The editors of the Wall Street Journal urge the Senate to confirm the appointments of Rahm Emanuel and Nicholas Burns to be the U. S. ambassadors to Japan and China, respectively:

Japan’s new Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, is eyeing a boost in defense spending. A prompt confirmation of Mr. Emanuel will accelerate cooperation and send a message to China about the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

The Senate could also help by confirming the next U.S. ambassador to China—a position that has been vacant since October 2020. Mr. Biden has nominated Nicholas Burns, a seasoned foreign-policy establishment figure.

and, complaining about the “parochial interests” that are blocking Mr. Emanuel’s confirmation:

Mr. Emanuel, President Biden’s pick, is opposed by two progressive Democrats, Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley, who cited a police homicide that took place when Mr. Emanuel was mayor. GOP partisanship could also work against Mr. Emanuel.

But great-power politics hasn’t slowed down to accommodate the parochial interests of U.S. Senators. Japan’s significance to Asia’s security has surged since 2019 as China escalates its military threats against Taiwan. In the months since Mr. Biden’s election, Japanese officials have declared that an attack on Taiwan is a direct threat to Japan’s security. There’s anxiety in Tokyo about America’s resolve—and who can blame them if the U.S. can’t even send an ambassador to the country?

It probably doesn’t help that Mayor Emanuel is an obnoxious shmuck who may have alienated quite a number of people in Washington. I question whether Rahm has the temperament, credentials, or experience to do an effective job as our ambassador to Japan but I do think that we should give President Biden the benefit of the doubt and confirm his appointees to their posts.

Here’s another glimmer of reality at the New York Times in the form of an op-ed by Nekima Levy Armstrong:

Those of us who had long fought for a reckoning over police abuse in Minneapolis expected to see a critical examination of the practices, laws, policies, contractual requirements and spending that undergird policing. We expected a well-thought-out, evidence-based, comprehensive plan to remake our police department.

Instead, what we got was progressive posturing of a kind seen throughout the country and a missed opportunity to bring about real change and racial justice.

This was made plain last week when voters rejected a proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety. While many white progressives embraced the ballot measure as a sign of progress, many Black residents like me raised concerns that the plan lacked specificity and could reduce public safety in the Black community without increasing police accountability. The city’s largest Black neighborhoods voted it down, while support was greater in areas where more white liberals lived.

She goes on to warn about unintended consequences and furnishes some suggestions for reform:

What many Black people are demanding is a system that is effective, cost-efficient, non-militarized and transparent. We want officials to be accountable for who is hired, how they are disciplined and how they treat us. We want police leaders to admit that racism, white supremacy and misogyny are endemic in many police forces and we want them to commit to radically shift police culture.

For that to happen, there must be a re-examination of the purposes, practices, expenditures and almost unfettered power and discretion of the police. To responsibly reduce spending, elected officials must conduct a real cost/benefit analysis of hiring numerous officers to focus on low-level crime, traffic stops (as in the cases of Daunte Wright and Philando Castile), and small quantities of cannabis, to name a few. This would ultimately mean eliminating or reducing low-level traffic stops, repealing criminal laws and ordinances that do not improve public safety, and making a commitment to end the war on drugs.

Police departments must establish an early-warning system to flag problem officers and a robust disciplinary system when officers violate the law and people’s rights. Instead of continuing to allow police departments to investigate themselves when officers kill people, states should establish a special prosecutor’s office to investigate claims and bring charges when appropriate.

but posturing is easier, cheaper, more fun, and has lots less accountability so I think we should expect more of it. To once again cite my favorite example of a bad example, during the Chicago mayoral primary elections, the plurality of black votes went to the most conservative candidate on the ballot—a black Chicago businessman. To me that suggested that black Chicago voters were tired of posturing and business a usual and were much more concerned about “bread and butter issues”. The present incumbent was the preferred candidate of the progressive mostly white Lakeshore voters.

I will quote this New York Times op-ed by Johnny Harris and Binyamin Appelbaum in full it is so short:

It’s easy to blame the other side. And for many Democrats, it’s obvious that Republicans are thwarting progress toward a more equal society.

But what happens when Republicans aren’t standing in the way?

In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And as we explore in the video above, they often aren’t living up to their values.

In key respects, many blue states are actually doing worse than red states. It is in the blue states where affordable housing is often hardest to find, there are some of the most acute disparities in education funding and economic inequality is increasing most quickly.

Instead of asking, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Democrats need to spend more time pondering, “What’s the matter with California?”

Much of the meat of the piece in a video which, sadly, is paywalled. I did watch it. It’s a document of crumbling inner cities and numbers of homeless people.

Although there’s a glimmer there it does not appear that reality has actually dawned on Mssrs. Harris and Appelbaum. Claimed values don’t matter. Stated intentions don’t matter. Results matter. Everything else is just pretense. They’re saying what they need to say to get elected.

Don’t tell me your values or your intentions. Show them to me.

Let me use my favorite object lesson: Chicago. It’s easy to say that you want fewer carbon emissions. Over the last 50 years Chicago has gone from deriving 85% of its electrical power from non-emitting sources to 55%. As a famous Illinoisan once said, actions speak louder than words.

Norman Haller and Peter Pry explain why mutually assured destruction is endangered and what we could do about it in a post at RealClearDefense:

…U.S. decision-makers should tune out minimalists who ignore the math and advocate replacing the Triad with either a Diad (bombers and submarines only) or, even worse, a Monad (submarines only). Tuned out as well should be MAD proponents who are inattentive to the math and insist that an undefended America is a positive asset.

I predict that the step they list that is most likely to be the focus is the one they say we shouldn’t do: resuming negotiations.

This article at 1945 by Constantine Atlamazoglou addresses a question. Would Russia go to war to stop Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO?

It is mostly a flat open space. Coupled with Belarus, it used to provide Russia with a wide buffer zone to its west. Ukraine joining NATO could mean U.S. troops and missile installations right on Russia’s border. Preventing that is a vital Russian interest.

On the flip side, Ukrainian accession to NATO will not offer any added security benefits to the U.S. and its European allies. Should Ukraine join NATO, a Russian attack against it would trigger the Alliance’s Article 5. Failure to invoke Article 5 in such an event, would be NATO’s end. But even if NATO were to invoke Article 5, the Alliance’s record is mixed and never tested against a superpower.

However, Putin will not wait for Ukraine to join NATO and cross his “red line.” If accession processes progress he will attack preemptively. At that point, Ukraine will not be covered by NATO’s defense umbrella. It is doubtful that Western nations will rush to the defense of a non-allied country that is not linked to their vital interests. This will leave Ukraine exposed.

The answer is obvious to anyone who knows anything about Russia: yes, it would. The reasons are incredibly numerous.

I can completely understand why the Ukrainians would want to become a member of NATO. It has no natural borders. It is indefensible. The only time in its history it has been a country distinct from Russia has been since the 1950s. I can only see one reason that NATO would want to admit Ukraine as a member and it is unutterably foolish.

You might be interested in this post from Annie Fixler at FDD. The Chinese authorities are apparently moving to consolidate the country’s rare earths production:

Peng Huagang, secretary general of China’ State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, confirmed last month that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will “promote the restructuring of rare earths to create a world-class company.” While it remains unclear what this “restructuring” entails, Peng’s declaration indicates the CCP will not stand by as the United States and its allies seek to diminish their reliance on China for rare earth elements.

Peng’s remarks come on the heels of China Minmetals Corporation’s September Shenzhen Stock Exchange filing, which announced a planned restructuring with China Aluminum Company (Chinalco) and the People’s Government of Ganzhou, a municipality in southeastern China. A merger would create China’s “second-largest rare earth producer by capacity,” according to Reuters, behind China Northern Rare Earth Group. The latter is the world’s largest supplier of rare earths.

If you’re curious about how the U. S. military became dependent on Chinese producers for strategic materials, this post provides a pretty good history. The TL;DR version is that it was environmental regulation:

In the eyes of the U.S. government and major manufacturers, it no longer made sense to acquire rare earths from a U.S. source subject to stringent environmental regulations. Instead, the hard business of extracting useful minerals was exported to other countries, where environmental damage was safely out of sight. China happily obliged, allowing environmental harm to proliferate so long as the costs of rare earth mining were kept down.

It’s easier and cheaper to keep production going than it is to rebuild it once you’ve shut down. Not to mention the pushback from environmentalists.

I stumbled across this piece by psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman at The Atlantic, describing a phenomenon with which I was unfamiliar—”group narcissism”:

Collective narcissism is not simply tribalism. Humans are inherently tribal, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Having a healthy social identity can have an immensely positive impact on well-being. Collective narcissists, though, are often more focused on out-group prejudice than in-group loyalty. In its most extreme form, group narcissism can fuel political radicalism and potentially even violence. But in everyday settings, too, it can keep groups from listening to one another, and lead them to reduce people on the “other side” to one-dimensional characters. The best way to avoid that is by teaching people how to be proud of their group—without obsessing over recognition.

Groups may differ in their narrative about why they are superior—they might believe that they’re the most moral, the most culturally sophisticated, the most talented, the most powerful, or the most protective of democratic values. They may think that their greatness is God’s will, or that they’ve earned it through exceptional suffering in the past. Regardless, collective narcissists are resentful of other groups, and hypersensitive to perceived intergroup threat. As a result, collective narcissism often breeds prejudice. In one study, for instance, participants in Poland who rated high in collective narcissism were more likely to hold anti-Semitic beliefs. In other research conducted on Americans, high collective-narcissism scores predicted negative attitudes toward Arab immigrants.

Collective narcissists tend to respond to the perceived threats of other groups in outsize, often aggressive ways. In Portugal, a sample of collective narcissists who perceived Germany as having a more important position than their nation in the European Union “rejoiced in the German economic crisis”—and supported “hostile actions” toward Germans. Meanwhile, group narcissists glorify positively valued in-group members and tend to overlook their moral transgressions. A recent study conducted in Poland, Britain, and the United States found that those high in collective narcissism were more likely to judge a group member’s action—such as a verbal altercation provoked by a pub customer—as moral if it served in-group interests.

Read the whole thing. I think there’s a lot of this going around; it would certainly explain a lot.

In an op-ed in the New York Times pollster Mark Penn and New York politician Andrew Stein offer President Biden some advice:

It’s hard to imagine Democratic candidates further to the left of Mr. McAuliffe, and of Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, doing any better with swing voters, especially when the math of elections requires two new voters to turn out to equal a single voter who switches from Democrat to Republican. It’s easy to dismiss individual polls that may or may not be accurate — but you can’t dismiss a clear electoral trend: the flight from the Democrats was disproportionately in the suburbs, and the idea that these home-owning, child-rearing, taxpaying voters just want more progressive candidates is not a sustainable one.

After the 1994 congressional elections, Bill Clinton reoriented his administration to the center and saved his presidency. Mr. Biden should follow his lead, listen to centrists, push back on the left and reorient his policies to address the mounting economic issues people are facing. As a senator, he was a master at building coalitions; that is the leadership needed now.

This would mean meeting the voters head on with stronger borders, a slower transition from fossil fuels, a focus on bread-and-butter economic issues (such as the price of gas and groceries), fixes to the supply chain fiasco that is impacting the cost of goods and the pursuit of more moderate social spending bills. Nearly three in four voters see the border as a crisis that needs immediate attention. Moving to the center does not mean budging from core social issues like abortion rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights that are at the heart of what the party believes in and are largely in sync with suburban voters. But it does mean connecting to voters’ immediate needs and anxieties. As Democrats found in the late ’90s, the success of the administration begets enthusiasm from the base, and we actually gained seats in the 1998 midterms under the theme of “progress not partisanship.”

I’m not sure that’s good advice or at least I’m not sure it’s advice that the president can take. The Democratic Party is a different party than that of 1994. The progressive wing of the party is a lot more influential now than they were then which goes some way to explaining the sharp rise in the number of Americans who consider themselves independents. Bill Clinton couldn’t get nominated today let alone elected.

I do agree with the change in focus they outline: our southern border and inflation are the pressing issues. The challenge for the Biden Administration is to walk and chew gum at the same time—deal with the issues that will get Democrats votes at the ballot box while appeasing the Congressional progressives enough to move legislation.

I used to post on the monthly changes in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Labor Situation Report but I gave up when I came to the conclusion that the adjustments the BLS were making far outweighed the actual measured differences. That’s truth of October’s report too but there’s enough of an improvement that actual improvements in the base numbers cannot be discounted.

President Biden certainly isn’t discounting them:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Today is another great day for our economic recovery. America is getting back to work. Our economy is starting to work for more Americans.

Thanks to the economic plan we’ve put through in Congress earlier this year and a successful vaccine deployment, America continues to add jobs at a record pace.

In this historically strong recovery, unemployment rate has fallen again today down to 4.6 percent. This included a substantial drop in unemployment for Hispanics, which was much needed.

Our economy is on the move. This morning, we learned that in October, our economy created 531,000 jobs — well above expectations.

nor is Eli Rosenberg in his piece in the Washington Post:

The growth in October came after worrying signs from September, when it appeared that problems reopening schools and child-care centers would wreak major havoc on millions of households. Some economists had become worried that the labor market’s recovery might become too uneven, particularly as many workplaces remain impacted by closures or uncertain hours.

But some 251,000 women over 20 reentered the labor force in October, and 138,000 took jobs after an outflow the month before, a very positive sign.

And the overall snapshot of the labor market is starting to look better: After shedding more than 20 million jobs in March and April of 2020, the U.S. economy has regained all but 4 million of them. The number of job openings remain near record highs, and scores of people are returning to work, with the country averaging roughly 580,000 new jobs added per month this year.

“It’s a strong jobs number for the month and changed the picture of the recent understanding of the labor market,” said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist at the University of Minnesota. “The previous reports had seemed so low, but actually growth has been steadier than we understood. It’s progress and indicates the labor market is recovering at a better pace than we knew.”

nor are the editors of the Wall Street Journal although, as you might expect, their explanation is somewhat different from that of the president or Mr. Rosenberg:

The Labor Department’s September survey occurred a week after the enhanced benefits expired, so it didn’t capture the expiration’s impact on employment. Many people also continued to receive benefits for weeks afterwards due to claims backlogs.

So it’s notable that job growth picked up in industries in which employers said jobless benefits were making it harder to hire. Nursing homes experienced their first month of job growth (12,000) since January 2020. Another 16,000 jobs were added in home healthcare, the biggest increase since June 2020.

The labor market nonetheless remains very tight. Labor participation has hardly budged since summer 2020 and at 61.6% is still 1.7 percentage-points lower than in February 2020. Payrolls remain 4.2 million below the level of February 2020.

Low pay isn’t the problem, as employers are raising wages to attract workers. Average private hourly earnings are up 4.9% year-over-year, and 12.4% among production-level workers in leisure and hospitality. But many employers still can’t find workers.

Like most things I think the improvement is likely multi-factorial, with an improving economic outlook, seasonal variations, the elapsing of the federal (and state and local) benefits, changes in restrictions on business operations due to COVID-19, and who knows what all else playing roles.

What were the most important factors behind the improvement and how do we know?