The RAND organization has studied “news in the digital age” and here are their three main takeaways:

• Print journalism and reporting on broadcast television have been mostly consistent in tone and style over the last 30 years. But since 2000, there’s been a gradual shift toward more-subjective reporting.
• When comparing prime-time cable programming with broadcast television, there were significant differences in how the news was presented.
• “Old media” is more grounded in traditional reporting. “New media” tends to lean more subjective.

Those are merely the tip of the iceberg. To those I’d add the following:

• The younger people are the more likely they are to get their news from online sources.
• Online sources have a more subjective, agonistic style than print media.
• Print media have declined substantially over the past 20 years.
• Print media adopting the style and tone of online media has made them less reliable and accelerated their decline.

There’s a lot to study on this subject.

The editors of the Washington Post are shocked, shocked to find nasty things going on in politics, in this case President Trump’s retweeting of a video of Nancy Pelosi, purporting to show Speaker Pelosi slurring her words and showing other signs of being indisposed. The incident of their displeasure is the claim that the video has been edited in a misleading way:

These difficulties both are caused by and contribute to the erosion of trust in today’s America, where it is hard to say what there is more of: false cries of “fake news,” or viral “news” that is actually fake. Technology certainly has helped this issue along, providing both an easy means to craft propaganda and an easy means to promote it. The increasing sophistication of image editing that creates the threat of actual deepfakes filling the Web will make that worse.

In the best of circumstances, the emergence of these tools for mass deception would be disturbing. It becomes absolutely alarming at a time when America is led by somebody who is intent on deceiving. The role of a responsible leader is to be a bulwark against an assault on truth, yet instead Mr. Trump is a battering ram. That’s not a problem Twitter or any other platform can solve.

But wait! There’s more! As acknowledged by the editors, although there is a misleadingly edited video of Speaker Pelosi making the rounds the video retweeted by Trump was not misleadingly edited.

Does it matter? My opinion is that it ain’t beanbag. If Speaker Pelosi or her supporters object to the Speaker being portrayed in an unflattering light, truly or not, they should reconsider careers in politics. Or exit the public sphere entirely.

Over the period of the last 30 years we have elected the candidate with the lower character too frequently. Weighing the factors and deciding that character doesn’t really matter that much is the way you get Donald Trump elected in the first place.

I have a number of problems with this piece at MarketWatch about increasing wealth inequality in the United States but here’s my biggest disagreement:

“So in some sense the source of higher inequality is Fed policies, which pushed stock prices and home prices higher. But the lack of changes in redistribution by fiscal policy is also playing a role,” Sløk said

The first clause in that sentence is something I strongly agree with. The primary cause of inequality in wealth in the United States is Federal Reserve policy.

But the second clause is grossly misleading. What conceivable fiscal policy would lead to a redistribution of wealth? At the very best (or worst depending on how you look at it) different fiscal policy would be immeasurably more likely to result in a redistribution of income rather than a redistribution of wealth.

The article fails to emphasize sufficiently the reasons for increasing inequality in wealth which are overwhelmingly enormous housing prices in certain parts of the country, the increase in the stock market, and a very low savings rate.

In case you start scrambling around for it to be in the top 10% of holders of wealth you’ve got to have a net worth of $1.5 million. I’d be willing to bet a shiny new time that most of the wealth of that top 10% is held in the form of their houses.

I’m also skeptical that redistribution of income is a leveler but that’s a completely different subject. At least in the United States redistribution tends either to be from the relatively poor to the relatively rich, e.g. the role that FICA plays in the budget, or from one group of the relatively rich or rich to a different group of the relatively rich or rich. I’d be interested in some proof to the contrary.

Finally, making the rich poorer without making the rest of us richer would be a leveling but I’m not sure that’s a direction in which we should go.

Let’s start compiling a list of the crazy and damaging ideas that people have these days. I’ll start. Believing that opening China up to trade would inevitably cause China to liberalize politically was both nuts and damaging to the United States. The people who peddled that pile of horse-hockey should have been removed from office and, probably, been forcibly restrained so they couldn’t harm themselves and others.

The idea that we could invade Afghanistan and create a coherent modern state there where none had ever existed before was crazy and dangerous. Escalating our efforts there would lead to success? Crazy and dangerous.

I could go on like this for days.

Yesterday I attended a talk on disruption. Like most such exercises I didn’t find the speaker particularly insightful or even well-informed but it did make me start thinking so I guess that’s something.

IMO “disruption” is one of the most overused words floating around today, so trendy it’s probably already jumped the shark (to coin a cliche). I thought I’d share a few thoughts. Not much I heard in the talk for goodness sake.

Disruption is a form of competition. There are any number of forms of competition. There’s competition on price, something most commonly encountered on good or services that are commodities, i.e. one is very much like another, or perceived to be a commodity.

There’s competition on products. The Toyota Camry is competitive with the Honda Accord or the Chevy Malibu. They don’t just compete based on price but also on features and service.

Then there’s competition between companies. Apple has been competing with Microsoft on that basis for decades, one of the best examples being the Mac vs. PC ad campaign of some years ago, and epitomized by the persons of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Don’t you want to do business with the hip, creative Mac company rather than the nebbishy boring PC company?

Disruption is competition but it’s competition of a different kind. It’s a challenge to your competitor’s business model. I wonder how many people have noticed that the prime example of disruption all involve artificial scarcity created by decades of regulation? Take ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft, for example. Ride-sharing services have disrupted the taxi business, which has been heavily regulated since before World War II. The scarcity is artificial because it involves drivers and automobiles. In case you haven’t noticed, there is no scarcity of either.

The third quality, after regulation and artificial scarcity, characterizing disruption is that it must be something that is worth disrupting but not so lucrative and well-organized that the established businesses are able to mount a coherent defense.

That’s why I think that health care, for example, is not a good candidate for disruption at least not in the United State. Providers would squash any upstart like a bug.

There’s a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that has crept into the common speech even though many people don’t understand what it means. A petard is a hand-held bomb, a grenade. Something like those bowling balls with fuses coming out of them in Mad Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. To be “hoist with his own petard” is to be blown up by the bomb your are carrying. In his most recent Washington Post column David Ignatius notes that most of the European countries are hoist by their own petards with respect to the “foreign fighters”, i.e. Europeans, who are being held in Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi prison camps, captured while fighting for DAESH:

The Europeans protest that they don’t have adequate laws to try their nationals who committed terrorist offenses on foreign soil, and that they don’t have evidence that would stand up in court. They worry, too, that Islamist extremists in European prisons would radicalize other Muslim prisoners and then be released back into society in a few years, perhaps to commit new terrorist acts.

It’s a political problem for Europe, too, explained one European who has talked extensively with officials there about the repatriation issue. “The European Union is in denial,” he told me. “The security and interior ministers don’t want to hear about it. The Europeans feel that a government that takes them back has no chance for reelection.”

The problem isn’t just the foreign fighters in the prisons but also their wives and children living in camps. Experts estimate that of the 74,000 people at a huge camp known as al-Hol, about 11,000 may be related to fighters who aren’t Syrian or Iraqi.

The European desire for self-protection was epitomized by Ben Wallace, Britain’s security minister, who told the Guardian: “I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which visits prison and civilian camps in northeastern Syria, said in a statement: “Countries of origin cannot turn their backs. People — especially children — cannot be made stateless. Faced with this complex problem, moral inertia is not an option.”

What peeves some U.S. officials is that the European nations shunning responsibility for Islamic State prisoners have for years been lecturing the United States about its immoral treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Facing a post-conflict dilemma now that’s similar to what the United States encountered with al-Qaeda, the Europeans are ducking the problem.

The problem is that shaming only works against people with “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”. It is the reason that Gandhi’s tactic of passive resistance worked against the British but would not work, for example, against the Russians or Chinese.

Regardless of their cowardly bluster our European cousins do not really have such respect and don’t really care what happens to their unrepatriated terrorists.

What, then, to do about these terrorists, hostes humani generis? It’s telling that the countries that have repatriated their terrorist citizens, e.g. Kazakhstan, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco and Bosnia, all have sizeable or majority Muslim populations. Gitmo’s beginning to sound like the lesser evil. After all, out of sight out of mind.

At Brookings Martha Ross sounds what has become a monotonously recurrent theme with the same persistent conclusion. Millennials are finding it hard to get jobs especially jobs that pay enough for them to pay off their educational loans and the solution to that is more education:

Helping young people prepare to engage in work and life as productive adults is a central task for any society. But after the great K-12 conveyer belt of education ends in the United States, young people out of high school face a landscape of college and training options that can be confusing, difficult to navigate, and financially out of reach—and they also face a labor market that favors those with college degrees.

It’s a small wonder then, that some young people are struggling. In a new analysis, my colleague Natalie Holmes and I found that 17 percent of all 18 to 24 year-olds, or 2.3 million people, in the nation’s largest cities and counties are out of work. Nationally, there are 5 million such young people.

On the whole, their circumstances suggest a difficult transition to adulthood. Only 36 percent worked in the past year, compared to 69 percent of all young adults. Twenty percent left high school before completion, and another forty-three percent report that a high school diploma is their highest level of educational attainment. Only 17 percent are in school, compared to 53 percent of all young adults. (Since so many young adults are in school, and school enrollment affects labor market behavior and prospects, we did not include all students in the analysis.

I’m finding it hard to reconcile the various competing claims. Isn’t that just a more polite, more politically correct way of saying “We’re full”? The American workforce does not need more people with little or no command of English and limited skills. We shouldn’t be importing them and doing so pushes down the wages of other workers with whom they compete for jobs.

How in the world do we plan to to train people who won’t stay in high school long enough to graduate? Saying that such people need more education is facile.

To add insult to injury, I’m now seeing people with master degrees being hired to fill very ordinary positions that a couple of generations ago would have been done by people with high school only. The additional years of education don’t qualify them better for their jobs but it does differentiate them from people with less formal education and add a significant amount of educational debt.

At Outside the Beltway James Joyner calls for removing President Trump from office on grounds of mental unfitness under the 25h Amendment:

This is sad and dangerous. It’s why the 25th Amendment provides procedures for ousting a President who’s demonstrably not up to the job. Instead of embarrassing themselves in public praising him, his top advisors need to seriously consider pulling the plug.

Just for the record and for the umpteenth time, I did not vote for Trump, I think his demeanor is awful, I think some of his policies are wrong, but I think that some of them are right.

I hope that James recognizes the risks in what he’s proposing. If Trump is removed Mike Pence will become president. The ball will be in the Democrats’ court then. If President Pence encounters the same level of resistance that Trump has, Trump’s supporters will, rightly, see the entire Resistance as an attempted coup. There are already serious, sober people who aren’t died in the wool Trump supporters who see the Trump-Russia collusion story as an attempted coup.

There would be a genuine risk of an actual, shooting civil war and IMO no good would come of that.

I agree with Kai Weiss’s thesis in this piece at CapX:

A one-size-fits-all approach from the Commission, along with the need to reach unanimity among member states is, after all, still the preferred path for action at a European level. However, with 28 different voices round the table, reaching unanimity has understandably become more and more difficult.

The refugee crisis of recent years is a case in point. Heads of state and EU officials have been talking about a “European solution” for many years, with very little real progress. Securing the bloc’s external borders and finding a fair but humane way to deal with a complex situation has proven out of the organisation’s reach.

Foreign policy is another example. Of course, there is a big debate over how far Brussels should supersede national governments in this area – thankfully that has meant the more swivel-eyed federalists’ plans for a European army have been swiftly rebutted by a chorus of opposing member states.

At the same time, it’s striking how member states have been unable to agree on even the smallest matters, like when the EU wanted to issue a joint statement to support Juan Guaidó as the rightful president of Venezuela – in the end Brussels decided it had no opinion on the matter, although individual governments have made their views clear.

The Commission’s one-size-fits-all solutions have alienated many countries. As Brussels, together with the infamous Franco-German engine, has pushed for ever more integration over the decades, other countries that are more sceptical about giving up their sovereignty have felt pressured towards accepting “ever closer union”.

The backlash to this over-federalisation of Europe has, of course, been most keenly felt in the UK, which has now decided to forge its own path (if its government ever actually gets round to leaving).

but I don’t think he really appreciates the problem. The EU isn’t pursuing a “one size fits all” strategy. It’s pursuing a “one size fits Germany” strategy. That is evident from the demonstrations, some violent, that continue to occur every weekend in France and have been doing so for six months. It is evident from the surge of the Brexit Party in the United Kingdom.

Germany for its part continues to pursue its nearly two century project of Germanizing Europe. Don’t believe it? Let the EU adopt Hungarian as its common language and watch the squawking from the Germans. The idea isn’t as nuts as it sounds. Jakob Grimm who, in addition to collecting fairy tales was also a founder of modern linguistics, proposed that Hungarian should be the international language on the grounds that its grammar was simple and regular and it didn’t have any difficult to pronounce sounds.A one-size-fits-all approach from the Commission, along with the need to reach unanimity among member states is, after all, still the preferred path for action at a European level. However, with 28 different voices round the table, reaching unanimity has understandably become more and more difficult.

The refugee crisis of recent years is a case in point. Heads of state and EU officials have been talking about a “European solution” for many years, with very little real progress. Securing the bloc’s external borders and finding a fair but humane way to deal with a complex situation has proven out of the organisation’s reach.

Foreign policy is another example. Of course, there is a big debate over how far Brussels should supersede national governments in this area – thankfully that has meant the more swivel-eyed federalists’ plans for a European army have been swiftly rebutted by a chorus of opposing member states.

At the same time, it’s striking how member states have been unable to agree on even the smallest matters, like when the EU wanted to issue a joint statement to support Juan Guaidó as the rightful president of Venezuela – in the end Brussels decided it had no opinion on the matter, although individual governments have made their views clear.

The Commission’s one-size-fits-all solutions have alienated many countries. As Brussels, together with the infamous Franco-German engine, has pushed for ever more integration over the decades, other countries that are more sceptical about giving up their sovereignty have felt pressured towards accepting “ever closer union”.

The backlash to this over-federalisation of Europe has, of course, been most keenly felt in the UK, which has now decided to forge its own path (if its government ever actually gets round to leaving).r

At no time has this been more evident than in the treatment of Greece. That Greece, with an economy still in the thralls of a post-colonial lack of capital investment, was utterly unsuited to adopt the euro was obvious from the start. The only way that could work is if the Greeks consumed German goods while the Germans poured money into Greece. The Greeks held up their part of the deal while the Germans declined to live up to theirs, preferring instead to complain about Greek profligacy and sloth (by comparison with German thrift and industry). That the entire policy with respect to Greece was targeted at propping up insolvent German banks does not seem to have occurred to the Germans.