George Friedman muses about a war in the South China Sea between China and the United States:

There are two scenarios. In the first, China invades Taiwan. In the second, the U.S. decides to block the exits of the South and East China seas, in order to cut China’s global maritime access. I intend to publish the Taiwan scenario today, and the blockade scenario tomorrow. I want to emphasize that these will be extremely high-level analyses, with vital details excluded.

The Chinese strategic motive for seizing Taiwan would be to open a wide gap in the archipelago running from Okinawa to the Strait of Malacca. The seizure of Taiwan, plus a few minor islands to the north and south, would open a substantial passage into the Pacific. As important, it would create a platform for Chinese land-based aircraft and missiles, which would force the border of the contested area in the Pacific east about 1,300 miles, bringing Chinese cruise missiles close to, or in operational range of, Guam and Anderson Air Force Base, a critical U.S. air base.

The oft-discussed Chinese strategy of placing underwater mines around Taiwan would not help for what the Chinese must assume would be an extended war. That strategy might cut trade, but Taiwanese and American aircraft could still use the island to stage operations against Chinese air, missile and naval targets. In addition, the U.S. response to mining might be to mine the areas around Chinese ports. It is a strategy in which the risks outweigh the benefits. Seizing Taiwan has higher risks, but a very substantial payoff in that it could solve China’s strategic problem of guaranteed access to the Pacific, as well as enhance its deep strike capacity in the Pacific.

Taiwan has about 130,000 battle-ready troops, with a reserve of about 1.5 million troops. They are equipped with about 2,000 armored fighting vehicles and substantial self-propelled artillery. Taiwan is a small country, and even taken by surprise, it would be able to amass its forces, if not to defeat the enemy on the beach then to engage them in mobile warfare to impose attrition on them. According to the 3-to-1 rule of combat, the Chinese would need to deploy at least 390,000 troops to defeat this force.

An invasion of Taiwan would mean amphibious warfare, in which the Chinese have no experience. It requires extraordinarily complex coordination between air, land and sea forces, and especially with logistics. As the U.S. learned in World War II, amphibious operations face this problem. No matter how lavish the supply of amphibious ships and landing craft, the number of forces landed initially is entirely incapable of defeating the defenders. The number of sea-to-land vessels and time of loading and unloading limit the buildup of forces. In other words, the landing area remains extremely vulnerable, particularly against a large, concentrated defense force.

It’s interesting. Read the whole thing.

I have many issues with Mr. Friedman’s observations but I’ll just name two. If China were to invade Taiwan, it wouldn’t be for strategic reasons. It would be for political ones. How would that difference affect his analysis?

More importantly to the best of my knowledge every wargaming of great power confrontation that allowed it ultimately led to the use of nuclear weapons.

Like Mr. Friedman I don’t think there will be war between China and the U. S. but it’s possible that would be for different reasons. There’s too much to lose and not enough to gain.

The Chicago Tribune’s suggestion for how ordinary Chicagoans can help stem the tide of violence that has engulfed Chicago is by joining a mentoring program:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday announced the expansion of mentorship programs through the city’s Department of Family and Support Services to bolster the connection between the city and the nonprofit agencies in the trenches. Twelve existing providers will be able to reach, hopefully, an additional 660 at-risk youths beginning this month.

But the city alone cannot spend its way toward dramatically improved crime statistics. That’s where you come in. Mentor a child or a high school student from a low-opportunity neighborhood. You don’t need a fancy degree. All you need is a willingness to listen, to care, to be reliable.

They present no evidence that their suggestion might be effective; they assume it.

Quite to the contrary although mentoring might be virtuous, it’s also irrelevant. I don’t believe that a single gang member does what he does because of a lack of mentoring. I think they’re gang members because they don’t have viable alternatives.

James Taranto has written his last “Best of the Web” column for the Wall Street Journal, moving now to another job at the WSJ. In his final column he writes about the collapse of journalism in the annus horribilis of 2016:

The fin d’année has occasioned a spate of columns about what went wrong with journalism in 2016. The column you’re reading now is in that category, although we have the luxury of extrospection. One who does not is Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, who tackled the subject—or at least lurched in its direction—under the headline “Lessons for News Media in a Disorienting Year” in the paper’s Boxing Day edition.

We’ve come to regard Rutenberg as the liberal media’s chief spokesman. In August, as we noted at the time, he wrote a column urging reporters who “believe” that Trump is “dangerous” to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century”—to abandon even the pretense of balance in favor of an “oppositional” approach.

That column appeared on the front page of the Times rather than in its usual spot in the business section. We construed that placement as a statement that Rutenberg’s opinions were Times policy, an inference that Dean Baquet, the Times’s top news editor, confirmed in an October interview with Harvard’s NiemanLab: “I thought Jim Rutenberg’s column nailed it.”

Curiously, in his Dec. 26 column Rutenberg has nothing to say about his August advice, except that he disagrees with New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin’s characterization of it as (in Rutenberg’s paraphrase) “woefully unfair.” Does Rutenberg think the media followed his admonition to adopt an “oppositional” approach in covering Trump? In retrospect does he think it was wise advice? (Our answers, for what it’s worth, are largely yes and definitely not, respectively.)

[…]

Our advice to journalists who wish to improve the quality of their trade would be to lose their self-importance, overcome the temptation to pose as (or bow to) authority figures, and focus on the basic function of journalism, which is to tell stories. Journalists are not arbiters of truth; we are, unlike fiction writers (or for that matter politicians), constrained by the truth. But fiction writers bear the heavier burden of making their stories believable.

In the past you could reasonably rely on a distinction between the “News” and “Opinion” sections of a newspaper; that is no longer the case. Even in the “Opinion” section you could rely on statements of fact to have a basis in fact; that is no longer the case, either.

With that change firmly in place it is no longer even possible to filter opinion pieces through the corrective lens of the publications’ known biases. It is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out what is actually happening by reading diverse sources.

What is to be done? Are there reliable independent news sources? My experience has been that they are mostly propagandists of one stripe or another but I’m willing to learn.

If you have recommendations for good, solid sources of information, please leave them in the comments.

If you have any interest at all in Russia in the 21st century I urge you to read Justin Lifflander’s article in The Foreign Service Journal. Here’s a snippet:

My friend Mikhailovich is a middle-aged entrepreneur who moved to Moscow from Kyiv as a young man. He believes that the factors contributing to an individual’s mentality are both experiential and hereditary.

“Look at the past 400 years. The Romanov dynasty started in 1613 and lasted 300 years,” Mikhailovich says. “The communists were in power for 74 years, and we’ve been free of them for 25 years. It is not a coincidence that 75 percent of the population are content to live under authoritarian rule; 24 percent think like communists—either thieves or despisers of private property and individual success; and only about 1 percent we can call ‘neo-Russian’—those with a balanced view of the external world and a desire to live and function in a progressive society.”

Today’s Russia is very different from the Soviet Union. If you assume that nothing has changed, you’re making a grave error.

CNNMoney reports that Finland is about to institute an experimental guaranteed basic income:

Finland has started a radical experiment: It’s giving 2,000 citizens a guaranteed income, with funds that keep flowing whether participants work or not.

The program, which kicks off this month, is one of the first efforts to test a “universal basic income.” Participants will receive €560 ($587) a month — money that is guaranteed regardless of income, wealth or employment status.

The idea is that a universal income offers workers greater security, especially as technological advances reduce the need for human labor. It will also allow unemployed people to pick up odd jobs without losing their benefits.

The initial program will run for a period of two years. Participants were randomly selected, but had to be receiving unemployment benefits or an income subsidy. The money they are paid through the program will not be taxed.

If the program is successful, it could be expanded to include all adult Finns.

The results will be interesting, but, sadly, I’m afraid not as interesting as might be. For one thing the influence on behavior of a two year program is likely to be different from that of a permanent one. I would expect more participants to seek work in a two year program than would be the case with a permanent one.

Additionally, I’m not sure how applicable the results of such an experiment in a country with a population of 5 million, 90% of whom are ethnic Finns and 95% of whom are culturally Lutheran, in which the people speak a difficult language spoken nowhere else on earth and with a 5% immigrant population is to, say, a highly diverse country of 330 million, 15% of whom are immigrants. The Finnish language is probably a higher barrier than any wall.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on Chicago’s obviously excessive homicide rate:

The Chicago Police Department reported 762 homicides in 2016, the most in two decades and more than in the cities of New York and Los Angeles combined. The 57% increase was the biggest spike in 60 years. Shootings jumped 46% to 3,550, with most occurring in poor and minority neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Police have blamed gang activity, as most victims had previously been identified for their gang ties or past arrests.

But gangs aren’t new, and another culprit is an increase in caution among police who have come under widespread political attack. Street demonstrations followed the November 2015 release of a video capturing the killing of 17-year old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by a white officer. The officer will stand trial for first-degree murder while police remain under investigation by the Justice Department.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also targeted Chicago police, and the department in August 2015 agreed to track investigatory stops and pat-downs to avert a lawsuit. Officers must submit detailed two-page reports for each stop, which a former federal judge and ACLU review for bias.

Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told CBS’s “60 Minutes” this weekend that the increase in paperwork has taken time away from proactive policing and made officers more reluctant to stop suspicious individuals. According to CBS, the number of stops declined from 49,257 in August 2015 to 8,859 a year later while arrests fell by a third to 6,900. While current Superintendent Eddie Johnson denied that police were retreating, he noted at a press conference this weekend that anger at police has “emboldened” criminals. He also blamed lax enforcement of Chicago’s strict antigun laws.

All of this suggests that the demonization of cops has contributed to Chicago’s surge of violence, with the principal victims being young minorities, many of them innocent bystanders. Perhaps the President could include an elegy for these black lives in his farewell.

Most of the murders are being committed in a handful of neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of the city and the people in those neighborhoods have a justifiably complicated attitude towards the police. They need and want police protection but they don’t want their young men tortured or murdered by the police.

Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has the chore of balancing priorities, among which are the interests of the police department, the interests of Chicago’s public employees’ unions, and the interests of Chicagoans. He’s already tipped his hand on his preferred strategy: let the city become decreasingly livable for ordinary Chicagoans and attract more of the well-to-do. How else do you interpret closing neighborhood schools, allowing the homicide rate to skyrocket, and spending the city’s dwindling resources on amenities primarily appealing to more prosperous Chicagoans?

Well, that’s interesting. The editors of the Wall Street Journal have come out in support of an idea that I floated some time ago—shoot down North Korean missiles:

The North already has the technology to launch a nuclear weapon against South Korea and Japan. But hurdles remain to deploying an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. Chief among them is a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and vibration. A successful test could provide the North with valuable data to work the problem.

The U.S. has ship-based missile defenses in the region, and intercepting the test would have the dual purpose of slowing Kim’s nuclear progress and demonstrating an effective deterrent. Kim may figure the U.S. won’t take such action as it prepares to inaugurate a new President and South Korea is riven by an impeachment trial of President Park Geun-hye. But the U.S. right to self defense provides ample justification, and U.N. Security Council resolutions ban the North from pursuing its missile program.

Even the defensive use of force carries risks that Kim would retaliate, but the larger risk is letting a man as reckless as Kim gain the means to hold American cities hostage.

Serious diplomatic engagement with China over North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons development program would be even better. When you have a well-founded fear of your neighbor’s dog biting you or your children, you don’t open up a dialogue with the dog. Strenuous measures in reaction to North Korea’s hostile programs are being abetted by Chinese support and the Chinese are making a cost-benefit analysis that presently favors continued support of Kim’s repellent regime. We should change that calculus.

However, as I’ve said before, we should be viewing North Korean missile tests as opportunities both to test our own technology and to counter theirs. He either fears his fate too much, etc.

I didn’t really exert myself too much in cooking for the holidays this year. For Christmas dinner I made a pork roast, scalloped potatoes, kale sauteed with onions and a little vinegar, and the cranberry sauce recipe I love so much. My wife made a fantastic German chocolate cake as a birthday cake for me. Probably the best cake she’s ever made.

Since I did my little stint in Bath a couple of years ago, I’ve been obsessed with perfecting my pies. Last night I came pretty close. I made a pie of chicken, chestnuts, and mushrooms in a white sauce, baked in a hand-raised hot water pastry crust. It was inspired by the pies served at The Raven in Bath. Mashed potatoes and peas on the side.

One of the things I’ve decided this year is that there is no substitute for non-hydrogenated lard in pie crusts. A combination of butter and non-hydrogenated lard yields the best balance of flavor and texture. Crisco just doesn’t do it. An all-butter crust tastes and looks good but is hard to work. An all-lard crust is bland. A mixture is best.

In their discussion of the intersections among policy, scientific investigation, gender, and identity, I endorse this observation made by Jonny Anomaly and Brian Boutwell at Quillette:

Two things can be true simultaneously: women and men can differ on average for certain traits, and any given man or woman might possess talents, interests, and abilities that suit them well for certain careers and hobbies, and less so for others.

As Pinker has argued, “it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable… Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.”

Most importantly for our current discussion, charges of sexism should not be launched against people who have argued for the existence of differences between men and women. And “sexist” should not be a catchall term used to describe any verbal misstep, lewd comment, or even crass joke. Real sexism is far more insidious than that — despite how distasteful we might find any of those behaviors to be. Charges of sexism should be restricted to systematic mistreatment of people based simply on their biological sex, or the gender with which they identify.

Sadly, that’s not much of a guide for policy because of disparate impact and the unbridged gap between gender and identity. Most biological females of childbearing age have a reasonable concern that they might become pregnant. Biological males do not regardless of the gender with which they identify.

Tailoring policies based on the least common denominator will necessarily discriminate in their impact.

There is a similar issue having to do with race. For example, so much of the medical research in the United States has been about people of European descent that policies tailored to conform to that research may implicitly discriminate against people who are not of European descent. Policymakers may not even have the ability to determine when they’re discriminating.