I want to commend to your attention an address by Henry Kissinger published at CapX. The address takes as its point of departure an address given by Margaret Thatcher in 1996, itself inspired by Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech from 1946. Mrs. Thatcher’s speech asked the following questions:

• Should Russia be regarded as a potential threat or a partner?
• Should NATO turn its attention to “out of area” issues?
• Should NATO admit the new democracies of Central Europe with full responsibilities as quickly as prudently possible?
• Should Europe develop its own “defense identity” in NATO?

which Dr. Kissinger attempts to reconcile with today’s needs and concerns. I found this observation by Dr. Kissinger about Russia particularly insightful:

Putin’s view of international politics is often described as a recurrence of 1930s European nationalist authoritarianism. More accurately, it is the heritage of the worldview identified with the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, as exemplified in his 1880 speech at the dedication of a monument to the poet Pushkin. Its passionate call for a new spirit of Russian greatness based on the spiritual qualities of the Russian character was taken up in the late 20th century by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Abandoning his exile in Vermont to return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn, in his book On the Russian Question, called for action to save the Russian people who had been “driven out” of Russia. In the same spirit, Putin has railed against what he has interpreted as a 300-year-old Western effort to contain Russia. In 2007 in a Dostoevskyan-like outburst at the Munich Security Conference, he accused the West of having unjustly exploited the troubles of post-Cold War Russia to isolate and condemn it.

Rather than attempting to consider Putin through an American, German, or Soviet prism, I believe that he needs to be understood in the Russian context. He is genuinely popular in Russia because he addresses Russian concerns in terms that are well understood by Russians.

Read the whole thing.

I confess that I don’t understand our foreign policy and haven’t for some time. I don’t know why we’ve gone out of our way to antagonize Russia; I don’t know why we’re worried about greater Chinese interconnectedness in the world; I don’t know why we support the policy goals of either Iran or Saudi Arabia. My preferred policy approaches would be to cooperate with Russia where it’s in our interest and otherwise to ignore them when we can which is most of time; encourage greater Chinese responsibility and interconnectedness—it will benefit all of us; and discourage Middle Eastern adventurism whether it’s ours, Iran’s, or Saudi Arabia’s. We don’t want either one of them to succeed; that’s a formula for Middle Eastern upheaval.

Sadly, Jeffrey Dorfman’s Forbes article criticizing the mortgage interest deduction barely scratches the surface of its problems:

The mortgage interest deduction is one of the most treasured and fiercely defended features of the current U.S. tax code. Many in the real estate business worry that any tinkering with it will lead to major disruption in the real estate sector, further weakening an industry still trying to fully recover from the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2006. Yet, thanks to a new study out based on Danish data, many people are now wondering if there is anything positive about this tax break. While the debate is not settled, right now the answer appears to be no. The mortgage interest deduction is nothing more than rent seeking on behalf of the real estate industry. It confers no benefit to society as a whole.

Not only does the mortgage interest deduction primarily serve as a subsidy to builders, real estate agents, and bankers, to whatever extent homebuyers benefit from it the most well-off in the society benefit most from it. The top 10% of income earners capture 75% of the value of the mortgage interest deduction. In other words at best the MID is upper middle income rent-seeking.

Don’t expect Democrats, tribunes of the poor that they are, to fall in line behind the abolition of the deduction. Geographically, the greater the claims of mortgage interest deduction in an area the more likely the area is to be a Democratic stronghold. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California are helped the most on a per capita basis, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Mississippi the least.

At USA Today columnist Andy Slavitt makes an impassioned plea for legislators to seize the moment and come to a bipartisan agreement on reforming health care rather than subjecting us to endless “do-overs”:

Everywhere I turned, as I listened to people’s stories, I heard another fainter, but still distinct, note. When and how do we make the cycle of partisanship stop? One thing I’ve learned is that the desire to have a regular source of care and not worry about going bankrupt from a medical bill is not a partisan sentiment, it’s a human one. And when the human system depends on the vagaries of who’s in power in Washington, no one can sleep well at night.

President Trump is on a different page. He is still goading his party to run over rather than work with Democrats. He also has repeatedly expressed his intention to do real damage to the insurance markets, and he possesses the arsenal to make it happen. He may follow through as soon as this week on his threats to cut off subsidy payments that make health care less expensive for low-income people. Members of Congress, in both parties, ought to use every tool they have to hold him accountable for delivering for the American public.

Any long-term solution for our country lies at least in part in an end to the epic partisan battles. When I left government, I began to regularly visit Washington and other parts of the country to meet with Republican counterparts and trade ideas with policymakers, state officials and policy experts from both sides to look for common ground. As I advocated against a bill I believed would harm our country, I found it challenging to listen to people who disagreed with me, and sometimes I was too dismissive of their points.

He should have spoken up in 2010 in opposition to the enactment of the PPACA along strictly partisan lines. The time for such prescriptions is prior to the attack rather than on the riposte. And, as I’ve been saying since 2010, as long as providers create most demand by determining courses of treatment and prices are not controlled, it will be like the movie Groundhog Day. The program will need continuing revisions, expansions, and increased subsidies and there will be an ongoing partisan squabble. It’s baked in.

You might recall that the other day I mentioned that there were some who were calling for military action against North Korea. The reliably superhawkish John Bolton has obliged by instantiating that in his Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Absent a successful diplomatic play, what’s left is unpalatable military options. But many say, even while admitting America’s vulnerability to North Korean missiles, that using force to neutralize the threat would be too dangerous. The only option, this argument goes, is to accept a nuclear North Korea and attempt to contain and deter it.

The people saying this are largely the same ones who argued that “carrots and sticks” would prevent Pyongyang from getting nuclear weapons. They are prepared to leave Americans as nuclear hostages of the Kim family dictatorship. This is unacceptable. Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has it right. “What’s unimaginable to me,” he said last month at the Aspen Security Forum, “is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver.” So what are the military options, knowing that the U.S. must plan for the worst?

First, Washington could pre-emptively strike at Pyongyang’s known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile factories and launch sites, and submarine bases. There are innumerable variations, starting at the low end with sabotage, cyberattacks and general disruption. The high end could involve using air- and sea-based power to eliminate the entire program as American analysts understand it.

Second, the U.S. could wait until a missile is poised for launch toward America, and then destroy it. This would provide more time but at the cost of increased risk. Intelligence is never perfect. A North Korean missile could be in flight to a city near you before the military can respond.

Third, the U.S. could use airstrikes or special forces to decapitate North Korea’s national command authority, sowing chaos, and then sweep in on the ground from South Korea to seize Pyongyang, nuclear assets, key military sites and other territory.

His first option is not pre-emption. It is a preventive attack. Preventive war is never morally justified.

His second option is pre-emption. It would be morally justified. As Sec. Bolton notes it is riskier and, sadly, we may not have that capability.

I don’t believe as some do that China or Russia would respond to a pre-emptive strike by the U. S. against an imminent attack by North Korea or a retaliatory strike by the U. S. following an attack by North Korea by joining in support of North Korea. Both the Chinese and the Russians are consummate foreign policy realists and both recognize that’s precisely what they would do under similar circumstances. They wouldn’t like it and they would complain about it but I believe that would be the limit of their response so long as we didn’t overstep which we would be sorely tempted to do, i.e. if we entered North Korea with U. S. troops.

His third option is also preventive war. Not only is it immoral but, since China and Russia would enter on North Korea’s side, it would probably be the start of global nuclear war.

Unfortunately, there are some people who take John Bolton seriously and some of them are in the Trump Administration, possibly the president himself.

I’m not sure how you can construe the editors of the Washington Post’ recent editorial:

PRESIDENT TRUMP says accelerating the United States’ economic growth is one of his administration’s most cherished goals. On Wednesday, he embraced a legislative overhaul to the immigration system that, if enacted, would make that goal unattainable.

Mr. Trump endorsed a bill sponsored by a pair of conservative Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, that would reduce legal immigration by about half over a decade, a shift that a broad consensus of economists believe would sap the nation’s economic vitality. It would slash the number of immigrants granted green cards for legal permanent residence to about 540,000 annually from the current level of roughly 1 million.

The legislation would achieve that chiefly by eliminating green cards granted to siblings and grown children of current immigrants and green-card holders — so-called chain migration — while holding steady the number of green cards based on job skills. Those employment-based immigrants would be selected according to a points system that would favor English speakers with higher levels of education and high-paying job offers. So much for the tired, poor, huddled masses for whom the Statue of Liberty stands as a beacon.

other than as support for open borders regardless of the potential immigrants’ skills, command of the English language, or anything else for that matter.

As I read the descriptions the point system being proposed is not unlike that used by Canada or Australia and sounds well-suited to the U. S.’s actual 21st century needs. Those needs have changed considerably since the 19th century.

Then when Emma Lazarus wrote her sentimental poem the marginal productivity of labor was rising and would do so for more than a century. Now it’s stalled. We don’t actually need more unskilled workers with poor or non-existent English.

A higher percentage of immigrants, legal or illegal, receive some form of public assistance than natives and that’s true at every level of educational attainment.

I wish the editors would take the last two words of the passage they cited from Ms. Lazarus’s poem more seriously. The implication is that new immigrants wanted and were expected to adopt our ways. The pressures on immigrants to do that are considerably less than they were then.

In short times have changed and our immigration laws should change with them.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I know what the employers hiring so many foreign workers are yearning for and it isn’t to breathe free.

Update

Is the point of Philip Bump’s Washington Post reaction piece that, since we didn’t have health care insurance, unemployment benefits, TANF, or Social Security in 1885 that we shouldn’t have them now?

My view is somewhat different. I think that, although the underpinnings of our law written into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, our metalaw, should remain constant, our policies including trade policies, immigration policies, building codes, and so on should evolve over time to meet the needs of the present day. I’d be interested in seeing a spirited defense of the proposition that our immigration law precisely as it stands today serves our present needs perfectly but he doesn’t seem to make that.

Update 2

Josh Barro has a more rational reaction piece to the proposed immigration reform at Business Insider. The short version is “Point system—yes;reduction in number of immigrants—no”. I think I should point out that under present policy about 2/3s of new arrivals are the relatives of the workers he’s saying we need. In other words if you reduce the number of individuals without skills or command of English you could still increase the number of skilled workers brought in while cutting the total number of new arrivals in half.

You might want to take a look at election analyst David Byler’s breakdown of possibilities about Trump’s approval rating at RealClearPolitics:

For the last few months, the Trump presidency has presented analysts with a weird puzzle. The news has been chaotic — Congress has made multiple attempts to pass new health care legislation, stories tied to Russian interference in the election seem to come out daily, various key White House roles have been vacated and filled and the president has made multiple foreign trips. Yet despite this roller coaster of events, his poll numbers have been shockingly stable. Specifically, Trump’s job approval has hovered around the 40 percent mark for over two months, almost never deviating by more than one percentage point.

So why are these numbers so stable when events are anything but? The world of political data has been busy debating this topic, so rather than simply lay out one view and argue for it, I’m going to describe five different views that have popped up. (Note: Some of these ideas were generated simultaneously by multiple people, adopted and edited by others and generally have changed in ways that make them difficult to trace back to one author.) I’ll also explore what each view might predict about the future. In the coming months we’ll be able to check what happened against each theory’s predictions and get a better sense of which one, if any, was right.

Although I’d put the specific numbers for Trump’s approval floor and ceiling differently than Mr. Byler does, his Theory #1 approximates what I’ve mentioned around here a couple of time and I continue to believe that’s the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. He has a floor of around 35% and a ceiling of around 50% and that’s that Not enough to get him booted out of office but a lot worse than presidents of recent memory.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip: Steve Green. He’s a St. Louisan, BTW. When I first spoke with him I used the secret St. Louis countersign and he responded properly which told me quite a bit about him.

An Italian study has found that rich people do better with the “Mediterranean diet” than poor people, if for no other reason than that it’s expensive. From CBS:

The Mediterranean diet — rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, olive oil, nuts and whole grains — has long been hailed as a heart-healthy eating plan. But new research suggests its health benefits may be limited to the rich and well-educated.

For the study, a team of Italian scientists reviewed diets, income and education level of nearly 19,000 men and women.

The investigators found the Mediterranean diet was associated with about a 60 percent lower risk of heart disease and stroke among those with higher incomes and more education. The same was not true for those with fewer resources — even though they followed a similar eating plan.

Healthy habits — such as getting regular exercise, routine check-ups, and not smoking — are more common among people with higher incomes. But the study findings held up even after the researchers accounted for these variables and others, such as marital status and body mass index (a measurement based on height and weight).

I’ve always found the description amusing because it doesn’t conform to what I’ve observed Greeks or Italians eating. Basically, what I’ve seen is that in real life they eat a lot less fish than most people on the “Mediterranean diet”, more beans, and a remarkably large amount of bread.

Here’s a disturbing bit of news. Discarded solar panels are becoming an environmental hazard in China. From Daily Caller:

Solar panels use hazardous materials, like sulfuric acid and phosphine gas, in the manufacturing process that makes them hard to recycle. Solar panels also have relatively short operational lifespans and can’t be stored in a landfill without protections against contamination.

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of electricity generated than nuclear power plants, according to research by the green group Environmental Progress. Solar panels use heavy metals, including lead, chromium and cadmium, which can harm the environment. The hazards of nuclear waste are well known and can be planned for, but very little has been done to mitigate solar waste issues.

Not only is the manufacturing process for solar panels problematic:

The net impact of solar panels actually temporarily increased carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, due to how much energy is used in their construction, a study published in December 2016 concluded. The solar industry has been “a temporary net emitter of greenhouse gas emissions,” and more modern solar panels have a smaller adverse environmental impact than older models. Scientists estimated that by 2018 at the latest, the solar industry as a whole could have a net positive environmental impact.

but the sheer accumulation of discarded panels is becoming an issue as well:

China has more solar power plants than any other country, operating roughly twice as many solar panels as the U.S. with no plans on how to dispose of the old panels that break down.

“It will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment, if the estimate is correct,” Tian Min, general manager of a Chinese recycling company, told The South China Morning Post. “This is a huge amount of waste and they are not easy to recycle.”

There could be 20 million metric tons of solar panel waste, or 2,000 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, by 2050 according to Lu Fang, the secretary general of solar power at the China Renewable Energy Society.

I’m not quite sure how to react to all of this. It seems to me that there are actually multiple issues to consider: degradation rate, failure rate, and obsolescence. The prevailing wisdom is that solar panels produce about 1% less energy per year of use, usually expressed as at the end of 20 years a panel will produce 80% of the energy it did originally.

But there’s also a failure rate. Cells fail. Physical damage can cause panels to become inoperative. They can just become inoperative for other reasons. I don’t really have a handle on that failure rate but as the number in use rises it clearly becomes an issue.

Finally, there’s obsolescence. How many of you are using the cellphone or PC that you used 20 years ago? Electromechanical devices like the old dial phones had very long lifespans. Do electropholtaic devices more closely resemble electromechanical devices or electronic devices? At some point does continued use become uneconomical compared to replacement?

IMO we shouldn’t be buying solar panels from China for a whole host of reasons among them that China does not have the civil infrastructure to deal with its own environmental problems. It’s also clear that as the tonnage of solar panels in use rises we should be thinking about whole lifecycle issues in solar panel use.

At RealClearDefense Steve Bucci points out the elephant in the cyber-security room. The U. S. government does a lousy job of protecting itself. How can it be expected to protect the country?

DHS is responsible for defending the “.gov” domain of the Internet. This covers the entire Federal government structure except for the military and intelligence community, as well as many local and state government entities. It is a huge task. Over the years, DHS built up the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), but done so in a piecemeal fashion. It has been a noble effort, but faced with present threats, it fails pretty regularly. That is unacceptable.

The United States has more computer users than any other country. Indeed, it has more computer users than the next ten countries combined. It has more cellphone users than any country other than China or India.

It doesn’t have the best hackers. That laurel would probably go to Russia, China, and Israel (pretty much in that order).

IMO the United States should adopt two new strategies concurrently. First, recognize that the federal government is not equipped by temperament or culture to protect itself properly. Present a smaller, easier to defend, and much harder to penetrate target. Counter-intuitively, constrain computer use by the federal government much, much more.

Second, harness the power of Americans. Pay bounties. Give awards for hacking. Does the federal government supply scholarship money for ethical hacking? The profit motive is the one motivation we can expect Americans to respond to.