Chris Weller’s article at Business Insider on the changes in the way some of the Chinese eat illustrates a number of my pet peeves. Here’s the kernel of his thesis, the meat of it so to speak:

Over the past two decades, China’s prevailing diet has shifted away from grains like rice and wheat in favor of richer animal proteins and a wider variety of exotic vegetables. As Bloomberg reports, this change has left the country short of land on which to grow produce and raise livestock.

While the Western diet typically demands about one acre per person, China has only 0.2 acres to devote to feeding each citizen. Meanwhile, the country consumes 50% of the world’s total pork supply.

“The rapid rate of industrialization in China is really chewing up crop land at an alarming rate,” Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Institute, told Reuters. “China is now losing cropland.

He goes on to assert that from a global standpoint the only way to “ease the global burden” is to eat less meat.

Now I’ll air some of my pet peeves:

1. Investigation of human settlements over the period of the last more than 10,000 years has demonstrated conclusively that human beings always and everywhere seek out the food source with the highest level of available fat in the environment. I don’t know whether characterizing that as the “Western diet” is simple lack of information, stupidity, or self-hate but there you have it. The notion that we will change what we have evolved to prefer through force of will is not well-founded.
2. There is no such thing as a “Western diet”. For a pictorial illustration of that see this article. Thinking there is such a thing as a Western diet is either solipsism, ignorance, or agenda-driven.
3. There isn’t even such a thing as the American diet. Over the period of the last 60 years there have been drastic changes in what Americans eat and those changes haven’t been in the direction of eating more meat. We consume much, much more sugar than we did 60 years ago, much more processed food, and much more hydrogenated fat.
4. The changes in what the Chinese eat is being driven a lot more by what a relative handful of well-heeled city dwellers eat than what all of the Chinese eat. A little more than half of the Chinese for the first time in history are now urban.

There is such a thing as mass-produced and mass-marketed food. That’s what’s being turned to all over the world, not just here and in China.

I do think it’s a problem, not just for the “global burden” but for our health. I can think of any number of solutions but I can’t imagine any of their being adopted.

I wonder if it’s occurred to those who saw the British election as the rejection of populism that the Tories joining with the DUP to form a government is the opposite of that. The DUP could be the most populist party in the United Kingdom.

Arnold Kling makes a prediction about the coming “synthesis” between the elites and the populists:

My first thought is national socialism. It needs another name, because of all the Hitler/holocaust baggage, but here is why it makes sense.

The nationalism would include immigration restrictions, protection of “culturally significant industry” (e.g., wine in France), and cultural pride. This would appeal to the anti-Bobos. The socialism part, which requires technocratic management of economic outcomes, would appeal to the Bobos.

To get to national socialism in the U.S., the left would have to give up its attachment to multiculturalism and the right would have to give up its attachment to free markets (which Alberto Mingardi says has happened). Right now, it is easier for me to imagine the latter than the former, but maybe if the left loses one more election that could change.

Two thoughts occur to me. The first is that there is no such thing as a “Hegelian synthesis”. The notion of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis belongs to Kant. The Hegelian dialectic is something quite different and much more complex.

The second is that I think that Dr. Kling misunderstands all sides of the conversation. Among some of those in the conversation a rejection of American culture and society is not an incidental component of what they want to accomplish. It’s the heart of it. No compromise is possible on that.

I don’t believe that what Dr. Kling refers to as “national socialism” is the most likely outcome. I think that nihilism is the most likely synthesis

You might mistake what Justin Fox’s recent Bloomberg View article is in reading its title, “The Stanley Cup and NBA Finals of Economic Performance”, thinking it’s an article about sports. It actually compares the performance of four U. S. cities, San Francisco, Nashville, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh, in three different regions of the country over the period of the last 20 years. Sports is just the “hook” of the story.

I found the graph above very interesting and puzzling. There’s a clear point of inflection for each of the cities in August of 2009. The reason for that is obvious enough: economic recovery. The recovery began in June and by August was well under way in all three regions (West, South or Mid-South, Midwest).

What interested me in that graph was two factors. First, the angles of the lines for San Francisco and Nashville are the same. Second, the angles of the lines for the other two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, are different from the other two and from each other. Why?

The pat answer for San Francisco’s rapid growth in employment would be the tech sector but the growth rate being in lockstep with Nashville’s suggests that’s inadequate at the very least and likely to be just plain wrong.

I’m open to suggestions but the explanation that occurs to me is the increasing financialization of the U. S. economy. Both San Francisco and Nashville are major centers for the banking and financial services industries while Cleveland and Pittsburgh aren’t.

While the ongoing consolidation of the banking and financial services sector of the economy may be good for the top management of the sector and for a few places around the country, I don’t believe the country as a whole is well-served by it. I think we’d be better off with smaller, regional banks who focused on their own territories.

One thing to think about. Is that consolidation reacting to the growth of megalopolises or promoting it or both?

At Politico Natasha Korecki outlines the political malfeasance that has resulted in Illinois failing to enact a budget for the state in three years and Illinois’s having the worst credit rating of any state and a declining population:

What does the crisis all boil down to? It began with an ego-laden brawl between two powerful men: Rauner and Democratic House Speaker Mike Madigan. Rauner was elected in 2014 as the first Republican governor in Illinois in more than a decade, vowing to “shake up Springfield” in a campaign that demonized Madigan — the longest serving House speaker in state history — and targeted “corrupt union bosses.”

Upon taking office, Rauner, a multi-millionaire businessman, laid out a list of policy demands that initially included right to work elements, as a condition of signing a budget into law. Rauner wanted changes to laws affecting workers compensation, collective bargaining and state property taxes, among others. Democrats considered the agenda an attack on unions, which the governor had vilified, saying they had too much power in Illinois politics. Rauner called the measures pro-business, and necessary to address decades of financial mismanagement.

But Madigan, who has served as speaker under governors from both political parties, was loathe to condition the passage of a budget on the governor’s political agenda. Each side dug in, with unions rushing behind Madigan and Republicans, tired of being shut out for years by Madigan and thrilled to have a generous donor to their campaigns in the governor’s office, lined up behind Rauner.

Today, Madigan’s Democratic-majority House and the Republican governor remain entrenched in the war to end all political wars. The exception is the Democratic-controlled Senate, which ultimately voted on a tax increase before May 31 adjournment.

Both Rauner and Madigan counted on the other to cave. Neither has. Meantime, the state is drowning in debt, deficit spending and multiple bond rating downgrades.

Until November the Democrats controlled both houses of the Illinois legislature with veto-proof majorities. To blame the impasse equally on Rauner and Madigan or on Republicans and Democrats is sophistry, pure and simple. The Democrats have offered no solution to Illinois’s problems other than continued borrowing and higher taxes, the strategy that put us in our present situation in the first place.

What should happen is that Speaker Madigan should offer Gov. Rauner some face-saving concession, they should join arms, and start working to solve Illinois’s problems. Expecting Gov. Rauner to abandon any reform of Illinois’s system is simply unreasonable.

But that’s their strategy and their sticking to it.

Principia Scientific lists 20 recent papers documenting the relationship between solar variation and climate change here on earth.

I think that climate change probably has no single cause but that human agency, solar variation, and any number of other factors probably play a role.

I think we’re really going to regret our heavy use of military drones in the coming years. This Voice of America article reports the first drone attack against U. S. forces, by an Iranian-made drone in Syria.

IMO promoting an international accord banning the use of drones in warfare would have been a better choice but it’s too late for that now.

I just finished watching the first season of the recent hit NetFlix drama series, 13 Reasons Why. The subject of the series is teen suicide and it’s depressing but it’s a good series and well worth watching. I recommend it. It’s certainly conversation-provoking which I think was its intent.

Revealing that it’s about teen suicide is not a spoiler—that’s something we know from the very first minutes of the very first of the show’s thirteen episodes. Each of the episodes is devoted to one of thirteen tapes made by Hannah, the young woman who took her own life, each of which is dedicated to one of the people she considers a reason for her death.

The series compresses an enormous amount of dysfunction into thirteen hours. Factors besides depression that are at least touched on include bullying, sexual abuse, absent or otherwise inattentive parents, broken families, worries over sexual preference, financial stresses, high school cliques, indifferent or otherwise ineffective high school staff, and substance abuse. It is saved from being the teen angst equivalent of the perfect country western song by sensitive and affecting writing, acting, and direction.

I found it too distressing to watch straight through. I watched exactly one episode at a time over a period of several weeks until I watched the last two episodes back-to-back last night.

I have no basis for knowing whether it is a realistic depiction of today’s adolescence or not. To my eye it is surreal—augmented reality—rather than real—actual reality. It certainly doesn’t reflect what my high school years were like. If high school is actually like that now it’s a scathing condemnation of the world that today’s adults have built.

In a bit of irony 13 Reasons has been renewed for a second season.

There’s an enormous amount of stewing going around on this side of the pond about the British election results. I still don’t feel comfortable in analyzing the election results from other countries so I’ll limit myself to the observation the vote was hardly a resounding rejection of the Tories. They still got a plurality of the vote. While I think there’s an argument to be made that it was a rejection of Theresa May, nervousness about Brexit, and any number of other things, I’m not the one to be making those arguments and I don’t think that most of us here in the U. S. are.