You can open a new college but you can’t open a new elite college. There are twice as many people in the United States as there were in 1960.

If you disapprove of President Trump’s disregarding of international norms, the necessary implication is that you disapprove of U. S. foreign policy over the period of the half century. At New Republic John Glaser outlines the U. S.’s routine ignoring of international law and standards:

The pundits, practitioners, and politicians that make up the foreign policy establishment have rarely respected the non-interventionist principles at the core of the United Nations, an institution exemplifying the liberal rules-based international order that the United States helped establish following World War II. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter says “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…” According to the Charter, which American post-war planners helped write, the use of force is illegal and illegitimate unless at least one of two prerequisites are met: first, that force is used in self-defense; second, that the UN Security Council authorizes it.

This prohibition against war is not some trivial aspiration. Non-intervention is the centerpiece of international law and the United Nations has repeatedly sought to underline its significance. In 1965, the General Assembly declared “No state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any state.” Again in 1970, it unanimously reaffirmed the illegality of “armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats.” In 1981, the General Assembly further specified that the Charter’s “principle of non-intervention and non-interference” prohibited “any … form of intervention and interference, overt or covert, directed at another State or group of States, or any act of military, political or economic interference in the internal affairs of another State.”

The United States is currently engaged in active military hostilities in at least seven countries, namely Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. That tally doesn’t include drone strikes in Pakistan, combat operations in Kenya, Cameroon, and Central African Republic, or other interventions of unknown magnitude. The true number might be closer to 14 countries. The White House is also explicitly threatening U.S. military action to change the regime in Venezuela and against Iran for a host of spurious reasons. Not one of these cases meets the prerequisites for legal military intervention (a plausible self-defense case can be made for the war in Afghanistan, but it expired a long time ago).

It includes Trump but it’s not limited to Trump. It includes Republicans but it’s not limited to Republicans. These norms have been violated by every U. S. president over the period of the last 60 years.

I’m wary of entering into treaties but that’s because I don’t think we should sign a treaty which we have no intention of honoring. I think that’s not only a violation of important norms but against U. S. interests.

I want to draw your attention to what to my eye is an absolutely brilliant white paper (PDF) from James Montier of GMO, “The Late Cycle Lament: The Dual Economy, Minsky Moments, and Other Concerns”. Here is as good a summary as any:

We have an increasingly fissured economy with low growth, lower productivity, and even lower real wage growth. An economy characterised starkly by growing differences between the haves and have-nots.

It is full of intriguing charts and graphs and interesting remarks. For example:

All the employment growth we are seeing is coming from the low productivity sectors. On top of this, the paltry gains in income that are being made are all going to the top 10%. This is not what a booming economy should feel like.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, when you dig down into the market you will find that a staggering 25% to
30% of firms are actually making a loss!

and

We aren’t the only ones to voice concerns in this realm. The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) (the central bankers’ central bank) has also noted similar concerns (see Exhibit 19). It has shown the number of “Zombie” firms (defined as firms aged at least 10 years old with an EBIT to net interest expense below 1) has soared.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t recall that Illinois has ever received the volume of attention from the editors of the Wall Street Journal that it has recently. I just wish it were for something more benign than Gov. Pritzker’s feckless tax and spend plan. In reaction to the governor’s plan to amend the state’s constitution to permit a graduated income tax for Illinoisans the editors declaim:

The Tax Foundation says the Governor’s proposal would catapult Illinois into the ranks of states with the worst tax burdens. Corporate income would be taxed at 10.45%, the third highest rate in the U.S., while pass-through business income would face a top rate of 9.45%, fourth highest. If the Governor manages to enact all that he’s proposed, Illinois would drop from 36th on the State Business Tax Climate index to third worst after New Jersey and California. Congratulations.

All of this comes at an especially difficult time for Illinois when it is losing people, after its neighbors have reduced tax rates, when its pension system is at least $135 billion underfunded, and when its wealthiest taxpayers are already paying more because of the $10,000 federal limit on the state-and-local tax deduction.

With his proposal, Mr. Pritzker is doing the bidding of the state’s public unions, which have long run the state through the office of House Speaker Michael Madigan. Having run Republican Bruce Rauner out of town after one term without reforming any part of government, these rulers for life now want to eliminate the last fiscal restraint in the state.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Illinois doesn’t have a benign climate or beautiful scenery. It doesn’t have mountains or an ocean. No one comes here or, indeed, stays here because it’s a great place to live. It’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Chicago isn’t the Big Apple or the Big Orange. Warrenville isn’t Silicon Valley. They come here to work and they stay here because it’s become their home. Illinois needs an attractive business climate and that includes low taxes.

I’m realistic enough to recognize that Illinois needs to address the problems that years of incompetent, dishonest, and corrupt government have bequeathed to us. We can’t do that simply by increasing taxes. I propose that we amend the state’s constitution in two ways: the legislature should have the power to impose a graduated income tax and to adjust the pensions paid to public employees at will. After that the immediate actions should be to impose a slightly graduated income tax and to limit the pensions that the state can pay to any public employee to three standard deviations above the median income for the state. The present median household income in Illinois is around $60,000.

When I began posting here at The Glittering Eye most blogs were independent, non-commercial ventures produced by single individuals as this blog continues to be. A lot has changed in 15 years. Nowadays most blogs are group blogs, bloggers have become newspaper columnists, and media organizations, corporations, and organizations comprise an enormous amount of the alleged content being produced. Facebook has taken over most personal blogs.

Nowadays on average I write five posts a day. Over the 15 years I have written nearly 16,000 individual posts. It continues to be a form of therapy for me, keeping me engaged and interested. I plan to maintain this blog as long as I have the consciousness and energy to do so. I still have stories to tell.

I produced a link farm of some of my best posts on my 12th anniversary if you’re interested.

Both the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times have endorsed Lori Lightfoot for mayor in the April 2, 2019 election.

Not only is Lightfoot accomplished, she comes to the race as an outsider not immersed in the Democratic Party politics that taint this city’s governance. Those associations have dragged down Preckwinkle’s campaign — Preckwinkle’s allegiance to former Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios, her connections to Ald. Edward Burke, and her role as chairman of the county’s Democratic Party, which raises and spends big money, slates judicial candidates and remains a relic of old-style cronyism and backroom deals.

She is beholden to pretty much nobody — except you.

She’s mostly right on the issues, to our thinking, and she’s entirely right in her priorities. Neighborhoods matter as much as downtown. Working folks matter as much as the rich. Civil liberties matter as much as good police work. And good cops, it should go without saying, are to be cherished.

We endorse Lightfoot because this election is bigger than any disagreement about taxes or charter schools or express trains to O’Hare.

This election is about who we are, and who we want to be. Are we one Chicago or not?

Our major newspapers are split on 39th Ward Alderman with the Sun-Times endorsing Robert Murphy and the Tribune Samantha Nugent.

As of this writing I plan to vote for Lori Lightfoot and Robert Murphy.

In comments it was observed that there’s a stark contrast between two of my posts this morning, one on the defeat of DAESH, the other on the murder of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.

There are both similarities and differences between the two incidents. The articles cited by the two posts from the Financial Times and New York Times, respectively, reserve their criticism for the United States and our allies. According to that story the rise of DAESH was caused by our “blundering about” the Middle East and the murders in Christchurch provoked by “white supremacy”. IMO there’s more truth in the latter account than in the former but that, too, is an insufficient explanation.

The murders in New Zealand tell a story of personal superempowerment. A single individual or a small number of individuals are able to wield enormous power. Laws that would actually make such a thing impossible would also make modern life impossible. Banning guns would not be enough. You’d need to ban the materials necessary to make explosives, chemical weapons, or bacteriological weapons as well.

This will only get worse. Where an individual or handful of people today can kill dozens, tomorrow they will be able to kill hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

The rise of DAESH on the other hand was the result of a concerted effort by first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of like-minded people over a decade. That effort was facilitated by social media. Radical Islamist groups aren’t new in Islam—they are as old as Islam—but being able to organize them over vast distances in a relatively short timeframe is new. Our “blundering about” is an aggravating factor rather than a cause.

As a society we have decided that our response to personal superempowerment will be to tolerate it—just to accept that every so often there will be a mass murder. We may make the same decision about radical Islamist groups but the comparison is a stretch.

Is there anywhere more secularist or more peaceful than New Zealand? The possession of firearms is pretty restrictive in New Zealand and they enforce their laws about as well as might be expected. Only about 5% of New Zealanders own firearms as compared with more than 40% here.

A gunman has killed 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The New York Times reports:

Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, in a terrorist attack that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”

• Officials said that one man in his late 20s had been charged with murder, and that two explosive devices were found attached to a vehicle that they had stopped.

• A Muslim leader in New Zealand said the attack was especially shocking as it took place around Friday Prayer. The police urged people to stay away from the mosques until further notice.

• A gunman streamed a live video of the attack on Facebook, and he appeared to have posted a manifesto online.

Shots were fired at Al Noor Mosque on Deans Avenue in the center of the city and at Linwood Mosque, about three miles away, the police said.

The country’s police commissioner, Mike Bush, said in an evening news conference that 41 people had been killed at Al Noor Mosque and seven at Linwood Mosque, and that another victim had died at Christchurch Hospital.

The police said that four people, including three men and one woman, had been taken into custody. Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia said that one of them was Australian.

If such an horrific attack can take place in New Zealand, it can take place anywhere.

I wanted to draw your attention to David Gardner’s remarks at Financial Times attendant to the defeat of DAESH in Syria:

Syrian Kurdish fighters, supported by the US air force, will soon end the caliphate that, at its height only a few years ago, controlled a third of Syria and Iraq. Isis is about to lose Baghouz, its last enclave in the Euphrates valley, on Syria’s border with Iraq. The jihadist group’s survivors have melted away into the empty wastes, reverting to terror and suicide attacks, while some of their foreign fighters may bring the war back home.

The priority for the world’s security services will be to avert a new rash of terror attacks of the type that have scarred Paris and Nice, Brussels and Berlin, London and Manchester, Istanbul and Ankara.

But now that the territorial caliphate that menaced the region is at an end, there is urgent need for reflection on how to change the western foreign policy that has reliably engendered jihadism. It is only a matter of time before a more virulent strain emerges if the west keeps blundering about in the Middle East.

And if you insist on wearing those short skirts you have no one to blame for being raped other than yourself. He goes on to trace jihadism to, of course, the contest between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The history of spreading Islam by the sword goes right back to its foundations. Before blaming its modern incarnation on our “blundering about” it was blamed on colonialism, starting with the Padri War in Sumatra at the turn of the 19th century to a string of other, similar conflicts right up to 1940. Between 1940 and 1980 secularist Pan-Arabism took the reins for a while before yielding them to various Islamist conflicts.

Prior to 1800 there was Turkish imperialism and before the Turks there were the Arab conquests.

The reality is that as long as their holy book can be interpreted as containing a mandate to spread Islam by force (the standard interpretation until the Mongols sacked Baghdad and took the wind out of the Arabs’ sails) and there’s no one with the authority to tell them “no”, there will always be someone somewhere who will interpret it that way. Nowadays putting together a movement doesn’t require a majority of Muslims or even a large minority. It only takes a few people so inclined and social media.

We need to adjust ourselves to the idea that jihadism is endemic in Islam.

I agree that we should stop “blundering about” and accept the notion that there will be a permanent difference of opinion between the Muslim world and just about everybody else. We can either tolerate it, accepting episodic outbreaks of mass murder, we can stamp it out which will entail killing tens or even hundreds of millions of people, or we can contain it.

I’m for containment, how about you?