Recommended: Excerpt from Ezra Klein's new book

Nassim Taleb has convinced me that he is right - listening to the news not only doesn't make one smarter, it actually makes one dumber, since it fills the mind with bias, spin, misdirection, outrage, exaggerations, unfounded speculations and fantasies. Ezra Klein, a journalist and political commentator (and co-founder of Vox), has written a new book about this entitled Why We're Polarized. An interesting excerpt from the book can be read here.

Klein makes several interesting points in this excerpt (I look forward to reading the whole book). He notes that the news business is in fact a business, and the news is tailored to maximize profits and enhance the careers of reporters, not to educate people. He asserts that the real significant divide in the political world is not between right and left, but between the politically interested and the politically disinterested. And he notes that political theorists thought that increasing the amount of information available to the voting public would improve democracy, whereas now that we have massively increased the news available to the voting public with television, cable news, and the internet in all its manifestations (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, etc)  it seems to have had the opposite effect. 

This is an interesting perspective.

Recommended: Fear the Future

Philip Klein's little 2018 book Fear Your Future: How The Deck Is Stacked Against Millennials and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse covers some of the same arguments that I made back in nine posts back in April of 2017 (see the first one here), but with a lot more data. In essence, decades of politicians in both parties voting us expensive government programs without raising the taxes needed to fund them have built a massive national debt, which the Millennials are inheriting at the very moment when they are struggling to get into the work force and build their own wealth.  Klein argues that the situation could still be saved, just, with bold action now, but that the political system seems incapable of acting. And socialism, which seems to be attracting the young these days, will simply make the situation worse.

Recommended: Why the US-China Cold War Will Be Different

Robert Kaplan, whose excellent 2018 book The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century is on my reading list in the sidebar, has an interesting article in today's National Interest, entitled Why the US-China Cold War Will Be Different.

Recommended: An Anxious Fiscal Future

There is a good book review of Philip Klein's new book Fear Your Future: How the Deck is Stacked Against Millennials, and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse. I haven't read the book itself yet, but I found the review quite thought-provoking, especially about the moral obligations owed from one generation to another. The review is entitled An Anxious Fiscal Future, published on the Law and Liberty site.

Incompetence in Washington

Yes, yes. I know it is a popular American sport to rail about the incompetence of Washington politicians. But really, can it get much worse than this??

I am no fan of Donald Trump, and I actually agree with most liberal goals, if not always with the way they try to achieve them. But I have to say that this whole impeachment business shows a level of incompetence among Democratic politicians that I would expect of a banana republic.

The Democratic majority in the House ran a sham investigation, in which they sharply restricted the Republicans’ ability to call defense witnesses or cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and then voted to impeach along strict party lines without a single Republican vote.

The Republican majority in the Senate will now no doubt return the favor by voting along strict party lines to acquit without a single Democratic vote. The whole thing is nothing more than time-wasting partisan political theater, and it sets a dangerous precedent (actually first set by Republicans in the Clinton impeachment) of using impeachment as a partisan political weapon. Expect the next Democratic president to have to face the same thing now.

And the charges? (1) That Trump tried to use the threat of withholding U.S. aid to encourage a foreign government to do what he wanted, something every president since the end of World War II has done on occasion, and which then Vice-President Biden even bragged publicly about doing (see the video clip here). And (2) that Trump used claims of executive privilege to obstruct Congress, something which every president at least since World War II has done when Congress tried to muscle in on the executive branch.  Trump is no saint, but if Democrats want to replace him, they need to do it at the ballot box, not by shabby political knife fights like this.

And then Speaker Pelosi delays the start of the trial, which forces some of the main Democratic candidates for the 2020 election to sit silent in the Senate six days a week, while some of their opponents get to campaign freely in the early voting states. Was this just stupidity on her part, or a cynical attempt to disadvantage some candidates in favor of others (like Biden?). But then of course letting the whole impeachment movement get started in the first place ensures that Biden’s sleazy relationship with the Ukraine, that earned his son some $3 million dollars, gets maximum and continuous public exposure, damaging his chances of getting elected. What was she thinking?

More than that, the Democrats have fielded the most pathetic set of candidates. The leaders are all old (almost as old as I am, and I am certainly too old to run the country well), the leading progressives, Sanders and Warren, are proposing outlandishly expensive giveaway programs that could never pass Congress, and could never be funded if they did, despite their fanciful dreams of soaking the rich to pay for it. Biden can’t remember what state his in on some days. Buttigieg is the darling of the media, and certainly says a lot of the right things, but in fact has never been more than the mayor of a mid-sized Indiana town, and never won more than 11,000 votes. Really? Is this the best the party can come up with?

Not that Republicans are in any better shape, but it is the Democrats who need to up their game if they are to win back power, and I don’t see them doing that. They seem to be driven by the most extreme and naïve voices in the twittersphere, rather than by any cool political calculations.  And as a result the election looks to me like Trump’s to lose, and the betting public seems to agree.

Another election in which I want to check the “none of the above” box on the ballot.

The Golden Globe Awards

This past Sunday the 77^th Golden Globe Awards occurred, in case you missed it. The Golden Globe Awards are one of those annual self-congratulatory Hollywood-manufactured media events used to hype the studio’s shows and give the leading stars some red-carpet media exposure. This year it was hosted for the fifth (and no doubt last) time by actor and stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais, who proceeded to make the attendees uncomfortable by telling it like it really is in his opening monologue (you can watch it here on YouTube, or read the transcript here). It has made something of a fuss.

Here are his closing lines:

  “So if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech. You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.  

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK? It's already three hours long. Right, let's do the first award.”

I have always wondered why reporters make such a fuss about what Hollywood stars say about current political events. Certainly they are entitled to their own opinions just like the rest of us. But why should I care what is said by a pampered, overpaid star who owes his/her fortune and fame mostly to an ability on set to say convincingly lines written by someone else? It seems to me of no more importance than opinions collected occasionally by reporters from random “man-on-the-street” interviews with people who may well believe the world was created 6000 years ago, can’t balance their checkbooks, and may not be able to find the Atlantic ocean on a world map (If you think this is a little over the top, go peruse the polls from the Pew Research Center or the studies from the Annenberg Public PolicyCenter. It’s frightening how poorly educated the general public is.)

And along the same lines, I find it almost amusing that many of the same Democratic politicians who applauded President Obama’s decision to take out Osama bin Laden (violating Pakistan’s sovereignty in the process, by the way) are outraged that President Trump would violate Iraq’s sovereignty to kill Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who arguably has had more people killed (including Americans) than bin Laden ever managed. Or are they really simply put out that the military and Trump, recognizing that Congress leaks like sieve, didn’t give them advance notice?

There are real legal, moral and practical issues with killing people remotely with drones, especially in other countries with whom we are not formally at war, and the nation needs to have a rational debate about this practice. Although the legal issue is probably moot. Legal rules are simply rules that people make up and agree to abide by, and many nations have already decided not to follow the rules (eg. Russia poisoning people in the UK, Iran plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador in the U.S., ISIS killing civilians right and left, Hezbollah terrorists using suicide bombers to kill civilians, or the Mossdad taking out terrorists around the world, etc).

The moral issue is more difficult. If one has an opponent who has killed civilians in the past and is no doubt working to kill more in the future, and that opponent is somewhere where she/he can’t be captured and tried in the normal judicial process, and one has the means to eliminate them before they cause more deaths, is it moral to refuse to do so? And especially if there are no consequences to oneself for “morally” deciding not to (ie – other people’s families die because of this decision, but not yours). This is a difficult issue, and simplistic moral on-liners by people who have no real skin in the game are of no help in resolving it.