At Bloomberg Olivia Rockeman reports that prices increased by 5% in June on a year-on-year basis:

Prices paid by U.S. consumers surged in June by the most since 2008, topping all forecasts and complicating the Federal Reserve’s debate over how soon to unwind ultra-easy monetary support for the economy.

The consumer price index jumped 0.9% in June and 5.4% from the same month last year, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday. Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the so-called core CPI rose 4.5% from June 2020, the largest advance since November 1991.

and in some categories, e.g. for used cars prices increased at the fastest rate on record: 40%. Inflation-adjusted hourly wages fell by 1.7%. Pressure on wages is sure to follow.

Today I’m thinking about Jackson Browne’s “Song for Adam”. Here’s its opening:

Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well
He was alone into his distance, he was deep into his well
I could guess what he was laughing at, but I couldn’t really tell
Now the story’s told that Adam jumped, but I’ve been thinking that he fell

Together we went traveling, as we received the call
His destination India and I had none at all
Well, I still remember laughing with our backs against the wall
So free of fear, we never thought that one of us might fall

I sit before my only candle
But it’s so little light to find my way
Now this story unfolds before my candle
Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
But I feel just like a candle in the way
I guess I’ll get there, but I wouldn’t say for sure

I’m casting around for something to write about today.

Richard Branson’s joyride into space is a curiosity. What’s to say? It’s interesting to me how life imitates Heinlein but that’s about it.

Cuban protesters are actually impeded by encouragement or support from the U. S. ‘Nuff said.

Yes, it’s hot in Death Valley. It just broke the world record. Global warming? Could be. I don’t know how you’d go about disaggregating the effects of releasing too much carbon dioxide into the air from local mucking about with the environment. I don’t dismiss global warming but I think in most cases local effects are a lot more significant and near term.

76 is a lot of people to be killed by lightning strikes in India. That’s twice as many as the U. S. has experienced in a whole year. Anybody have any ideas on what’s happening there? Attributing it to people taking selfies sounds far-fetched but stranger things have happened.

Let’s make one thing very, very clear: increasing the amount of rare earth metals mined and processed in the U. S. is a strategic necessity. It’s not a question of “whether”. We must. Given that this primer on why we’re content to let China dominate rare earth metal production and processing by José Rodríguez Jr. at Jalopnik is worth a read. Here’s a snippet:

Big auto in the U.S., along with the current administration in Washington D.C., are both about to experience growing pains as we pivot to EVs. The problem of missing microprocessors can’t even start to scratch the surface of other issues electrification will run into, namely those of rare earth mining and processing.

The U.S. will now have to choose between adding much-needed mining and processing capacity for the rare earth minerals that EVs need, or risk letting other countries dominate that sector, according to a new report from the Financial Times. Adding mining capacity is a dirty endeavor, as the residents of a South Texas town articulated in the FT report, saying “Hello, more pollution.”

Reducing pollution in the U. S. by offloading the effort to China is perverse—it doesn’t result in a net decrease in pollution but the opposite. It just puts it out of our sight and beyond our control. And it doesn’t just provide a problem for the auto industry but for the production of solar cells and wind turbines as well. If you want more EVs, solar power, and wind power and less pollution, we’ve got to be much more self-reliant on rare earth metals. Simple as that.

Today I’ve been musing about the data presented at two sites: the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Tracker site that displays a map showing the COVID-19 vaccination rate by state and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s tabular reckoning of vaccination rates by race or ethnicity (and state).

The first thing that jumps out at you from the Mayo Clinic’s map of the percentage of fully vaccinated people by state:

is a sharp Red State-Blue State dichotomy. Since it supports the “stupid, ignorant Trump supporter” trope, that explanation has been fully embraced by the Creative Class Blue State dwellers that comprise a large proportion of web users but I think that, once you dig a little farther into the data cf. the KFF table, it’s clear that is at best a superficial first order approximation of what we’re seeing. Just to cite one example of what I mean the correlation between vaccination rates for white people in Red States and black people in those same states is quite close. Indeed, percentage black and Hispanic population is a better predictor of vaccination rates (they are inversely correlated) than whether Republicans or Democrats dominate the state.

The relevance of per capita income by state should also be noted. Mississippi and Alabama have the lowest vaccination rates and are also the poorest states. That suggests that educational attainment and how you earn your living are factors as well. Those are weakly correlated with intelligence but only weakly. Just as one anecdote the smartest guy I know came from a blue collar family. He got a PhD in mathematics and spent 15 years as a math prof before taking a job as a software developer because the pay was better.

To my eye the factors appear to be preference, location, income, politics, how you earn your livelihood, race or ethnicity, educational attainment, and intelligence in roughly descending order of importance and those are unquestionably interrelated. How you craft a strategy for encouraging more people to get vaccinated is anybody’s guess. Preferences are hard things to change. So, for example, I think that public service announcements with a wide array of black leaders from all walks of life (politics, sports, entertainment, religion, etc.) is a prudent step but how effective it will be I couldn’t say.

I’m in material agreement with Andrew Latham’s post on U. S. grand strategy at 1945. In it he makes three points:

1. The U. S. post-war grand strategy is, if not dead, on its last breath.

Whereas the period from 1990 to about 2010 was characterized by the historically anomalous circumstances of unipolarity and the dominance of a single set of (liberal) norms, rules and institutions, the period since then has been defined by the return of multipolarity; the emergence of a serious challenge to the liberal or rules-based order; and the continuing erosion of American military primacy. In short, over the past decade or so we have witnessed the resurfacing of what might be called the “deep structure” of international relations: a condition in which states, operating under conditions of anarchy, compete for power – and perhaps even dominance – in the diplomatic, military and economic domains.

Although it has yet to sink in, this new geopolitical reality has rendered the US grand strategy of liberal internationalism – first conceived in the 1940s, but only fully practicable since the end of the Cold War – effectively obsolete. That grand strategy, of course, had two main elements: upholding and defending the liberal international order (ends) and maintaining American primacy (means). The former entailed creating a dense network of US-led liberal institutions, advancing liberal-democratic norms, promoting liberal economic systems, and universalizing liberal conceptions of human rights. The latter involved maintaining a margin of hard- and soft-power superiority necessary to police and defend that liberal international order against all comers.

But the liberal international order, if not quite dead, is certainly on its deathbed, and American primacy is fast slipping away in the face of China’s multifaceted military buildup.

2. The return of great power competition is calling a competing grand strategy, restraint, into question.

But while the return of great power competition has effectively ended the checkered career of liberal internationalism, it is also calling into question one of its main competitors, the grand strategy of restraint. In connection with grand strategy, of course, the term restraint can be used in at least two registers. First, it is sometimes used as a hypernym covering a family of approaches to foreign policy that are less enthusiastic about maintaining global primacy or policing the liberal international order. That is not the way I am using it here. Rather, I am using the term solely to refer to restraint proper – that is, to a grand strategy that assumes that the US inhabits an extremely favorable security environment in the post-Cold War world, that this environment is the product of forces other than American primacy, and that the United States, therefore, does not require the world-spanning system of military alliances, bases, and deployments to maintain a liberal international order that either doesn’t exist or is self-sustaining.

And just how has the return of great power competition rendered restraint just as passé as liberal internationalism? Simply put, like liberal internationalism, restraint was an artifact of the post-Cold War unipolar moment. In that moment, the United States as the sole superpower faced no peer competitor.

3. “Blunting” is a viable alternative to the alternative.

My argument is that the only viable strategic path forward is a specific form of the traditional realist one of balancing – one that Rush Doshi in his recent book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order has labelled “blunting.” According to Doshi, a blunting strategy would involve denying China hegemony in its home region, undermining Chinese efforts to assert its leadership regionally and globally, and preventing China from dominating the global commons, including not only the high seas, but space and cyber as well. As Doshi argues, such a strategy would have military, political and economic dimensions, for it is in precisely these domains that China is seeking to build its own forms of control. The goal of such a strategy would be essentially defensive – to prevent the emergence of China as either a regional or global hegemon.

I do have a few disagreements with him, however. For one thing I disagree with his assessment of American grand strategy. In my view American grand strategy, unlike the grand strategies of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, or China, is an emergent phenomenon. It has certain aspects, e.g. free transit of the sea, but other aspects, notably American hegemony is not properly an American grand strategy but one embraced by American elites which is not entirely the same thing and, I would argue, the source of much mischief.

I have always argued for a balance of power rather than American hegemony and I don’t believe that I’m the only one: as Mr. Latham notes, it’s the classic realist grand strategy. I would add that competition with China is not an issue only for the United States. There are three, even four candidates for Asian hegemony and, as Highlander put it, there can be only one.

And, as I have repeatedly contended, American hard and soft power are both downstream from American economic strength. If we continue our relative economic decline, great power competition will be the obvious emerging consequence. However, relative economic decline is a choice rather than an inevitability.

More people strongly object to ranked choice voting, as this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Vin Weber and Annette Meeks illustrates:

Minneapolis was once known for its innovative and progressive policy solutions. It produced national political leaders such as Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale. In the past year, however, Minneapolis has become better known as a badly managed city adrift in politically correct mob rule. How did this once-great city fall so far so fast?

In 2009, Minneapolis adopted ranked-choice voting, then an untested method of electing city officials. It was sold to voters as a way to increase voter participation and improve the tone of political campaigns. In fact, it has had little positive effect on campaigns and their messaging, and voter turnout remains low. The corrosive effect of ranked-choice voting on democratic legitimacy is partly to blame for Minneapolis’s current dire condition.

In Minneapolis’s 2017 mayoral election (which was the third using ranked choice) voter turnout was only 43%. The victor in that 16-way race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after six rounds of counting that took 24 hours to complete. He became mayor despite being the first choice of only 25% of voters.

Mr. Frey’s most notable first-term achievement was doing nothing last May while rioters burned and looted more than 1,300 buildings, causing an estimated $500 million of damage. He implied that destroying the city was a justifiable social-justice action. When a police precinct was burned to the ground, he showed no special concern. He did make time for a live television interview on MSNBC.

I’m not sure that the conclusion I would draw from that is that “ranked choice voting helped wreck Minneapolis” but that today’s progressives are not cut from the same cloth as yesterday’s liberals and are so incompetent at executing the basic responsibilities of government they should not be allowed near the reins of power. I could provide any number of examples of just how different Mr. Frey is from either Hubert Humphrey or Walter Mondale. I don’t think you can blame ranked choice voting for that.

The editors of the Washington Post declaim that the events on January 6 of this year were, indeed, an insurrection:

The Justice Department announced this week that law enforcement authorities have arrested more than 535 people, an average of about three every day since Jan. 6. The rioters did $1.5 million of damage to the Capitol building. The insurrectionists allegedly assaulted some 140 police officers. So far, authorities have charged 50 people with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. But far more appear to have been involved: The FBI is still trying to identify more than 300 people investigators believe committed violent acts, including more than 200 believed to have assaulted police officers. These were not tourists.

Court documents unsealed Thursday, relating to the June 30 arrest of four Florida residents, provided harrowing details of some of these alleged assaults. One of the defendants allegedly “charged the line of police officers and began throwing punches.” Another allegedly stole a police officer’s shield after he pulled the officer down the Capitol steps, then charged into a police line. And another allegedly thrust a flagpole into an officer’s chest, before raising it over his head and apparently striking an officer in the back of his head. The attack resulted in the death of one police officer, and 138 were reported injured.

These are just a few of countless examples of mayhem that have emerged since Jan. 6. Indeed, the alleged violence was not just directed at police. Authorities have arrested six people for assaulting journalists or destroying their equipment.

Prosecutors also argue that the havoc was far from spontaneous, assembling evidence that far-right activists planned for violence, even preparing a “quick reaction force” site. Testimony from alleged participants suggests that members of the Oath Keepers stashed guns in a Virginia hotel, brought paramilitary gear, used military-style formations to assault the Capitol, conducted tactical training meetings in advance of Jan. 6 and moved to erase what they described as “all signal comms about the op” afterward.

Because Republican senators rejected a Jan. 6 commission, some questions about the assault might never be answered definitively, such as exactly what Mr. Trump did and did not do while insurrectionists attacked lawmakers. But prosecutors are showing that this was not some run-of-the-mill riot; it was a violent incursion into the nation’s seat of government conducted by dangerous extremists and encouraged by the president, who asked them to descend on Washington. This should not be another issue for partisan disagreement. No American should minimize or forget the horror of Jan. 6.

I condemned the actions immediately and I object strongly to mob action for whatever reason but I’m not sure the editors have made their case.

What actually happened on January 6? For some of those involved I have little doubt that they did, indeed, see it as an insurrection but I also suspect that was a very small number of those who participated and the editors are tarring with far too broad a brush. It was unquestionably mob action which instantiates why I am chary of protests full stop. There is frequently a very narrow line between protest and violent mob action. I think that those engaging in violence against persons or property should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

I think we learned a lot from the events of January 6. There are those among us willing to use violence to achieve their political ends. The Capitol Police are a bunch of old, sick men incapable of maintaining order in the Capitol. Another was just how timorous and cowardly the members of Congress are.

Here are some snippets from Andrew Sullivan’s latest offering, responding to the question what has happened to him?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

[…]

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

[…]

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

I see a strong analogy with a point I’ve made in the past. There are only two known strategies for allocating resources: a market system and a command system. A market system is not perfect; it does not result in outcomes that any of us would consider decent but its outcomes are far superior to those in command economies which are always catastrophic. Not only are they authoritarian and violent but they result in horrifically misplaced allocations of resources. It wasn’t missiles and tanks that brought the Soviet Union down; it was blue jeans from the West, it was Russia’s chronic inability to provide the good and lives its people wanted.

Consequently, we maintain a market system, tinkering around its edges on an ongoing basis to remedy its manifest injustices. It is a meticulous, exacting, unending process. Not “one and done”. A complete absence of state control is not good but as a general rule more state control is not an improvement.

Similarly, there are only two known orders for organizing societies: a liberal order and a totalitarian order. While the liberal order may be imperfect, not delivering the results you want as quickly as you want them, it is far superior to its opposite. A liberal order can tolerate those who oppose it; a totalitarian order cannot.