I’ve said before that I love a good polemic. The best I’ve found today is from Eugene Dunn in the New York Daily News. I don’t agree with much of it but I do think that this passage bears consideration:

Do they think Trump — who mounted one of the greatest comebacks in American political history and after being left for dead in the wake of that “Access Hollywood” videotape — is just going to send up the white flag of surrender and go quietly into the night? Or will he pull the trigger on a ferocious offensive against what he repeatedly calls a “witch hunt” that has purposely hampered his administration from Day One?

Given Trump’s ferocious fighting character, given that he once dedicated a whole book chapter on the concept of “revenge” and once famously said that he “screws back in spades,” I’d like all the delusional, impeachment-hungry Democrats to consider how they envision the most powerful man in the world, seething with revenge in his veins, might react to such a turn of events.

and as if on cue Robert Reich provides an excellent column-length fantasy in Newsweek on the extra-constitutional action of “annulling” the Trump presidency.

I’ll leave you with this thought. There are very few in public life, at least in national politics, whose campaigns and lives would stand up to the sort of scrutiny that Trump’s has received over the last two years. Nancy Pelosi is not Mother Theresa. Chuck Schumer is not Francis of Assisi.

How would you go about quantifying President Donald Trump’s or his administration’s effectiveness as negotiators?

If you want an example of what I mentioned in my last post, look no farther than Illinois. For most of the last 40 years both houses of the Illinois legislature have had veto-proof Democratic majorities. For most of that period they’ve had the same leadership. For most of the last 25 years they’ve also held the Governor’s Mansion. Who does Democratic gubernatorial candidate J. B. Pritzker blame for the state’s woes? Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, the only Illinois Republican presently holding statewide office.

As has been quipped you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time. Apparently a lot of those some of the people live in Illinois.

I agree with Michael Goodwin’s claim in his New York Post column that we aren’t simply coping with one major scandal but with four. I disagree with his identification of one of them. Here are his four scandals:

• “The first scandalizing event is Donald Trump — his candidacy, his election and his presidency. And, on some days to some people, his existence.”
• “First is the conduct of the mainstream media, which has abandoned all standards of fairness and continues to embarrass itself with overt bias against the president.”
• “Another scandalizing event is the behavior of some federal agencies. The Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA took liberties that were morally offensive, and possibly illegal, because they didn’t want Trump to be president.”
• “The fourth scandalizing event is the reaction of Democrats to Trump.

  Led by Hillary Clinton, the party has thrashed about like wounded animals caught in a steel trap. The grief does not seem limited to three, five, seven or 10 stages. It’s endless.”

He gets in at least one good zinger:

Instead of making Trump look good, CNN would rather make itself look bad and confirm Trump’s assertion that it promotes fake news. How crazy is that?

Where I disagree with him is in his characterization of the last scandal. I don’t believe it can be attributed to “Democrats”. I think that what he’s seeing are the desperate attempts by an incompetent and despicable Democratic leadership to save their own positions and power by blaming everyone but themselves for the first scandal. Trump’s victory can’t be blamed on Russians, voter suppression, or any of the other 1,001 excuses they’ve been making since 2016. They foisted a very bad candidate on the party, using every dirty trick in the book. When that very bad candidate was defeated by another very bad candidate they began looking for directions in which to point fingers.

That doesn’t exonerate all of the toadies and crooks with whom Trump has surrounded himself or even, possibly, Trump himself. But their guilt or innocence doesn’t exonerate the Democratic leadership, either.

That Mr. Goodwin does not recognize the real source of the problem shows just how effective the Democratic leadership’s campaign of misdirection has been.

I’m skeptical of Steve Salerno’s claim in his Wall Street Journal op-ed that young-adult fiction is “unbearably dark”:

Inspiration has always been the hallmark of young-adult literature, which traditionally consists of reassuring texts infused with values espoused by most of mainstream society. And many of today’s best-selling books in the YA genre remain faithful to that ethic. But such books tend not to catch the eye of the curators of today’s lists of recommended titles, who evidently assume that all students arrive at school traumatized in some fashion.

Therefore, they reason, to meet children “at their own level,” books must deal with sexual abuse, dysphoria, racism, domestic violence, gang life, school shootings and other forbidding aspects of a world that, one would think, is spinning off its axis. As James Blasingame, executive director of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, put it in his Nevada summit keynote speech, YA literature “not only saves lives” but can provide “a map to navigate a world fraught with problems.”

No one would argue that American life in the early 21st century is flawless. But isn’t it possible for educators and their close allies in the social-justice set to look out across the vastness of contemporary life and see something other than darkness and depravity?

which I think smacks more than a little of “get off my lawn”. How would you go about quantifying how “dark” today’s young adult fiction is compared with that of a year ago, five years ago, ten, twenty-five, fifty? How would you distinguish between being founded on reality and being dystopian? I find today’s reality sufficiently dystopian I can hardly bear to watch the news.

In evaluating the claims, pro and con, about incipient revisions to the North American Free Trade Agreement, two things should be kept in mind. First, Mexico benefited substantially from the agreement, it didn’t do much for the U. S. one way or another, and Canada actually suffered a bit under the agreement. The actual impact on the U. S. of NAFTA was that it helped some people (mostly those with incomes above the median) and hurt others (mostly those with incomes below the median).

But even more importantly the gravest economic challenge to all three of the signatories is China not each other. Mexico in particular has been hurt by China’s mercantilist policies. But for those policies Mexico would have benefited much more than it actually did from the agreement and it didn’t do too badly by it.

Any revision to NAFTA should take both of those facts into account.

Donald Trump’s approval rating as measured by the RealClearPolitics Average of Indexes is presently at around 43% and has been holding steady for two months. Those two months have been filled with what his opponents consider damning revelations. That cannot be attributed to a handful of diehard Trump supporters.

He does have them but IMO they constitute about 35% of the people. The other 8% are people who are judging based on outcomes and have largely tuned out the barrage of enemy fire from the media and punditry.

My suggestion to Democrats and neverTrumpers is try something different. What you are doing now is not working. Americans’ opinion of the media is falling while their short-term opinion of Trump holds steady and the long-term trend is up.

At Quillette “Wael Taji” discusses an interesting, difficult, and troubling issue—differences among individuals in in intelligence:

Having intelligence is what allows us to operate in the world—both on our own, and within the societies we inhabit. Those lucky enough to have a high IQ have an easier time at dispatching the various challenges they face, and thus naturally rise within hierarchies of competence. We can imagine any number of these hierarchies, most of which are unimportant (the hierarchy of Rubik’s Cube solvency speed, for example, is probably irrelevant), but all of which require some degree of intelligence. Furthermore, some of these areas of success—such as friendship groups, romantic relationships, and professional employment—are so fundamental to the individual pursuit of happiness that to be unable to progress in them is profoundly damaging to one’s sense of well-being and intrinsic self-worth.

This means that having a low IQ doesn’t only make you more likely to get killed or fall victim to an accident. It also means you’re more likely to undergo difficulties in progressing up every ladder in life. You’ll often feel permanently ‘stuck at zero’—unable to improve or change your position. Most of us will experience this feeling at least a few times in our lives, whether encountered in school (being unable to break the ‘A-grade’), in our social lives (being unable to establish or maintain a successful romantic relationship), or in comparatively trivial areas. Yet most of the time, it is transient—passing when we switch our efforts to a new endeavor, or after devising a way to solve the problem. Very few of us know what it is like to have that feeling almost all of the time—to have a large proportion of one’s attempts at self-betterment or advancement frustrated by forces that seem to be beyond our control.

The reality, as “Wael Taji” must be aware, is that intelligence in the form of cognitive ability is actually less important to success in life than other forms of intelligence, particularly the ability to work with people, what is called “socio-emotional development”. Nonetheless the question remains. Should we be attempting to compensate people for losing in life’s lottery? For having lower levels of basic ability regardless of how you measure it?

I don’t have a ready answer to that question and can only offer some observations. We should not reward people for doing what they’re going to do anyway. People with the intellectual ability to tackle certain kinds of jobs will have a propensity to tackle them because they can, because of their intrinsic rewards. Additional incentives are unnecessary.

Most tasks can be organized to require individuals with very high levels of cognitive ability or organized so that they may be performed by individuals with more typical levels of cognitive ability. Reality should drive us to put more effort into ensuring that ordinary tasks can be accomplished by ordinary people.

Finally, we need to reconcile ourselves to the reality that some people are, indeed, smarter than others and education alone will never bridge the difference. Some people will have a maddeningly frustrating experience with higher education, so frustrating they can’t really benefit from it. The rush to requiring college degrees for everything is an error.

I sometimes wonder whether if pundits avoided strawman arguments they would have any arguments at all. I’m not even going to bother linking to Paul Krugman’s latest NYT column. He’s arguing against more “capitalism”. We do not have a free market system, red in tooth and claw. Pitting your steel against such a mythical beast is a waste of pixels. We also don’t have socialism at least not anything that a socialist worth his salt would recognize as such.

What we have is crony capitalism, a system in which politics is used to redistribute the means of production (mostly money), rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. It is unquestionably worse than anarcho-capitalism and arguably worse than full-on state socialism.

I think there are some reasonable questions to ask about our system but, sadly, he asks none of them. Here are some of them:

• How would you go about measuring just how capitalist or socialist we are?
• What is the trend?
• Would we be better off if the federal government exerted more influence over the economy, less influence over the economy, or just operated differently?
• If differently, how?
• Is there a feasible path with measurable milestones for accomplishing what you wish to accomplish?