Speaking of what people deserve, I found the editors’ of the Washington Post’s umbrage over Congressional pay bordered on the unhinged:

Limits on lawmakers’ pay affect congressional staffers who are not allowed to make more than members, which, in turn, puts Congress at a clear disadvantage in competing for talent. Others who support a raise, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), point to the effects of pay and financial pressures on those who serve. “I do not want Congress, at the end of the day,” said Mr. McCarthy, “to be a place where only millionaires serve.”

Presently, Congress includes members who never earned more than $40,000 a year in their lives before getting elected to Congress and those who earned millions. I’m not as concerned about Congress being a place where millionaires serve as I am about the many Congressmen who became millionaires as a consequence of what is euphemistically called “serving”. The evidence that more pay would attract more talent is nonexistent. The sole talent required to be elected to Congress is a talent at getting votes. Is that really worth paying for?

How about this for a proposal for Congressional pay. Total income for a member of Congress should be limited to three times the median income of his or her district. At least that would align incentives in the right direction. Those earning more than that would have the balance taxed away; those earning less would have their incomes topped off.

While I’m on the subject, why is the federal government the only major organization in the United States that doesn’t do its business by teleconferencing? Being able to remain in their home districts would certainly take the pressure to maintain two residences away.

The New York Times considers the answers of the candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination the question “Does anyone deserve a billion dollars?” Some of the answers are, frankly, disqualifying. The correct answer is “I’m not the one to say”. Put another way does Beyonce deserve a half billion dollars? Does Taylor Swift deserve a third of a billion dollars? Those are their net worths. I wouldn’t give either of them a penny but it’s not for me to say. Lots of people think they are. Do they deserve that much money while the average musician earns $20,000 a year? Same answer: it’s not for me to say.

The question assumes that you believe in “true value” or that anybody deserves to receive the amount they need to live the lifestyle they desire. If that weren’t the case we’d never be giving benefits greater than were necessary to maintain a subsistence living in rural Mississippi.

Here’s the question I would ask: does anyone deserve to earn a billion dollars based on rents, royalties, patents, government grants, professional licensing, or arbitraging any of the thousands of federal, state, and local laws and regulations? I don’t believe that anyone deserve to earn more than three standard deviations above the median income based on any of those things but it’s not for me to say.

I was very much struck by this analysis from Peterson-Kaiser comparing the quality of U. S. health care with that of other countries. It’s full of graphs and charts. I would summarize it as that care is better here but health is better in many other OECD countries.

Consider this graph, for example:

What it seems to say is that age-adjusted mortality per 100K population tracked pretty closely between the U. S. and other OECD countries until 1985. Since then the statistic has improved for both the U. S. and other OECD countries but it has improved less in the U. S. Why?

Okay, let’s do a little poll. Consider this description of a statement by European Central Bank head Mario Draghi, quoted by Ferdinando Giugliano at Bloomberg:

The ECB chief sounded particularly exasperated by politicians’ foot-dragging over the creation of a common budget for euro members, which would help them stabilize weaker economies if they faced a shock. Euro zone finance ministers announced the first steps toward such a fund last week. Draghi is justifiably unimpressed.

Which of the following is the best explanation for the problems of Europe’s economy?

1. German policy
2. “politicians”
3. The European Central Bank
4. It’s the Americans’ fault
5. Other

I think it’s A. No contest.

Over the weekend I watched a Chinese science fiction movie, The Wandering Earth, streaming on Netflix. I’m told it’s the second-highest grossing movie in Chinese cinema history. It earned $700 million, most of it in China, interesting in its own right. Its plot resembles that of the movie Armageddon from a few years ago but the scale is enormously greater. The Sun is in the process of becoming a red giant and the people of earth have decided on the nutty strategy of moving the entire earth out of its orbit, ultimately to settle in another solar system. Like most sci-fi movies The Wandering Earth requires a willing suspension of disbelief. It requires a lot more of it than most. I don’t believe any aspect of the plan would work.

I found the picture mildly entertaining. It has plenty of action and roughly zero sex or violence (other than lots of things crashing). I would characterize it as “family friendly”. I’m a bit more tolerant of dubbing and corny movies than I think most Americans are so I’m not sure how other Americans will react to it.

Stereotypes abound. It included a number of what I think of as characteristically Chinese tropes. Attitudes between parents and children. The climax and ending of the picture (which I won’t reveal).

If you’re looking for something to stream with the kids, there are worse picks. Mostly, in fact.

I wish more people would pay attention to Henry Grabar’s post at Slate than probably will. It has quite a few important revelations. For example:

The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”

And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.

Youngstown’s blacks aren’t Republicans and the Democrats aren’t interested in them:

The bad news is that no one had voted in the city’s recent primaries for local elected office. Turnout was about 10 percent. Helen Youngblood, a longtime leader of the AFSCME local, remembered talking to a friend about this: “When I ask, ‘Why can’t we get these people out to vote?,’ the person says to me, ‘Helen, when you get up in the morning and you don’t know if your baby is going to have milk, then your priority of the day isn’t getting out to vote.’ ” Poverty, she reasoned, was crushing people’s will to participate in the political process.

But several people I spoke to said there is also reason to blame Democrats, or as Sybil West called them when I paid a visit to her east side home on a recent afternoon, “the wimpocrats.” The party has been as absent here as Donald Trump is present, West told me, and the state’s GOP-led gerrymandering and poverty have further sapped people’s enthusiasm. “Most people are feeling apathetical,” she surmised, “because they’re saying, ‘It’s not going to do any good.’ ”

One of the effects of the collapse in manufacturing jobs in the United States is that it has concentrated black people in the cities. Black people moved from the South to Northern cities for jobs. Now that the jobs have vanished they’re more hesitant to move than their white counterparts.

In his newsletter, reproduced at the New York Times David Leonhardt seems surprised that blacks don’t overwhelmingly think that reparations is the measure most likely to help them:

In the poll, people were given a list of 14 economic policies and asked how much they thought each would help the black community. The list was full of progressive ideas: paid leave and better workplace benefits; a higher minimum wage; a federal jobs guarantee; stronger laws against discrimination; reparations for descendants of slaves; and more.

On a straight up-or-down basis, a majority of black Americans favored every one of the 14 policies. But there was a fairly wide gap in how much they thought each would help. At the top of the list were a higher minimum wage, stronger discrimination laws and better workplace benefits and training. About 70 percent of respondents said each of those would help “a great deal.”

At the bottom of the list: Slavery reparations. Second to last: a federal jobs guarantee. Only about half of respondents said each would help a great deal.

What’s going on here? To me, it’s a reminder that black Americans, as a group, don’t have the same political opinions as the most liberal parts of the Democratic coalition. On many issues, black Americans are more moderate — or perhaps more pragmatic.

My own experience has been that blacks are more conservative and more religious than non-black Democrats and that the division is growing.

Quite a number of things disturbed me about the New York Times’s recent article alleging that the U. S. has been inserting malware into Russian power grid control systems. For one thing I question the article’s veracity. For another if true I think it’s irresponsible of the NYT to publish such information. Are we to interpret it that today’s NYT would have been publishing U. S. troop movements in real time to the Axis? Inserting such malware is an act of war. If we are, indeed, doing that it is brinksmanship with incalculable risks.

I found this highly distressing:

But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”

Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.

While I can see the good sense in such a provision to allow for preemption or counter-attack, that does not seem to be the case here. I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that it is a violation of black letter law, not merely the U. S. Constituion but many provisions in the UCMJ. An American general would be bound to reject such a course of action.

Besides, the Congress does not have the power to amend the Constitution by statute. The Congress and the president together do not have that power.

I found this concerning as well:

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

That’s before Russia invaded Ukraine and before DHS began alleging incursions of Russian malware into the U. S. power, before the law mentioned above was enacted and before Donald Trump became president. Did President Obama order this actions? Did he know about them?

I found Andy Kessler’s column in the Wall Street Journal about predictions of the future amusing and maybe a little sad:

Founded in 1867, the Keuffel & Esser Co. commissioned a study of the future for its 100th anniversary. If you’re of a certain vintage, you might have used a K&E slide rule. Their “visionary” study was a huge dud, missing completely the electronic-calculator boom that came a few years later. They shut down their slide-rule engravers in 1976. As Mark Twain said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Or was it Niels Bohr? Maybe Yogi Berra?

My father was a proud member of the Book of the Month Club. Bored on a visit home in 1989, I devoured that month’s selection, “Megamistakes” by Baruch College professor Steven Schnaars, where I read about K&E’s study. The book’s message was simple: Don’t be fooled by prevailing opinion, and don’t extend trend lines into the future. Mr. Schnaars chronicles how 1950s jet-age thinking morphed into ’60s dreams of a space-age utopia. A 1966 study by conglomerate TRW forecast manned lunar bases by 1977, autonomous vehicles by 1979 and intelligent robot soldiers by the ’90s. AT&T ’s Picturephone service, ultrasonically cleaned dishes, cheap energy forever, future shock everywhere—all wrong.

Predictions of the future are highly conditioned by the present. If we can’t agree about what happened in the past how can we possibly predict the future? When the “first draft of history” is hopelessly biased, it isn’t surprising that the future nearly always takes us by surprise.