I have my disagreements with China perma-bear Gordon Chang. However, I encourage you to read his piece at The National Interest explaining how China’s ascendancy and America’s decline are both greatly exaggerated:

Xi’s reversal of liberal economic policies has been matched by his reversal of political and social policies. He has de-institutionalized the Communist Party, thereby heightening the risk of political instability. At the same time, he has demanded conformity—“absolute loyalty”—and tightened social controls. The institution of a nationwide social credit system , which will assign a score to every resident for all his or her actions, is but one example of the state’s attempt at total control of society.

China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.

And there is one more reason to doubt Chinese economic dominance: demography. China will soon join the ranks of shrinking nations. The population will peak somewhere around 1.44 billion people at the end of next decade according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. By the end of the century, China will have a population of 1.02 billion.

That’s why I continue to say “don’t worry about China, worry about the U. S.” China’s problems will catch up with it soon enough. In the meantime we should stop reacting as though they had already surpassed the U. S. and look at them more critically and skeptically.

Americans need to look more closely at the most reliable gauge of the relative status of China and the U. S. There are presently about 110,000 Americans in China, an all-time record. At the same time there are about 3.8 million Chinese in the United States. Look at the direction the canoes are paddling in.

The disappearance and presumed murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is certainly evoking a long-overdue reaction from the major media outlets. The editors of the New York Times declaim:

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has long imposed an intolerant form of Islam, with a liberal use of cruel punishments such as beheading, stoning, amputation, lashing and the like. On being named heir last year, Prince Mohammed, 33, generated a reputation as a reformer by allowing women to drive; detaining hundreds of businessmen, including fellow royals, in an “anticorruption” campaign; and proclaiming grand visions for the future. But then he jailed the women who had campaigned for the right to drive and violently overreacted when Canada protested. He is also behind a barbaric war in Yemen, in which American weapons have been used to kill untold thousands of civilians, and a bitter feud with neighboring Qatar.

Basically, he appears to be revealing himself to be a ruthless tyrant, only with a different social and economic agenda from his predecessors. It is not hard to believe that he is behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, especially given the reports of American intelligence intercepts in which Saudi officials discussed a plan to lure Mr. Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him.

President Trump is obviously troubled by this possibility. “We don’t like it, and we don’t like it even a little bit,” he said on Thursday. But he seems to like even less losing a $110 billion arms deal and a Middle Eastern comrade in arms.

I guess that’s a start. It beats their prior lauding of him as a reformer when it was obvious to anyone but a gullible fool what he was actually doing. I should add that “absolute monarchy” misrepresents Saudi Arabia’s actual nature somewhat and that last paragraph calls their intentions into doubt a bit. How much is genuine outrage and how much just something else to bash Trump about?

The editors of the Washington Post are equally incensed if not more so:

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was still “planning on going at this point” to the conference, adding, “If more information comes out and changes, we can look at that.” That is the opposite of the appropriate position, which would be to suspend official U.S. participation unless and until Saudi authorities provide satisfactory answers. As they did before Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, Mr. Trump and his aides are sending the message that they will tolerate even the most reckless and unlawful adventures by the crown prince, provided he buys U.S. weapons. It’s hard to imagine a more irresponsible and amoral stance.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal react as well:

Mr. Khashoggi is a more complicated figure than the liberal democrat he is portrayed to be in the Western press. He is a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood and favors Islamic theocracy, as John Bradley explains this week in the British Spectator. He has longtime ties to the Saudi royal family as a journalist and adviser, and some reports suggest MBS recently offered him a significant government post if he returned from exile in Washington, D.C. Some speculate that his refusal to accept that offer may have triggered the Saudi assault in Turkey.

None of this justifies a brazen murder, if that’s what happened, which would be a blunder and a crime. The fiasco puts enormous pressure on aging King Salman, who put the Crown Prince in charge. The Saudi royal family can be like feuding Borgias in the best of times, and the rivals of MBS will see a moment to strike at his power and agenda.

The episode is not the fault of Mr. Trump or son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, despite the predictable claims of the American left. Any sensible U.S. Administration would support a Saudi reformer willing to help restrain Iranian military adventurism. But a murder of this sordid kind would inevitably have bilateral consequences.

I guess there’s nothing like violence perpetrated against journalists, even journalists with which they have nothing else in common, to get the dander of journalists up.

When will Americans recognize that we have enemies in the Middle East and we have clients there but no allies or friends? It is incomprehensible that two consecutive administrations have supported KSA’s war against Yemen. There is plenty of evidence that Saudi Arabia is supporting our worst enemies in the Middle East. If we were living according to our purported values, not only wouldn’t we be supporting their war or trading with them, we would be blockading them and tossing their royals into jail here. For goodness sake, the Saudis still practice slavery (including here in the United States) and execute people for witchcraft.

I don’t know why we put up with the Saudis’ reprehensible behavior. We don’t need them any more and they’ve hated us for decades.

Thomas Jefferson:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Laurence Stern:

Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.

Maya Angelou:

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Michelle Obama:

We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean… and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.

Anton Chekhov:

How pleasant it is to respect people! When I see books, I am not concerned with how the authors loved or played cards; I see only their marvelous works.

Tecumseh:

Show respect to all people and grovel to none.

Thorstein Veblen:

Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful – to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.

Aretha Franklin:

Everybody wants respect. In their own way, three-year-olds would like respect, and acknowledgment, in their terms.

Peggy Noonan, today in the Wall Street Journal:

It was Ms. Ford’s story that was compelling, but in need of support or corroboration. It did not come.

It was a woman who redeemed the situation, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. In her remarks announcing her vote, she showed a wholly unusual respect for the American people, and for the Senate itself, by actually explaining her thinking. Under intense pressure, her remarks were not about her emotions.

One of the things that distinguishes human beings from beasts is respect.

When I read the title of Fareed Zakaria’s latest Washington Post column, “How Trump can win the cold war with China”, I was interested, excited even. After reading it not only was I disappointed, I was angry. After reading nine paragraphs in which he described the challenges here is the single paragraph of his prescription:

Tariffs and military maneuvers might be fine at a tactical level, but they don’t address the core challenge. The United States desperately needs to rebuild its infrastructure, fix its educational system, spend money on basic scientific research and solve the political dysfunction that has made its model less appealing around the world. If China is a threat, that’s the best response.

One of the peculiar things about language is that using ordinary human language you can create names that have no actual referent, i.e. that refer to things that do not and cannot exist. Just because you name something does not mean it actually exists or can be done.

Not one of the four measures Mr. Zakaria alludes to has an actual referent. Let’s start with the last, solve political dysfunction. I believe that if you asked ten people what should be done to solve political dysfunction in the U. S. you’d get ten different answers. Some would say get rid of Donald Trump. Some would say get rid of Fareed Zakaria. I think that, short of turning human beings into automatons, political dysfunction cannot be solved or, more precisely, there is no such thing as political dysfunction. There is politics. It is all dysfunctional to one degree or another. That we have no viable alternative does not make it more or less dysfunctional.

But I think his premise is flawed. It isn’t political dysfunction that “has made its model less appealing around the world”. The American system has never had any appeal other than economic might. Our economy is still growing; our system is just not the only game in town today. There’s also the autocratic Chinese model. Do you know who likes the Chinese model? Autocrats and wannabe autocrats.

Now I believe that the Chinese model is doomed to failure and cannot be repeated but that’s an article of faith rather than something I could provide evidence for. But the reason that China’s economy has grown so spectacularly while ours, at least in relative terms, has languished is that for the last 40 years we’ve been taking Fareed Zakaria’s advice or at least the advice of people who believe as he does.

Onwards. It is not possible to “spend money on basic scientific research”. There are only specific projects on which we might spend. All projects are not created equal and resources of money, time, and attention are finite. How do we distinguish between worthwhile and worthless projects? Any decision is bound to be flawed. My own prejudice is that most money spent on medical research is wasted. We’ve already plucked the low-hanging fruit and there are now diminishing returns on investment. There’s an argument to made that is true in all scientific fields. The best evidence for that is the decreasing pace at which basic discoveries are being made.

I would also ask Mr. Zakaria how “basic scientific research” will convey a competitive edge to the U. S. against a China that is ready, willing, and able to beg, borrow, or steal anything we might discover or create? IMO although it might be public-spirited it wouldn’t solve any problem we actually have.

Education. What would it mean to “fix its educational system”? I don’t think Mr. Zakaria can define it. All I can offer is an opinion. I think the primary problem with our educational system is that it’s being asked to do too much. Children should arrive at school ready to learn. We presently have no alternative for families in child care. I don’t believe there is one.

For another issue let me give you an anecdote. I have a dear friend, a teacher of children with special needs, who began her career in teaching many years ago. In one of her first classrooms she had eleven first grade students with six different first languages (English, French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Urdu). How do you fix that?

I don’t even know how you’d measure progress in “fixing our educational system”. Over the period of the last 25 years real spending on education has trebled with little measurable progress. How much would it cost to “fix it”?

Finally, infrastructure. According to ASCE’s infrastructure “report card” for Illinois, the state has 26,775 bridges, 2,303 of which it characterizes as “structurally deficient”. 20,000 some-odd of them are rural. The rural bridges with local use only (which account for most of the bridges that are structurally deficient) which are structurally deficient average fewer than 100 crossings per day. Which should be repaired? I’m asking you, Mr. Zakaria. If you say “none”, repairing the rest, at least from a statistical standpoint, will have no effect on the overall report card.

Do we have a lot of bridges? Yes. Are a lot of them structurally deficient? Yes. Could we do better? Yes. Should we repair all of them? Probably not. It just wouldn’t make any sense.

In conclusion we can’t accomplish any of his “core challenges” because they’re so poorly defined and we could arguably accomplish all of them and it wouldn’t help us a bit.

In short I thought his column was as big a piece of codswallop as I’ve ever seen.

At RealClearEnergy Alan Daley and Krisztina Pusok of the American Consumer Institute explain the new proposed vehicle emissions standards:

NHTSA’s and EPA’s proposed SAFE Vehicles Rule would reduce average vehicle ownership cost by $2,340, reduce crash fatalities by 12,000 by 2029, cut regulatory costs by $252.6 billion over a decade, and cut the number of hybrid vehicles required to meet mileage standards from 56% to 3% by 2030. Those benefits would be made at de minimis increase in greenhouse gas and pollutants over the next decade.

In comparison with the CAFE standards that had been scheduled for effect out as far as 2025, the SAFE Rules would create a 3/1,000ths of a degree Celsius increase in global average temperature in 2100, and 8/100ths of a percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration in 2100, but no noticeable impact to net emissions of smog-production or toxic air pollution.

I predict that what sounds like a commonsense move will be portrayed in the media as the vile Trump Administration’s plot to kill Americans and fry the world.

We manufacture no small cars in this country. American car companies go through the charade of importing parts from Japan and/or South Korea and assembling them here so their fleets can meet NHTSA’s emissions standards. We manufacture larger cars and trucks here—they’re more profitable. They’d be even more profitable if NHTSA’s mission had not crept from fuel efficiency to reducing carbon emissions over the last couple of decades.

I would not have a problem if Americans were to decide as a country that we didn’t want big, gas-guzzling cars and trucks here at all. If the sales figures are any gauge, we aren’t making that decision. The biggest-selling personal car in the U. S. is a truck. What’s actually happening is that the decision is being foisted on us along with the greater imports and loss of jobs represented by the change.

IMO at the very least those who advocate higher emissions standards and smaller vehicles have a moral obligation to say how they’ll replace the jobs that are being lost. Solar and wind jobs aren’t enough. Think an order of magnitude more.

They sound like the opening lines of jokes. “A journalist, an actress, and a policeman” or “A journalist walks into a consulate” but the stories of Fan Bingbing, China’s most popular movie star, Meng Hongwai, the president of Interpol, and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, all of whom have just disappeared, are not funny.

Maybe they all just ran away, the actress to enjoy her ill-gotten gains in seclusion, the policeman to evade the long arm of the law, and the journalist just because. Maybe they’ll all reappear. I suspect that the lesson of Fan Bingbing and Meng Hongwai is that it doesn’t pay to be too noticed in Xi’s China and that of Jamal Khashoggi that if Mohammed bin Salman wants you dead, you’ll get dead but I can’t really know. Autocrats gotta autocrat.

Democrats Cheri Bustos, Hakeem Jeffries and David Cicilline take to the pages of USA Today to explain what Democrats plan to do if they recapture the House in November. Here’s the pocket summary:

If we have the opportunity to lead the House of Representatives next year, we will lower your health care costs, increase your pay and clean up corruption so Washington works for you.

We will need to wait for the details. My interpretation of what they plan to do is increase health care subsidies, enact a big infrastructure spending plan (Trump promised that, too), and enact stronger ethics laws. “Cleaning up the swamp” has been promised by every administration I can recall. It’s the modern equivalent of “a chicken in every pot”. Every administration has also demurred from doing what would actually “drain the swamp” by reducing the incentives. Decentralize.

I guess we’ll have to pass it to see what’s in it.

I maintain my prediction that impeaching Trump will be for House Democrats what repealing ObamaCare was to House Republicans. After all of the fulmination the base will demand it.

Today is the 106th anniversary of my father’s birth. As of today he has been dead for as long as he had been alive.

He was a wise, courageous, and virtuous man, a skilled and trusted lawyer, a valued friend, a beloved husband, and a loving father. I have never met a man like him and I never expect to.

Over the years I’ve posted many pictures of him. None of the pictures really capture his essential quality which was his enormous energy, his zest, his enthusiasm. He was nearly always in motion. He was 5’10”, had broad shoulders and a barrel chest. His hair was fine and light, his complexion slightly ruddy, and at the time of his death he was somewhat overweight. I do not know how much of that can be attributed to the pancreatic cancer that killed him.

I strive to be like him but it’s a very high standard and, sadly, I fall short.

It’s just about one year after Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker exposé of Harvey Weinstein was published and revealed decades of sexual harassment and worse in Hollywood and got the ball rolling on the #MeToo movement. What remarkable is what hasn’t happened.

The revelations have hardly spread past entertainment, infotainment, and politics. Even within entertainment there hasn’t been the tsunami of revelations that everyone expected.

What conclusions should we draw?