David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column is a bit rambling but let me summarize it for you:

1. Our system was set up as a liberal democracy.
2. Majoritarianism erodes liberal democracy.
3. Humanity’s normal state is one of violence, authoritarianism, and oligarchy.
4. The decline or relative decline of the U. S. is returning humanity to its normal state.
5. The “Gramscian long march” through our institutions is undermining us.

I’m not sure that Mr. Brooks himself recognizes that’s what he’s saying. Here’s his conclusion:

The real problem is in the seedbeds of democracy, the institutions that are supposed to mold a citizenry and make us qualified to practice democracy. To restore those seedbeds, we first have to relearn the wisdom of the founders: We are not as virtuous as we think we are. Americans are no better than anyone else. Democracy is not natural; it is an artificial accomplishment that takes enormous work.

Then we need to fortify the institutions that are supposed to teach the democratic skills: how to weigh evidence and commit to truth; how to correct for your own partisan blinders and learn to doubt your own opinions; how to respect people you disagree with; how to avoid catastrophism, conspiracy and apocalyptic thinking; how to avoid supporting demagogues; how to craft complex compromises.

Democrats are not born, they are made. If the 21st century is to get brighter as it goes along, we have to get a lot better at making them. We don’t only have to worry about the people tearing down democracy. We have to worry about who is building it up.

Do you see what I mean? What are “the institutions that are supposed to mold a citizenry, etc.”? I don’t think that we as a country at this point let alone he and I agree on that. I would list those institutions as (in descending order of importance):

• the absolute nuclear family
• churches and religious organizations
• fraternal organizations
• schools
• the press
• state and local governments
• the federal government

Is it actually possible to “restore” the absolute nuclear family without discounting or at least offending the activists of “homosexuality and transgenderism”, something that earlier in the column he associates with autocracy. For schools and the press to play the role he envisions wouldn’t they need to be dedicated to building up liberal democracy rather than tearing it down? The questions are almost endless.

Does he imagine alternative institutions rising in the place of those I’ve listed? It took the better part of a millennium or, in some cases, millennia to build the institutions I’ve listed. You can’t just go online and get FedEx to deliver new ones.

Wednesday has passed and Thursday has passed without the predicted Russian invasion of Ukraine. As of this writing it’s presently around 4:00pm in Moscow. I see that Matt Taibbi’s take on the present situation resembles mine:

If cluelessness can be art, American journalists unveiled their Sistine Chapel this week, in a remarkable collection of misreports and hack stenography surrounding a predicted invasion of Ukraine.

The mess began last Friday, February 11th, when National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan gave an address warning American citizens to evacuate Ukraine. “If a Russian attack on Ukraine proceeds, it is likely to begin with aerial bombing and missile attacks that could obviously kill civilians without regard to their nationality,” he said. “I will not comment on the details of our intelligence information,” he added, before doing just that: “I do want to be clear: It could begin during the Olympics,” i.e. before the Beijing games end on February 20th.

Around the time of Sullivan’s comments, American reporters began telling audiences a curiously detailed story about upcoming Russian invasion plans. PBS NewsHour’s Nick Schifrin cited “three Western and defense sources” in saying Vladimir Putin had already made up his mind to invade. He then cited six sources — “US and Western officials” — who told him the U.S. expected an invasion of Ukraine the following week. These voices left little to the imagination, saying the invasion would be a “horrific, bloody campaign,” with two days of aerial bombardment, followed by electronic warfare and possible regime change:

and concludes:

It should be clear to any reporter that a national security source who whispers not only the alleged date of a coming invasion, but the number of days of aerial bombardment and the war’s expected level of horror and bloodiness, is either yanking your chain with a fairy tale, or using you, or both. Reporters on this beat nonetheless repeated this tale over and over, as if it were patriotic duty.

Will Russia invade Ukraine? It might. Putin might already be achieving his objectives without war in real Sun Tzu fashion.

Meanwhile the Associated Press reports that Russia will be conducting “nuclear drills”;

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia announced massive nuclear drills while Western leaders grasped Friday for ways to avert a new war in Europe amid soaring East-West tensions, after unusually dire U.S. warnings that Moscow could order an invasion of Ukraine any day.

Immediate worries focused on the volatile front lines of eastern Ukraine, where an upsurge of recent shelling tore through the walls of a kindergarten and basic communication was disrupted. Western officials, focused on an estimated 150,000 Russian troops posted around Ukraine’s borders, fear the long-simmering conflict could provide the spark for a broader war.

The drumbeat of warnings that a larger conflict could start at any moment continued Friday after U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Washington saw no signs of a promised Russian withdrawal — but instead saw more troops moving toward the border with Ukraine.

Short of hoisting up a Gadsden flag could hardly make his point more clearly.

It’s a frequent source of irritation to me that people don’t take Rutherford’s famous wisecrack more seriously: “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting”. Spoiler: economics is not physics. It will never be physics. It will always be a science of human behavior. Not quite stamp-collecting but closer to it than it is to physics. When I was in grad school econometrics, the use of mathematics, particularly statistics, in economics was just gaining steam. Those who entered the field in that period who have little interest in observing human behavior or are incapable of observing human behavior, cannot quite forgive economics for not being physics.

Those are the underpinnings of Tyler Cowen’s post at Bloomberg in which he draws attention to the psychological component of inflation:

Sometimes yesterday’s crazy idea turns out to be sane or even essential. For instance, Fischer Black, the late finance economist and co-discoverer of modern options pricing theory, argued that the rate of price inflation will be whatever we think it will be. If expectations are that inflation will be high, it will be high. If expectations are that inflation will be low, it will be low. For Black, who died in 1995, this was always true, at least for modern economies. I never agreed with Black on this point, but increasingly I have begun to wonder if he wasn’t on to something.

Plenty of people like to say that they knew at the time that the big money supply increases of 2008-2009 were not going to lead to high inflation. There are also people who like to say that they knew at the time that the combined monetary and fiscal response from the pandemic would lead to much higher rates of price inflation. But relatively few people can gloat about getting it right both times.

concluding:

Market expectations for inflation have recently turned up sharply for the one-year horizon, and for the three-year time horizon they still stand above 3%. Black did not argue that such expectations had to be stable, but that they may be the best guess for where we are headed. Another idea that is suspect is the notion that the Fed can steer the rate of price inflation as it chooses.

If people believe that tomorrow’s prices will be higher than today’s and they have the money to do it, they will buy today rather than spend more tomorrow. If in addition people believe that should they run out of money that a generous federal government will give them more, why not buy today?

Believing that the Fed can control inflation while not being led to believe that there’s always more money where that last windfall came from may be important components of restraining inflation. I’m not confident that the people in place to do those things have the cojones to do them.

Well, no war started in Ukraine yesterday. Will that persist?

There are some reports of what is being characterized as a “provocation”—in the case that I read a kindergarten in Donbas being shelled by “rebels”.

There doesn’t seem to be any way of determining who is provoking whom or even whether the “provocation” actually took place.

It’s a dangerous situation. What strikes me about it is how differently NATO is responding to this than it did to Syria. In Syria it sided with the rebels against the like it or not legitimate government of Syria. In the case of Ukraine they’re siding with the Ukrainian government against separatists. That the present government of Ukraine replaced the like it or not legitimate government of Ukraine under circumstances which some have claimed was a Western-supported putsch adds to the complexity and irony of the situation.

Just in case anyone is confused about it, I’m not defending Russia. I’m explaining it.

I’m an American. My ancestry is not Russian. I am (in decreasing order) Irish, Scottish, Swiss, German (Rhineland Pfalz), Ländler, Swabian, and French.

But I speak Russian pretty fluently and have studied Russian history, culture, literature, etc. fairly deeply. I declined an offer to have one of my papers on Russian history published. I find my compatriots pretty ignorant about Russia and am trying to help.

In his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley considers why black support for Joe Biden has declined:

he country has witnessed a lot of political norm-breaking in the Donald Trump era. Less black fealty for the Democratic Party could be part of the trend. It’s easy to forget how bad things were for blacks economically during the Obama presidency. Black unemployment didn’t fall below double digits until the third year of Mr. Obama’s second term. Prior to the pandemic, black unemployment under Mr. Trump reached record lows, and black wages rose at a faster rate than white wages. Mr. Obama symbolized racial progress, but you can’t pay the rent with symbolism.

That black experience partly explains why minority support for Mr. Trump ticked up in 2020. It might also explain why blacks have soured on Mr. Biden. Inflation, which the current administration first denied and then played down, is at a 40-year high. Blacks are overrepresented among low-income workers, who are watching prices rise faster than their wages. In addition, the president wants to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut and reregulate sectors of the economy that Mr. Trump deregulated. If black voters aren’t eager to return to the pre-Trump economy, who can blame them?

Mr. Biden’s efforts to appease his party’s progressive wing are also costing him black support. Black politicians and activists tend to be far more liberal than the average black voter. On issue after issue—school choice, defunding the police, voter ID, racial preferences—individual black Americans hold more conservative views than the elites who claim to represent them. The political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue in a 2020 book, “Steadfast Democrats,” that black partisan loyalty is less issue-based and has to do with social pressure from other blacks. But as the black middle class grows and black interests become less unified and more varied, the solidarity politics we see among black voters will inevitably start to wane, as it has with other racial and ethnic groups.

These are the larger trends that Mr. Biden and his party are up against, and the question is whether Republicans will take advantage of the situation. The Republican National Committee is currently preoccupied with settling scores for Mr. Trump, which could come at the cost of expanding the GOP’s appeal at a time when Democrats look vulnerable. The economic gains we experienced prior to the pandemic were real, and no one benefited more than blacks did. The establishment media mostly ignored the story, but Republicans could do worse than talk about it nonstop between now and November.

I suspect that like the Palestinians Republicans will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity but Mr. Riley has identified a serious risk for Democrats which, coincidentally, I’ve been pointing out here for some time.

The questions now are whether President Biden will try to change course, whether struggling Democratic politicians will just run away from President Biden which is hard to make into a winning strategy, whether they’ll all just stay the course and hope for the best in the face of declining polls, or whether they’ll just deny the whole thing is of any consequence.

I was prepared to disagree strongly with Matt Bai’s op-ed in the Washington Post but I wasn’t prepared to agree with it as strongly as I do. Here’s the meat of it:

It seems self-evident that the Republican Party — more a celebrity fan club than a political organization at this point — would, if left to its own devices, destroy the foundation of the republic. I never thought I’d write those words about any U.S. political party, but here we are.

It’s not just that Donald Trump and his imitators would blow up the integrity of our elections, or that they have expressly countenanced a violent insurrection against the federal government, or that they basically admit to having no governing agenda beyond the reclamation of some mythical White heritage.

It’s also that the Trumpist GOP advances the notion, in all kinds of ways, that citizenship alone doesn’t mean you belong here — that your race or ethnicity, the language that you speak, or the identity you choose can somehow make you less American than your neighbor.

We’ve seen this interpretation of Americanism before — in segregated schools and diners, in the internment of Japanese Americans, in populist disdain for Catholics and Jews. No patriotic American should entertain it, and no politician with an ounce of integrity would excuse it.

You might think, given this Republican calamity, that any political alternative would be sufficient. And, yes, a party that doesn’t seek to limit ballot access and install an autocrat is definitely a step up.

But that doesn’t mean a lot of us who consider ourselves liberal feel kinship with today’s Democratic Party — or that we’d even be welcome if we did.

Rather than focus on traditional American ideals of citizenship over race or origin, the left is in thrall to its own misguided cultural revolution (yes, I use the term deliberately), embracing a vision of the United States that lays waste to the 20th-century liberalism of its greatest icons.

I’ve always liked and respected President Biden, and in most ways he has governed well. His $1.2 trillion infrastructure package was a major achievement. His efforts to counter the pandemic have been steady. He seems poised to make a historic addition to the Supreme Court.

For all of his successes, though, there’s a fire raging in his party that Biden hasn’t even tried to control — and probably couldn’t extinguish if he did. For me (and probably a lot of suburbanites voting this fall), this is more than a backdrop to his presidency. It’s a dealbreaker.

In their zeal to beat back Trumpism, the loudest Democratic groups have transformed into its Bizarro World imitators. Tossing aside ideals of equal opportunity and free expression, the new leftists obsess on identity as much as their adversaries do — but instead of trying to restore some obsolete notion of a White-dominated society, they seek vengeance under the guise of virtue.

One of the bibles of this movement is a book called “How to Be an Antiracist,” in which Ibram X. Kendi declares: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

This is not — as the celebrated author claims — an expression of support for Lyndon B. Johnson-style affirmative action, which still makes sense to me. It is a case for the kind of social upheaval that occurred when foreign empires relinquished their colonies. It does not end well.

Liberals used to believe in civil debate about such ideas. But now, the arbiters of language are constantly issuing Soviet-style edicts about which terms are acceptable and which aren’t (“woke” was okay, now it’s not) — a tactic used for controlling the debate and delegitimizing critics.

Maybe he’s overestimating the Republicans’ cult of personality around Donald Trump. Maybe he’s overestimating the nativism of today’s Republican Party. Maybe he’s underestimating just how horrible and venal the national Democratic Party has become.

But you will hear quite a few echoes of what I’ve been saying around here, my repeating Chesterton’s assertion that “America is a country founded on a creed”. And I can’t accept that when a sitting Congressperson says “my country” and doesn’t mean the United States or when the greatest aspiration of someone who’s entered the United States illegally is to return to the country of his or her birth with money in her or his pocket that they are not in fact Americans or that I’m a nativist for concluding that.

But again these are quibbles. I would conclude along with Mr. Bai that neither of the parties described above are acceptable and our national politics are in grave need of a reform whose I can’t imagine coming about.

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times!

The Ukraine story is far from over. But if Vladimir Putin opts to back away from invading Ukraine, even temporarily, it’s because Joe Biden — that guy whose right-wing critics suggest is so deep in dementia he wouldn’t know Kyiv from Kansas or AARP from NATO — has matched every Putin chess move with an effective counter of his own.

Putin has been on such a run of outmaneuvering the West and destabilizing our politics that it is easy to overrate him. It is also hard to believe a word that comes out of his mouth. But if Putin was sincere when he said Tuesday that he was “ready to continue on the negotiating track” to ensure that Ukraine never joins NATO and was also pulling back some of his menacing forces — U.S. officials say there’s no sign of that yet — it’s because Biden’s statecraft has given Putin pause.

Specifically, the Biden team has mobilized enough solidarity among the NATO allies, enough advanced defensive arms transfers to Ukraine and enough potentially biting economic sanctions on Russia to put into Putin’s mind the only thought that matters: “If I go ahead with a full-scale invasion and it goes bad — wrecking Russia’s economy and resulting in Russian soldiers returning home in body bags from a war with fellow Slavs — could it lead to my own downfall?”

That is the only calculation that matters, and Biden has done the best job a U.S. president could do, given the asymmetry in interests between America and Russia on Ukraine, to frame it. Ukraine is not only right next door to Russia, but it’s also a country whose fate and future are vitally important to Putin personally. By contrast, most Americans could not find Ukraine on a map and feel zero emotional attachment to its future. And, as Putin found when he seized Crimea in 2014, Americans will not send their sons and daughters to preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Get that? While I agree that, should Russian President Putin not invade Ukraine in the next couple of days, President Biden will quickly take credit for it, there’s another possibility that, apparently, neither Mr. Friedman nor any other pundit I’ve read nor President Biden himself seems to have considered—that President Putin may well achieve his foreign policy goals without invading Ukraine. Has Ukraine joined NATO? Will it? I think what the last few days have demonstrated has been just how far apart the members of the alliance are.

Do you think it is more or less likely today that Ukraine will become a member of NATO? Do you think it more or less likely today that Ukraine will be admitted to the European Union?

I think that what is likely to happen is that Russia will continue to engage in cyberattacks against Ukraine and will be likely to increase them in intensity. I think that Russia will continue to engage in brinksmanship with respect to an outright invasion of Ukraine. False flag operation? (as some have suggested) That’s possible but they may not need to. Ukraine is quite capable of fomenting a catastrophe although recent signs have actually been pretty positive.

Of course, I could be proven wrong within hours, minutes even. But wasn’t the Biden Administration saying that a Russian attack was likely on Wednesday? Today is Wednesday. It’s almost 7:00pm in Moscow as I write this. If there is no attack today or tomorrow or on Friday, it will be evidence that I’m correct. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it.

If there is a starker example of the risks associated with bionics than this instance described by Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris in IEEE Spectrum, I don’t know what it is:

Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”

It wasn’t her phone battery running out. It was her Argus II retinal implant system powering down. The patches of light and dark that she’d been able to see with the implant’s help vanished.

Terry Byland is the only person to have received this kind of implant in both eyes. He got the first-generation Argus I implant, made by the company Second Sight Medical Products, in his right eye in 2004 and the subsequent Argus II implant in his left 11 years later. He helped the company test the technology, spoke to the press movingly about his experiences, and even met Stevie Wonder at a conference. “[I] went from being just a person that was doing the testing to being a spokesman,” he remembers.

Yet in 2020, Byland had to find out secondhand that the company had abandoned the technology and was on the verge of going bankrupt. While his two-implant system is still working, he doesn’t know how long that will be the case. “As long as nothing goes wrong, I’m fine,” he says. “But if something does go wrong with it, well, I’m screwed. Because there’s no way of getting it fixed.”

Read the whole thing.

This case highlights some facts about technology companies of which anyone who’s been involved with technology for any length of time is aware:

• Picking the right technology provider is more important than the technology.
• The best technology does not always prevail in the market—in fact, it’s rare that it does.
• Whether a technology provider prevails has less to do with its technology than with the other, non-technological aspects of the company, e.g. its financing, its management, and its size.
• The biggest companies are rarely the best companies or have the best technology (unless they acquired it) but they do tend to prevail.