At RealClearPolicy James Cunningham calls for securing the electrical grid. Here’s his proposed program:

1. A thorough and candid assessment of exactly where improvements and upgrades are needed, in order of priority, to be completed as soon as possible.

2. Development of a collective national plan, driven by Congress and the administration, in partnership with the full range of infrastructure entities, to drive key short- and long-term grid improvements.

3. Regulatory reform, including the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s establishment of improved and consistent standards for the North American bulk power system adequate to the threats we face.

4. Identification of public and private funding mechanisms to raise the necessary financing in an equitable manner.

which highlights the scope of the problem. The complex web of private utilities, cooperatives, and public agencies that operate the electrical grid don’t have the mindset, culture, or resources to do what he’s asking and even if they did it wouldn’t secure the electrical grid.

Rather than the top-down centrally controlled plan he envisions what is needed is something more akin to the personal computer revolution and the World Wide Web. We need to decentralize rather than centralize and build resilience in rather than imposing it through national plans. The advantage is with the offense in issues of security. We can’t avoid attacks. The objective of securing the grid should be to mitigate the risk of an attack on part of the grid bringing other parts down.

There is what strikes me as a good post on the controversy over Confederate monuments by Greg Weiner at Library of Law and Liberty:

There is similarly a difference between dragging every past figure before the bar of contemporary reason, on the one hand, and, on the other, accepting history as a storehouse of custom but also complications. The former arrogates all power to the immediate generation. It is, ironically enough, supremely Jeffersonian reasoning. Jefferson—whose monuments some want to be next—argued that “‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”

Yet history does not operate in discrete generations. Generations are constantly passing in and out, contracting debts and making demands. We are all heirs to our complex history, sharing both its blessings and its shortcomings.

That we, right now, might make a permanent moral judgment for all generations by simply excising the past like a tumor rather than confronting its complexity requires both a generational arrogance and a supreme faith in contemporary reason that is at odds with the typical Progressive presupposition that moral feeling is generally advancing. On the contrary, it accepts an ironically transcendent morality that can only transcend for an instant before something else transcends it in turn. (Consider that Woodrow Wilson was a hero to generations of Progressives before his recognition as a notorious racist.)

To use prescription as a measure for gauging monuments to the Confederacy or other morally flawed causes or people is not to provide an airtight abstract standard. That is, in many ways, the point. This is ultimately a prudential question that must account for the legitimate feelings of those who feel excluded and in fact outright assaulted by these monuments and those who will feel further alienated by their removal.

I think we would do well to consider Karl Marx’s view of history:

People make their own history, but they do not make it however they want, not under self-selected circumstances, but out of the actual given and transmitted situation. The traditions of all the dead generations burden, like a nightmare, the minds of the living.

as expressed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. That is what G. K. Chesterton referred to as “the democracy of the dead.” Try as we might we cannot escape the past. Every successive generation should make its own struggle to come to terms with the past. Simply rejecting it is foolhardy.

In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal naval analyst Seth Cropsey points the finger for the crop of collisions of Navy vessels at inadequate training and the shrinking fleet:

On Aug. 21, Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, told ships world-wide to pause their activity for a one-day safety stand down. He also directed the Navy to investigate how it trains and certifies the forces that deploy to Japan. This inquiry will examine the pace of naval operations—whether ships are being overused—as well as maintenance, personnel and equipment.

A no-holds-barred analysis is needed, not least because American forces face rising danger on many fronts. China is moving aggressively in the South and East China Seas. North Korea threatens war in the Pacific and beyond. The Baltic and Black Seas are as hazardous as ever. Islamic State is being pushed back by an air war conducted in part from ships in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Navy has its hands full simply answering requests from combatant commanders, the senior officers who lead U.S. forces around the world. The deployable battle force, at 276 ships, is far smaller than what’s needed to meet demand, and it isn’t growing. So the Navy has looked for other ways to answer the call. One has been to keep ships at sea longer. Although the gold standard for deployments once was six months, amphibious vessels recently have been sent out for close to twice that.

This helps the Navy maintain a constant presence, but at a price. Longer deployments put wear and tear on sailors, their families and the fleet. Equipment problems accumulate, but detailed maintenance must wait until ships return to port.

Adm. Richardson’s specific directive to examine Naval training is pivotal. In the Fitzgerald and McCain collisions, large merchant ships approached undetected until it was too late to avoid a mishap. The questions about seamanship are obvious, and they must be asked. Navy ships have radars, crew standing watch, officers responsible for safe navigation, and computers that calculate other vessels’ speed, direction and closest point of approach. The Navy needs to understand how the system failed twice in three months.

Is there any connection between long deployments and these fatal mistakes? Perhaps ships are being overused, leading to longer repairs once they return to port, which leaves inadequate time for training. A Government Accountability Office report last May noted this possibility: “The Navy has several options for mitigating extended maintenance availabilities and overruns, including the following: Condense training period (most common according to Navy officials) . . . ”

Has the Navy pushed practical training in seamanship and navigation too far into the realm of computers, forsaking harsher on-the-job learning? Does time spent preparing for inspections of ship systems come at the expense of training? Is the system for evaluating commanding officers functioning properly?

The problem I find in that is that it doesn’t comport with the results of the Navy’s own investigations into the collision in June as a consequence of which several officers have already been relieved of duty. That suggests to me that the Navy found a discipline problem rather than inadequate training.

I can’t help but wonder if long deployments have led to a relaxation of standards. I also wonder if civilian culture has departed so far from the Navy’s culture that the Navy now faces new problems in maintaining discipline.

Blaming inadequate funding for problems is facile. I doubt that any military commander in the history of warfare has ever found that the resources at his disposal were excessive. You can always use more. It’s right-sizing that’s hard.

Last night I prepared stuffed tomatoes for our dinner. It’s been decades since I’ve had tomatoes that were worth stuffing.

I took two of my Cherokee Purples and stuffed them with a combination of couscous and spinach, seasoned with bacon, onions, and smoked cheddar. Preparation took a bit of time and trouble but the actual cooking time was only about a half hour.

They were delicious.

You might want to take a look at the U. S. State Department’s “Country Reports on Terrorism”. Here’s the first paragraph of Chapter 1, “Strategic Assessment”:

Although terrorist attacks and fatalities from terrorism declined globally for the second year in a row in 2016, terrorist groups continued to exploit ungoverned territory and ongoing conflict to expand their reach, and to direct and inspire attacks around the world. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) remained the most potent terrorist threat to global security, with eight recognized branches and numerous undeclared networks operating beyond the group’s core concentration in Iraq and Syria. Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and its regional affiliates remained a threat to the U.S. homeland and our interests abroad despite counterterrorism pressure by U.S. partners and increased international efforts to counter violent Islamist ideology and messaging. Terrorist groups supported by Iran – most prominently Hizballah – continued to threaten U.S. allies and interests even in the face of U.S.-led intensification of financial sanctions and law enforcement.

Africa as usual is probably in the worst shape but it will, of course, continue to be ignored by us. African terrorism just isn’t that much of a threat to us.

At Foreign Policy Nikolas Van Dam performs what strikes me as a slightly premature post-mortem on Western participation in Syria’s civil war:

Western politicians generally had clear thoughts about what they did not want, but no realistic or clear ideas of what they wanted in Assad’s place. They wanted a kind of democracy in Syria, but a violent ousting of Assad could not realistically have been expected to result in such a desired peaceful democracy.

Politicians did not always keep up with the realities on the ground and continued to use “politically correct” slogans even though the country’s situation no longer fully justified them. The Syrian opposition continued to be described as peaceful and democratic, even long after more radical forces, including Islamists and jihadis, had hijacked its platform and the Syrian war was already well underway. Subsequently, the concept of peaceful opposition became more of a myth than the reality it was in the beginning. But the rhetoric of Western politicians did not change.

Nor did the West’s military support for the Syrian opposition ever match its rhetoric, thus dangerously inflating the opposition’s expectations. The opposition was never given sufficient military support to bring the regime to its knees, even when such military pressure would have been necessary to achieve the political solution the West claimed it wanted. With this combination, the Syrian revolution was doomed to failure — certainly as long as the regime received military support from its allies Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.

The first two paragraphs mirror what I’ve been saying all along. The final sentence of the third paragraph is the key.

What should we have done? Obeyed the law. Followed the international agreements to which we are signatory. Paid more attention to practical outcomes and less to dreamy visions of unrealizable objectives. The world is full of evil people. We can’t make it better by becoming some of them.

In a good post at War on the Rocks on what appears to be President Trump’s new policy with respect to Pakistan Christopher Clary summarizes Pakistan’s influence on our efforts in Afghanistan:

That partnership likely includes considerable Pakistani cooperation with Western intelligence agencies examining threats from citizens or visitors of Pakistani origin, though the full extent is unclear in the open domain. The counter-terrorism partnership’s most publicized aspect is, ironically, the one that ought to be the most secret — the U.S. “covert” program to target terrorists in Pakistan using armed drones. Pakistan has publicly opposed the strikes as violations of Pakistani sovereignty that generate excessive civilian casualties, but it appears the vast majority of the drone campaign occurred with the explicit or tacit consent of the Pakistan military, including permitting U.S. operations from Shamsi air base near Quetta for a decade from 2001 to 2011.

Pakistan is also critical for the U.S. mission in land-locked Afghanistan, even as its behavior undermines U.S. objectives there. The troubled state of U.S.-Russia relations following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in Russia shutting down the so-called Northern Distribution Network that re-supplied Afghanistan through the Central Asian republics. U.S.-Iran relations have become only more troubled since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, and appear likely to worsen further still. The United States has begun using Turkmenistan for “humanitarian cargo,” a euphemism that in this case likely means “nonlethal” supplies to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Thus, the United States presence in Afghanistan depends — and will depend for the foreseeable future — on Pakistan, which permits U.S. ground and air lines of communication. Absent unexpected, major improvements in U.S.-Russia or U.S.-Iran relations, or a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, this dependence on Pakistan cannot be alleviated. “No matter how great President Donald Trump makes America, he cannot win the war on geography,” observes Afghan expert and former U.S. official Barnett Rubin.

We need Pakistan’s cooperation to continue operations in Afghanistan and that cooperation will only be forthcoming as long as we aren’t too successful. For Pakistan a U. S. victory in Afghanistan would be worse than a U. S. defeat but best of all is a stalemate. They are not our friends.

At Alphaville Cardiff Brown wonders whether Fed Chairman Janet Yellen will remain consistent:

The passages about financial stability in the FOMC’s latest minutes were furthermore notable for how unthreatening the present conditions were portrayed as by participants — a potentially mildly elevated equity market, worries about real estate prices, a need to monitor lending standards, and that’s about it. These were countered by a recognition that the financial sector was better capitalised and that investors did not seem over-levered. The primary worry was a vague notion that a delay in tightening would in the future lead to “an intensification of financial stability risks or to other imbalances that might prove difficult to unwind.”

Still, it’s certainly a reasonable topic for a Jackson Hole speech given the uncertainties that do pervade the relationship between monetary policy and financial stability. She is likely to address an issue raised by Bill Dudley and others, that overall financial conditions remain easier than expected despite the pace of the tightening cycle. But will Yellen also reinforce her earlier point that monetary policy is too blunt an instrument for mitigating financial stresses, or will she somehow alter that message in response to how the world has since changed?

There is another alternative. It may be that regardless of what she says that Janet Yellen doesn’t really believe the unemployment figures that her own organization, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the other federal agencies are coming up with.

I found Steve Malanga’s post on Seattle’s public pension problems, echoing as it does Chicago’s public pension problems and, I presume, the problems of most large cities very interesting. Here’s a snippet:

A study earlier this year by Stanford University finance professor Joshua Rauh ranked Seattle as having the ninth worst funded system among the nation’s 40 largest cities. Though Seattle says that today it owes about $1.2 billion, Rauh says the bill could be as high as $3.2 billion.

A decade ago Seattle contributed about $40 million a year to pensions, but the city has been forced to increase the amount over time and this year put $108 million into the system. And that tab will keep growing.

I think this highlights a number of important topics. First, public pensions have been organized under assumptions that are unrealistic in the extreme. Who can really believe that 7%+ annual returns on a fund are possible year in, year out forever?

Second, the compensation of public employees is limited by what the jurisdictions they serve are able to pay. It doesn’t make a bit of difference if people in other jurisdictions or doing other things earn more. If Seattle can’t pay what its public employees are demanding, it can’t pay it. Which brings us to the third point.

Cities aren’t sovereign. They operate under the control of and at the pleasure of states. If the state says a city can’t do something, it can’t do it. Chicago has the power to impose fees, it has the power within limits to raise property taxes, and it has the power to raise sales taxes. It doesn’t have the power to levy an income tax and, importantly, it doesn’t have the power to impose a graduated income tax.

The reckless promises of past or present politicians are not constitute exigent circumstances that entitle cities to do anything they care to.