And here’s another article about which I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry, this time from Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam at the Washington Post. Their op-ed is about something I’ve been pointing out for decades:

The most formidable political class in the United States now is not the oligarchic 1 percent. It is not the struggling middle class. It is not the suffering poor. It is the upper middle class, strong in number, loud of opinion and fiercely determined to protect its interests.

It’s the upper middle class that candidate Joe Biden was attempting to appease when he promised not to raise taxes on anybody making less than $400,000 a year. Upper-middle-class Americans — those with household income in the top 20 percent — may not have incomes reaching quite those heights, but they are comfortably into the six figures. They also have solid retirement accounts, kids for whom four-year college is a given, good health care and valuable homes in good neighborhoods.

But they don’t come by all these things solely through their own hard work and brilliance (though they really do like to think that). Every step of the way, the government is there to help. Their affluence — perhaps your affluence — is plumped up with generous tax breaks and restrictive zoning laws. This is welfare for the prosperous.

Remember how Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it”? He made good on that promise in his 1996 legislation, which famously provided the poor with a “hand up, not a handout.” But that philosophy died in Congress this year, with the introduction, as part of the pandemic stimulus, of unconditional cash transfer to families with children — which Democrats want to make permanent.

Good: Giving handouts to those most in need is both economically rational and morally right. But giving handouts to the affluent is economically wasteful and morally repugnant.

Their candidates for “upper middle class welfare” include the deduction for state and local taxes, the home mortgage deduction, and 529 educational savings accounts. 80% of the benefit of those go to the top 20% of income earners. They also touch on restrictive zoning.

I notice that they don’t touch on the sources of income for a lot of the top 20% of income earners which as it turns out, is the government. Here in Chicago, for example, teachers, police officers, and firefighters are all in the top 20% of income earners.

I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at David Sirota and Andrew Perez’s piece in Jacobin, complaining that Democrats’ arguments about taxation sound a lot like Republicans’:

For years, Democratic lawmakers fought the GOP lie that cast estate tax cuts for billionaires as efforts to rescue family farms. But in this new era of ubiquitous misinformation, the same Democrats are waving a white flag in the battle against anti-tax bullshit. They are ripping a page out of the GOP’s “death tax” playbook and conjuring a new lie, this one depicting tax breaks for affluent donors as a defense of working-class homeowners.

They then lurch uncontrollably onto a reality which, if they did not realize it before, is tragic and, if they did realize it before, is comic:

In the process, Democratic leaders show they fight far harder for the donor class than they do for the working class.

Yep. Democratic politicians and, particularly, the Democratic leadership are focused, as Bill Clinton used to say, like a laser on their donors and those donors, unsusprisingly, aren’t the poor, the downtrodden, or minorities. The rest of the article continues on in this vein.

But who are these donors? If you look at the largest organizational donors listed by Open Secrets, you can discern a sort of pattern. After several organizations controlled by big money individuals (Bloomberg, Soros—Fund for Policy Reform, Dustin Moskovits—Asana, and Tom Steyer—Fahr LLC), they are public employees’ unions (SEIU, American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, etc.) and trade unions (Carpenters & Joiners Union, Laborers Union, Operating Engineers Union, etc.). Keep that in mind as you consider the policy proposals being advanced by the Biden Administration.

BTW only 14 U. S. representatives and senators receive 50% or more of their political contributions from small donors—8 Democrats and 6 Republicans. Most of those are fringe politicians—”democratic socialists” or ultra-conservatives. And the total amounts they’ve raised are pittances compared to some of the pols raising really big money.

Here’s a rather cynical assessment of the 20 years American adventure in Afghanistan by Sumantra Maitra at The National Interest:

The American imperial project in Afghanistan was a bunch of NGOs, and contractors in the defense department making money, and average men and women losing lives for nothing. A random bloke from South Carolina wouldn’t have gone to Kandahar, to start a shop, get married and settle down for the next century at least . . . thereby making the project doomed from the start. There is no dedicated civil service and the higher-education system currently in the United States that is comparable to what the utterly disciplined Victorian public schooling produced during the height of the British empire, which drove proud generations of Britains to ensure that the empire remained a martial but overall liberalizing force, to have the requisite brains trust under the purest form of meritocracy, something, incidentally, that China is doing now promoting its Belt-and-Road project and debt-trap diplomacy. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians working from Central Asia to Africa, starting businesses, and managing constructions, although they have not gone taken the exact same path as imperial Britain—at least not yet.

An empire needs two things, material prosperity, and ideological zeal. The average American lacked both in the last twenty years.

That’s not far from how I see it and it’s not limited to our “imperial project” in Afghanistan. It’s true of everything in government from federal right down to local. To not recognize that is to not understand how our government actually functions.

We are in dire need of reform but there are too many people whose livelihoods are completely dependent on government for it to take place.

I recommend that you read John McWhorter’s most recent post. Here’s its opening:

The organization 1776Unites, founded by my mentor and model Bob Woodson, has tweeted out a video where various black people decry a now fashionable idea that “whiteness” includes being smart. As in, precise, objective, fond of the written word, oriented towards dispassion, on time.

Those things are all manifestations of intelligence, vigilance, discipline. But according to our Elect folk, we black people are best off channeling our Crazy Badass Mothafucka. Because that’s more “authentic.” And, I get the feeling, fun to watch.

Because so many think that the battle that I and others are waging against Critical Race Theory’s transmogrification into education for children is an obsession with something that isn’t a real problem, I want to explore a bit. Someone I deeply respect not long ago surmised to me that the idea that black kids should be exempt from real standards is something being promulgated via mere paper “handouts,” and that the real problem is censorship from the right. I just don’t think so.

First, watch this, the 1776Unites video. Just a few minutes.

And now, as to what we are referring to, it starts actually before last summer. I knew something was really wrong when in 2019 at a conference in New York City for the city’s principals and superintendents, participants were presented with an idea that to teach with sensitivity to race issues meant keeping certain issues in mind.

These included ways of looking at things that are “white” rather than correct: namely, objectivity, individualism, and valuing the written word. Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was fine with this, happily telling the media that it’s white people’s job to do the “work” of identifying the racist assumptions in how they go about their business.

Read the whole thing. And the video is short and to the point.

Confucius said that if your plan is a one year plan, plant rice. If your plan is a ten year plan, plant trees. If your plan is a 100 year plan, teach children. Some children are being taught today that that are incapable of learning. That harm will be with us for decades. It should never have started let alone be admired or allowed to continue.

The countries with which we will compete in the years to come aren’t being burdened with such pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-caring claptrap. It needs to be rejected in no uncertain terms.

I didn’t realize that David Ignatius had Armenian ancestry (on his father’s side). That’s one of the things that comes out in his most recent Washington Post column. Today there are about 11 million Armenians worldwide, mostly in Turkey, Armenia, Iran, Russia, and the United States. If you’re not familiar with the term “Armenian genocide” it refers to the mass slaughter of Turkey’s Armenian population by the Turks a century ago. Turkey’s position is that the numbers have been greatly exaggerated and they were merely putting down an insurrection. Officially, the U. S. hasn’t contradicted the official Turkish account.

In the column Mr. Ignatius considers President Biden’s official recognition of the Armenian genocide favorably:

Armenians around the world surely will rejoice in Biden’s planned announcement. They will celebrate the affirmation of justice and truth after so many decades of Turkish denial of the horrific events of 1915. But I hope they will also think, as Gregorian would have, about how to build bridges now to help Turkey escape from the horrors of its history.

Saturday ought to be a day when Turks, too, are liberated from the past. Denial of the genocide has wounded Armenians, but it has also damaged Turkey. Historians have long affirmed the truth of what happened, including Turkish scholar Taner Akcam in his detailed study of Ottoman sources, titled “A Shameful Act.”

Denial of these facts has been a dead weight around Turkey’s neck, as if dragging the past into the future. Turkey’s continuing anger has been manifest, too, in its support for Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

I think that Mr. Biden’s decision to recognize the Armenian genocide is the right one but I also think the President Trump’s decision to move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was a good one. I think we should deal with the world as it is rather than as other countries (or peoples) wish it were in their creation myths. We shouldn’t lose track of the facts but that recognition may make dealing with the Turks more difficult.

As I have said before the Turks are not our friends. Kemalist Turkey was a useful ally during the Cold War but Islamist Turkey is an ally in name only. I’m not concerned about their allying with Russia or Iran; their own interests are not well-aligned with those of Russia or Iran and, indeed, in the case of Iran are in some ways antithetical to them. We need to understand Turkey as it is rather than as we wish it were and that includes the Armenian genocide and Turkey’s denial of it.

I don’t remember who said it but it remains true. History is a vendetta.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Joseph Sternberg suggests that Democrats are trying to increase inflation as a political and economic strategy:

Reduced inflation-adjusted labor costs are one way to maintain some modicum of U.S. competitiveness while the Biden administration saddles the economy with productivity-killing higher taxes and stiffer regulations. It’s time to stop talking about inflation (transitory or otherwise) as a side effect of the government’s various economic wishes and commands. Inflation is the ingredient Democrats hope prevents this policy soufflé from collapsing.

I don’t believe it’s a deliberate strategy. I think they’ve been persuaded that inflation is completely controllable and that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

The balance of his column is mostly dedicated to an explanation of why “transitory inflation” is a misconception:

What ordinary people know and economists too often forget is that while inflationary spikes may come and go, higher prices are forever. This spring’s inflation surge will lead to a permanently higher baseline. A lower inflation rate in the future will only moderate future increases from that new, higher base. The one thing that almost certainly will not happen is that prices will fall substantially to undo some of this allegedly “transitory” inflation. The Federal Reserve will fight tooth and nail to prevent that.

and, as Mr. Sternberg notes, there have been winners and losers in the increases in wages with fewer and fewer winners and many, many more losers. While it’s possible that the Democrats have been persuaded by their technocratic constituents, who are among those who have largely kept up with inflation, that it’s benign others of their constituents have not been so fortunate. IMO that’s an explanation for ever more blacks and Hispanics voting Republican: they feel abandoned and ignored by Democrats.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal consider President Biden’s environmental plan:

Some green groups have done their own back-of-the envelope analysis of what it would take to achieve Mr. Biden’s 10-year plan. Take a recent Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) report that argues for a “strong whole-of-government approach.” This includes eliminating new gas-powered cars by 2035, presumably by ramping up corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards. Mr. Biden has also proposed sweetening federal tax credits for buying electric cars—currently $7,500—but soon consumers will have no choice but to buy them when their gas vehicles expire.

The Biden goal will require the electric grid to be totally rebuilt in 10 years. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the U.S. will also have to double its share of carbon-free power to 80% from 40% today—half of which is now provided by nuclear—to have any hope of achieving Mr. Biden’s pledge.

All coal plants would have to shut down, and natural gas plants would be phased into obsolescence. Wind and solar energy would have to increase six to seven fold. The Obama Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court blocked in 2016, looks modest by comparison. It sought to reduce CO2 power emissions by 32%. Most homes would also have to be electrified. So if you like your gas stove, you won’t be able to keep it. Farmers would also have to adopt “climate-smart agriculture and forestry,” EDF says.

and they assess the approach President Biden is taking as authoritarian:

Mr. Biden is essentially doing an end-run around the Constitution, which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate for the President to enter a treaty. The emissions reductions that foreign leaders pledged on Thursday aren’t legally binding, but Mr. Biden intends to use regulation to bind Americans.

Businesses will be conscripted as foot soldiers in the progressive war on fossil fuels. Mercenaries like Google, Apple and Microsoft have already enlisted. America’s founders believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers would safeguard individual liberty, but this assumes Congress guards its power.

Mr. Biden will face no resistance to his regulatory overreach from Democrats in Congress. They will happily finance his 10-year plan to remake the economy, starting with his $2.3 trillion much-more-than-infrastructure proposal that is the Green New Deal in disguise.

A few observations. First, Mr. Biden is trying his belief that China, India, and other countries require American leadership on carbon emissions before they will act. While I think that China in particular is not above exploiting American gullibility, I don’t believe the Chinese leadership will do anything they don’t see as being in their own parochial interests. I take President Xi at his word: they’re not going to do anything until 2030. In 2030 I presume they’ll decide they won’t do anything until 2040. And so on. American leadership is irrelevant.

Second, I believe the costs of achieving President Biden’s environmental objective are being grossly underestimated, the benefits are being grossly overestimated, and the toll it will take on the economy, particularly in the form of net job loss, is being grossly underestimated. Just as one example, what will the short term emissions impact of the plan will be with all of its building and rebuilding? 14 years is not that long a period.

Third, IMO the only practical way of achieving the goal of zero carbon emissions by 2035 is via cheap energy provided by small scale nuclear reactors and carbon capture and sequestration. Time’s a wastin’.

Finally, I have a proposal for cutting U. S. electricity consumption by 1% overnight: ban cryptocurrency mining. Also Amazon consumes 2% of the electricity generated in the U. S.

On Saturday April 17, California Congressional Rep. Maxine Waters called for protestors to “stay on the street” and “get more confrontational” were former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin to be acquitted. Some complained that the statements were inciting violence which Congresswoman Waters subsequently denied. To my eye that was not inciting to riot under 18 U.S. Code § 2102. It may have been an incitement to violence which is also illegal under federal law but that would be hard to prove. IMO it is brinksmanship.

If you’re not familiar with that term, “brinksmanship” means trying to achieve an advantageous outcome by pushing dangerous events to the brink of active conflict. The term may have been coined in the 1950s by Adlai Stevenson. I believe the concept derives from Stephen Potter. In the late 1940s he wrote a book called The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating followed up the following years by a number of other books, One-Upmanship, and Lifemanship.

In my view Rep. Waters remarks were reckless and brinksmanship but not actually illegal and the House should have censured her for them.

In his Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger declaims:

When Rep. Maxine Waters of California (Los Angeles) was asked whether she was inciting violence by telling the demonstrators arrayed around her in Brooklyn Center, Minn., to “get more confrontational,” she responded with the politician’s user-key response that she isn’t “about violence.”

Don’t bother looking, Ms. Waters, but you—like all the rest of us today in the United States—are engulfed in violence: the political violence of street protests, the violence of rising urban crime, the violence of cops either shooting suspects or getting shot by suspects, and the violence committed routinely by homicidal shooters.

[…]

It might seem like a stretch to conflate political riots, violent inner-city crime and individual shooters, but I’m not so sure they aren’t related. Obviously something is spinning out of control in the U.S. Whatever status quo exists to mitigate each of these forms of violence, it isn’t working anymore. It is failing.

There used to be widely shared boundaries on personal and public behavior. Not anymore. A lot of people no longer know how to behave or where the lines are that one shouldn’t cross.

[…]

How could the postelection Washington mob that invaded the Capitol think that was no different than attending a rally on the Mall?

Whatever happened to the thought, “Maybe I don’t want to do this?” Or shouldn’t do this.

[…]

There is a pattern here of misgovernance and misjudgments. Black Lives Matter and its advocates argue, correctly, that the criminal-justice system arrests and jails too many young black men. Their solution is de minimis policing and prosecution, explicitly to repair “systemic racism.”

This is a consequentially dangerous error of judgment. They are absolving young men of personal responsibility for acts of violence against their neighbors.

The reality across the U.S.—on the streets of protest, in the toughest neighborhoods or in the minds of the homicidally deranged—is that the simple and utilitarian concept of behavioral “pushback” has lost consensus support.

Without pushback’s demarcation of limits—whether with accepted norms of behavior, a basic police function, or the credible defense of limits by public officials (not least U.S. presidents)—the future will bring more crude violence. Which no one will condone.

This was the original meaning behind the idea of maintaining social guardrails. They’ve been taken down—again.

I have one explanation to Mr. Henninger’s implied question and one that should be disquieting. I think we are transmogrifying from a guilt society to a shame society, from a society regulated by internalize guilt to one only regulated by externalized shame. Some of that is inevitable and should have been expected, as we import an increasing number of people inculcated into shame societies. Why should it be disquieting? Because shame societies require a lot more policing to regulate behavior than guilt societies do. Another reason is that for some reason public shaming is now off limits. It’s not nice.

It is not bigotry to point out that most homicides in the U. S. are young black men killing one another. And it is not bigotry to point out that public officials need to regulate their own speech and behavior more rigorously. I said that of President Trump although I didn’t perseverate on it and I think the same is true of members of Congress. It is consistent. That is the meaning of “coequal branches of government”.

I have complained about Rep. Waters’s statements and behavior in the past. The woman is pretty obviously a loose cannon and a loose cannon that, while what she says and does may be appealing to her constituents, is inconsistent with how we should want public officials to behave, particularly in the present context. Congress’s failure to admonish her is a scandalous dereliction of duty on the part of the Congressional Democratic leadership. She cannot merely be dismissed as a back-bencher or unimportant because she is a part of that leadership, the House Chief Majority Whip and a past chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. For Democrats it may be worse than a crime; it may prove a mistake.

Rokhaya Diallo is a French journalist, TV personality, and activist. In an op-ed in the Washington Post lamenting the passage of a French law limiting the wearing of hijabs and even banning their being worn in certain circumstances she observes:

The new version of the law creates new reasons to surveil Muslim citizens and restricts their freedom of religion in a way that has never been seen before.

While the secular law in place bans hijabs in schools and for civil servants only, the senate decided to ban religious signs for parents who take part in extracurricular activities, which basically means the exclusion of Muslim hijab-wearing mothers from school life.

Lawmakers also decided to forbid burkinis in swimming pools and to exclude any person wearing religious signs from taking part in a sporting event or a competition hosted by a federation or sport association. In a context where the French Football Federation is the only international body to restrict women with hijabs from participating in sport, the senate is amplifying the pressure on Muslim women who constantly face exclusion.

concluding:

France has been discussing the outfits of Muslim women for at least three decades. In 1989, girls were excluded from middle school for wearing headscarves. Since then, France has singled itself out for an incredible number of controversies over Muslim women daring to appear covered in public. Women have been attacked and dismissed for leading a student union, being nannies, being part of a television singing contest, running for office, participating in a news show, attending a public hearing, volunteering in a charity, wearing a long skirt at school, applying for a job, being provided adequate sporting equipment, and in so many other situations. This article would not be able to name all the times when Muslim women’s choices have been violently debated without them.

The provisions received unfavorable opinions from the current government and the law commission, and French President Emmanuel Macron’s majority party in the National Assembly will probably not vote for them. But the fact that they have been approved by one of the two legislative chambers says a lot about how far lawmakers are ready to go to erase Muslim women from the public sphere. The debate, taking place without the participation of the main parties concerned, itself normalizes the exclusion of the community.

Muslim women are reclaiming their freedom over their bodies. Pretending to save them from oppression while banning them from activities is nothing more than denying them agency.

As you know it is not my practice to criticize the decisions about their own affairs of people in countries other than my own and, indeed, I hesitate before remarking about such decisions in states other than my own. I believe the French have an absolute right to determine what it means to be French as they see fit. Laïcisme has been one of the foundational doctrines of the French nation for more than 200 years and in France it extends to the public wearing of religious symbols. Similarly, égalité, equality, has been one of the foundations of the French nation for more than 200 years and goes so far as to prohibit categorizing French citizens by race. How many people of sub-Saharan African descent are there in France? Officially, the French do not know because it is illegal for such records to be kept or such a tally to be made.

Contrary to whatever impressions you might have the wearing of hijabs by Muslim women is not a religious requirement under Islam. It is a custom and a religious and political statement. If the French decide that such customs and statements are contrary to being French, that’s up to them.

And as I have said before France and the other ethnic states of Europe have a decision before them. They may continue to remain the ethnic states with more or less uniform cultures that they been for centuries or they can try to remold themselves into multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-confessional states. Each of those alternatives has consequences. It’s not up to me to decide their choice for them.