor decided it wasn’t worth paying for. The City Council decided to strip the mayor of the authority to approve or disapprove it. The mayor says that’s not legal. The company has terminated service and is starting to dismantle it in Chicago.

Now the editors of the Wall Street Journal have weighed in:

ShotSpotter uses acoustic technology to detect gunfire and dispatches law enforcement to scenes of violence before 911 calls come in. Chicago has deployed the technology since 2012, mainly in its south and west sides. The University of Chicago Crime Lab found it likely saves about 85 lives a year.

The system has detected more than 200,000 gun shots in the 13 months ending in August. Even Mr. Johnson must think the technology works since in February he extended the contract through the summer, which is when gun violence typically peaks and the city hosted the Democratic National Convention.

But last week he said he’d let the ShotSpotter contract expire, calling it a waste of money. He may be taking his cues from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who charged in May that ShotSpotter perpetuates “over-policing and unjustified surveillance” in minority neighborhoods.

The City Council disagreed and voted 33-14 to give Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling the power to override the mayor’s office. “If one life is saved with gunshot detection technology, then it is absolutely worth having,” Alderman Ray Lopez said.

It is true that Chicago has a nearly $1 billion hole in its budget. Chicago has spent $57.4 million on ShotSpotter since 2018. It spent $300 million housing, feeding, etc. migrants in 2023.

I don’t believe budgets have anything to do with the mayor’s opposition to ShotSpotter. I suspect the “over-policing” is his complaint (I would like to see a definition of “over-policing” that is not circular).

The population of Chicago is one third white, one third black, and one third Hispanic. Chicago homicide victims are three-quarters black, 20% Hispanic, with the balance being “Other”. In other words of the 85 lives the UoC says ShotSpotter saved, 64 were black lives.

Lately I have experienced something distressing. I am getting wildly varying results from different search engines. I am not entirely sure why that might be. It might be due to increased use of “artificial intelligence”. It might be because the search engine providers have different policies, particularly with respect to source they consider unreliable for one reason or another.

In other words they might be protecting me.

What I want in a search engine is a reliable and complete index of the information that is available on the Internet. I don’t want to be protected from knowledge that is bad for me from a search engine. I rely on online security companies for security and search engines for indices of information.

I’m starting to use multiple different search engines to do cross-comparisons which is a time-sucker. One of the challenges is that different search engines are not necessarily different search engines. Some search engines are actually frontends for Google or Bing.

I have noticed a lot of comments by regular commenters going into spam—not even into moderation but into spam. It’s nothing I have done. I suspect it’s due to a change in AKismet, the service I use to screen comments.

I have approved all non-repetitive comments. Hopefully, that will reduce the number going into spam.

I was interested in the observations of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs’s on Dick Cheney’s support for Kamala Harris, quoted in this post at RealClearPolitics By Tim Hains:

MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions.

SACHS: There’s a very interesting interview of Putin in 2017 where he says, “I’ve dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas, even. But then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties,” he says, “I wear red ties but they wear blue ties. They come in and explain the way the world really is and there go the ideas.”

I think that’s Putin’s experience. That’s our experience. That’s my experience. Which is that there is a deeply entrained foreign policy that has been in place, in my interpretation, for many decades.

I do not believe that U. S. interests have much to do with the interests of that “administrative state”. They have their own goals and objectives.

One last point: doing anything about that will require much more than a single president. It will require civil service reform of a type and scale I cannot realistically envision.

The graph above was sampled from this post at The Dialogue by Manuel Orozco and Patrick Springer:

Over the past few years, Mexicans have sent money back home to their families, friends, and others. Between 2017 to 2022, remittances sent to Mexico from the US have experienced double-digit growth, and during pandemic times (2020-2022) they nearly doubled in absolute numbers to 41 percent. In 2022, remittance volume reached a 20 year high at nearly US$59 billion. In 2023, over US$63 billion was remitted representing a growth rate of eight percent year over year (YoY). While remittance growth rates are showing signs of deceleration, volume is estimated to reach over US$65 billion by the end of 2024.

In the current context, remittance volume will continue and play a central role in US-Mexico relations. As was the case in 2023, remittance growth this year can be attributed to simultaneous increases in migration to the US, transfer frequency, number of senders, and the annual principal amount. Based on available data and current trends, remittance volume will grow by approximately three percent in 2024. This growth rate is lower than rates forecasted for the top 10 recipient countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

I suspect that the sharp increase in remittances is due to a combination of inflation and the sharp increase in new migrants. I further suspect that new migrants are more likely to send remittances back to Mexico than long-term migrants.

A number of matters are addressed in the post including not just the increase in remittances but the role of remittances in Mexican economy, the relationship between the U. S. consumer price index and remittances, the relationship between the Mexican consumer price index and remittances, etc.

One last point. Remittances regardless of their destination country represent disinvestment in the United States. $63 billion is quite a bit of money but it’s a minuscule percentage of U. S. GDP—less than 1%. It’s a couple of percent of domestic investment.

At RealClearScience Ross Pomeroy points out something that should be obvious but, apparently, isn’t. Human beings did not evolve to consume calories in liquid form:

Humans have existed as a distinct species for roughly 315,000 years, and for all but a fraction of that time, we drank just one liquid after weaning: water. Boring, flat, calorie-free, water – with any flavor and texture coming from sediments, bacteria, or excrement.

Now, faced with a sudden explosion of calorically-dense beverages in the evolutionary blink of an eye, our bodies are outmatched. Put simply, we are not meant to drink our calories, and it shows in elevated rates of obesity around the world.

Humans started drinking the equivalent of very, very light beer 13,000 years ago. And we may have consumed milk from livestock as many as 20,000 years ago. But this isn’t very long on an evolutionary timescale. Our naïveté´ with beverages is apparent in our physiology today.

His observations are fine as far as they go. However, there’s something he does not consider. There are lots of things that human beings did not evolve to do but nonetheless have done for the last 10,000 years or so. One of them is live together in groups larger than a few dozen related people or, indeed, live in close proximity to people to whom we were not related at all.

Then, just a little over 10,000 years ago, a number of things happened more or less all at once. Human beings began domesticating and husbanding livestock, they began to cultivate grains, they began fermenting various things to make beer and wine, and they began adopt a sedentary habit, i.e. to live in towns and cities. And those cities and towns included people who were not closely related to one another.

The only ones of those things it is quite difficult to do while nomadic are brewing beer and making. It has been suggested by some anthropologists that human beings adopted a sedentary habit expressly to allow them to make beer and wine. And the evidence supports them.

I suspect that as we become wiser in identifying when people began consuming cows’, sheeps’ and goats’ milk the time when each of those began will be pushed back in time. The notion that consuming milk has not changed human evolution is far-fetched. My ancestors adapted to consume milk probably considerably more than 10,000 years ago. Have I mentioned that milk is also fermented into alcoholic beverages, e.g. kumiss, blaand, etc.

Consequently, there is some evidence that, indeed, beer did invent civilization.