January links

Energy sector revolution. A long article summarizing important changes in the energy sector in the last decade. A must-read when I have time.

India riots. An anti-Muslim immigration law was a slap at a religious minority in India. How far will the Indian government go in its authoritarian policies? It seems that India might erupt, considering the much worse than typical fighting, even at universities.

Friction with South Korea. Short, focused summary of our strategy with South Korea and why tough love is a mistake there.

A critique of Trump Mideastern policy. This is written in stark terms without hyperbole or catastrophizing. Pretty refreshing, really. No, the world isn't going to end, but could we please have a bit of coherence? Actually, though, foreign policy tends to be incoherent, maybe because there are truths that you can't say out loud.

A prediction about Iran. I like it when someone makes a definite prediction because you get to test whether it comes true or not. Here's a prediction that Russia will end up mediating between Iran and the US. Ummmm, I don't think so. If we were all angels, that might happen, but we aren't even close, so no deal.

Boeing behaved badly. And they put it into emails! They're thrilled they got to avoid costly training. Too bad about the deaths lack of training caused. Come on, folks, be realistic and care about safety more than the bottom line because lack of safety is going to kill your profits.

Media whitewashes Trump. Not completely, but they often don't show how batshit crazy, angry, or insulting he is. People ought to know this before they vote again.

Epic story of Trump's temper. Top military and civilian officials tried to school Trump on international relations and learned instead that his opinions are fixed, and anyone who disagrees with him is stupid.

Martin Luther King. For his holiday, lots of anecdotes about how King listened to the ideas of others, often leading to his finest moments.

Image : abcnews.go.com

Shootings and August links

In less than 24 hours, there were two major mass shootings, following up a mass shooting at a festival in California (so three in fairly short span). The shooting in El Paso, TX targeted Mexicans. The shooting in Dayton, OH was by a young man with a long history of violent fantasies, including having a kill list and a rape list while he was in high school. (Google these shootings for details. I won't choose one link as representative). This article about the background of the El Paso shooter is chilling: mostly 'normal' but with all too familiar undercurrents including bullying at school along racial lines, hopelessness about job prospects while automation continues, and open racist sentiments expressed after Trump was elected.

Ignore the headline of this article (Washington Post again - a good source). It's not so much that there's pushback from the NRA on gun legislation, as there is deep worry from GOP legislators. Can they stay in office if they sign on to gun legislation? Probably not if they depend on votes from GOPers, which they do. According to polls, the wide majority of Republicans are still against even partial gun control measures. So it's less the NRA standing in the way, but instead the very popular Guns R Us ethos among Republicans.

Faltering Dem candidates. A Politico author contrasts the Republicans, who understand the importance of legacy and a winning historical narrative, with the Democrats, who are sniping at each other over the party's recent past. Part of this is due to a leadership vacuum since Obama is gone and the Clintons are gone, and both failed in some major ways.

Stealth reform measures for Social Security. Why hasn't this been big news? With funding issues looming, the Dems in the House are working on a big change to SS. This should be drawing a lot of attention, debate, number-crunching, and fact-checking, but the press barely utters a peep. Sure, it's not likely to get through the Senate, but it's a real proposal with seemingly real numbers, and these numbers are likely to be the basis for future work on SS.

Zero interest on bonds. A big difference from when I was young is that now the return on bonds is almost nothing. I find this fascinating. The world is awash in money chasing after profits. We've created so much wealth, and so much paper or digital money that there isn't enough ways to spend it or invest it. This doesn't worry me, however. We won't turn dirt poor even if there's a crash. There will just be another inflation via QE (quantitative easing) as there was last time.

Update on Gaza. Tensions rise and fall, but nobody wants a repeat of the last useless, destructive war. Progress!

Image: wikipedia.org

Extras. Gun control (now called gun safety) advocacy group shows how common private sales are without a background check.

April links

Always more on Russia investigation. Now conservative media is pretending the Papadopoulus contact was a CIA asset trying to entrap him. Long WaPo article about adminstration action against Russian hacking before and immediately after the election. Also covering that period, and answering the snarky question 'What did Obama do to stop it?' Even more, though it sounds like maybe Steele gave his dossier to British intelligence and their heads exploded.

FBI scandal. I skimmed the Inspector General report on the Hillary investigation. Strzok looks bad in his handling of the Weiner laptop. Lawfare review of it.

Peace deal failure. Someday I need to write a long piece about why the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks failed. What next for Israelis in their outlook.

Gitmo holding camp. Military tribunals have failed. Slow, questionable decisions, not a firm legal basis.

2020 Election. This is BIG, and worth watching if the trend continues. A poll in Texas has Trump even with two Democratic candidates. These are named candidates, not a generic one. The rich will support Trump in 2020. Not because they like him or respect him, but because the Dems want to raise their taxes.

Midwest flooding. A long article about the Missouri River, and how our relationship to it and adjacent land use should change. Move further away, don't try to manage for navigation because it doesn't carry a lot of navigation.

Japan's economy. Japan is doing pretty well. Not a lost decade.

Trump non-news. Trump's tweeting is becoming unhinged. Is this new and repeat?

Stuff I want to remember

(Clues to my interests.)

Understanding quantitative easing. A good article, very readable, that gives an easy-to-understand analysis of QE. It asked good questions, but I ask even better questions. It tells how QE inflates the value of certain bonds. In rolling back QE, demand is lower and the bonds are worth less. True, except that QE is done with demand is especially soft and needs the boost. QE is rolled back when demand is stronger. Still, I think I have more work to do to understand the workings. QE also shelters borrowers from surges in interest rates, right? Prevents lenders from demanding higher returns.

Extreme crazy conspiracy site. The crazy flat-earth lady gets her news here. Oh, the imagination involved in spinning these tales. Microwaves are needing to cook food grown with fertilizer, but it destroys the nutrients. Ummm, wow.

Gun info database. Save the link to check. Country by coountry information.

Image: bloomberg.com

July links

Travel ban ruling. A careful look at the travel ban (from some Muslim majority nations) and the issues involved. The Supreme Court decision and the dissent are haunted by the decision in the 1940s to intern Japanese-Americans. None of the justices want to make a mistake like that again. But there are other interesting issues, like whether waivers are being granted to those with clearly legitimate needs to visit the US. Definitely eye-opening and different from the usual partisan screamfest.

A history of the politics of Supreme Court nominations. A clear, easy read. I prefer the times when competence was the issue. However, the Bork nomination and anger over it eroded that. This prompted me to look into Bork again, and I found this strong statement of opposition to Bork--that he had no problem with discrimination and segregation as a personal choice of a business owner. Nor did he have any sympathy for the accidentally pregnant. It was the right thing to defeat this nomination. (I've written about before about the history of the Supreme Court.)

Poor standards at Fox News again. This time, Fox reported, Trump tweeted and both were wrong. This isn't actually news, but someone should keep score of how bad news orgs are.

Inside look at land management issue. This is a rare topic, but important for the future. Good choices on land management are a boon. Bad choices are a blight. I've seen it first hand on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Why is congress such a circus? There's actually an answer to that question. Gods be praised, and count me surprised. The answer is--messaging is still very important in Congress, but policy isn't. The number of pragmatic policy staff have been greatly reduced, but not the 'communications' people.

The latest winner in Syria... Is Israel. Read about the power plays between Israel, the US, Syria, Russia, and Iran. Fascinating. Seems coherent and solid to me. Will I still think so in a few years?

Image: economist.com

April links

I was away for the month of March with only a tablet, and not in the mood for typing on that infernal non-keyboard. I did read a few interesting items, and a few more since I returned home.

Closing the racial achievement gap. According to Charles Murray, this should be impossible because it's inherent in the genomes. An intensive program in New York City has had very good results. However, skimming the published scientific paper, it's not clear that the gap was erased, just that they were heading that way.

North Carolina's blatantly discriminatory voting act. Struck down, but uggghhhh! This couldn't happen in the Supreme Court hadn't decided that the Voting Right Act was no longer needed. Well, that was a partisan decision, not an honest judicial finding. I read elsewhere that the legislation disallowed the types of IDs that were more common among blacks. Yes, very blatant.

Voter fraud investigation in California. I wonder a lot about California, partly because I nearly became a voter there but bailed out before I committed an actual illegal act. This investigation may be ongoing, but hasn't turn up much. However, I like to watch whatever I can in CA.

Korean strategies. From March. This story is a bit slow, but still an easy read and fairly informative on different ways to view the situation in Korea.

Nazi story. A profile of a leader of a white supremacy group that was involved in Charlottesville.

Unexpected interference in business. Suppose the socialism wasn't the worst enemy of business. Instead, it was a thin-skinned blowhard who ended up as president.

Capsule picture of what's wrong with Trump. This story rings so true to me. Trump as an impetuous glad-hander who doesn't know what he's doing.

Iran's presence in Syria. Very informative story about why Israel is bombing airfields in Syria, and who has missiles where.

Image: dailytarheel.com

December links 2

Sexual harassment in foreign policy circles. Dan Drezner, a smart, wonkish political writer, asks women in foreign policy circles what hurdles they face. Very readable in two parts.

Read between the lines in the Flynn indictment. Better yet, let law experts do it and read what they write. They think Flynn is giving very important information and cooperation to the Russia investigation. 

Tax cut dogma. Just when I needed to refute some jerk who thought the Laffer Curve was scientifically proven, I found this article about tax cuts and their effect on growth. Pretty concise.

Ramifications of US recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital. It's been a fact on the ground, but a diplomatic minefield. Candidates for president have made and then broken promises. Trump finally seems to plan to pull that trigger, but how bad will it be? As this article notes, it won't derail talks because there are no talks. Background on the role of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who seems to have an ego as big as Trump's. Of course there were riots in the short term. The long term will have to be seen.

A day as President Trump. A close look at what it's like to be President Trump. Kelly has brought in more discipline and focus, and Trump appears to have learned a few productive coping mechanisms.

A Trump fallacy and its effect. Trump isn't able to hear and accept the truth about Russia, its intentions and its interference. His own ego and insecurity don't allow him. However, he also doesn't seem to be in charge of policy with regard to Russia. It's a bad situation and could get worse.

A lesson in post-Soviet history. I hadn't known this important bit of history, where the NATO countries broke an unwritten promise on expansion. One lesson--it's not any kind of promise if you can't write it down and publicize it. Secret agreements--they're probably broken again and again.

Big ideas: Clash of world powers. This column starts as a book recommendation, but the issue is huge: the future of the world. Is our future more relative peace or a big conflict? Mostly pessimistic, but not entirely.

Image: future.wikia.com

December links

I collected a bunch of links in November but didn't get to write about them. Here they are. As usual, an interesting bunch.

White nationalist bad behavior. I'm not sure why this struck me as important, but it did. It turns out that a white nationalist who was caught on video repeatedly shoving a woman at a Trump rally has also been involved in organizing white rallies. This includes Charlottesville. Maybe this detail will be important sometime, but I hope not. On a related note, extreme violence at neo-Nazi rallies didn't start at Charlottesville. This report from 6/26/16 shows that it started over a year earlier. Seven were stabbed at a rally in Sacramento.

Roy Moore bad behavior. Roy Moore is the notorious judge in Alabama who has twice substituted his superior knowledge of God's will over the judgments of higher courts. Now he's running for Senate, and has been accused by several women of chasing them when they were teenage girls and he was in this 30s. He's called them liars, which is the traditional patriarchal response. This video shows an interview of a worker who knew of Roy Moore being banned from a mall in the 1980s for that behavior. Doesn't look like this guy is lying. Updating--another woman who dated Moore when she was 17 is sharing her story, and a card that looks very much like Roy Moore's writing.

Senator gets fed up. Humorous story about Sen. Orrin Hatch getting tired of being accused of wanting to cut taxes for the rich. Well, if he doesn't like the accusation, maybe he should stop repeatedly performing the action of which he is accused. If you don't want to be called a wife-beater, stop beating your wife. Ever.

Was Trump's election racist? This is a long article, but I liked the last third. That part starts with "History has a way of altering villians..." It argues that perhaps whites in the US can't see their own racism even as it worsens in a very scary way. I don't know if I agree, but it's definitely worth keeping in mind.

Why care about a crime 25 years ago? I started reading this article about the conviction in a genocide trial, and my initial reaction was that European justice is too slow and too weak. Then my focus changed, and I was surprisingly happy that this murderer was forced to face justice. He didn't get to escape justice as so many others have.

Immigrant gangs. No, this isn't just a conservative talking point. This is real. Maybe the MSM is mostly burying this information because it's not a story that fits their political bias.

Congressmen have sex. Joe Barton was getting divorced, but he was still interested in having sex with women. Sounds normal to me. He actually sent some nude selfies to some women (not out of the blue). Sounds like the 21st century, right? However, it's trouble for a congressman. Unfortunately, TMZ scrubbed their copies of the pic. It's what you'd expect for a guy his age. This ought to be a non-story, shouldn't it be?

Conservative sting bad behavior. Project Veritas, an organization that exposes liberal causes in not so honest ways, tried a sting on the Washington Post, but was caught instead. Their operative concocted a lie about Roy Moore, was discovered, videotaped, and written about at length. James O'Keefe, the swarmy head of Project Veritas, of course isn't going to be honest about this.

Deregulation improves economy. According to The Economist, the major decrease in new regulations during the beginning of the Trump administration has been helping the US economy. No shit, Sherlock.

Interesting factoid about Israel. The Greek Orthodox church is one of the major landowners in Israel. I never thought about it, but it makes sense. What if it has owned land there for nearly 18 centuries? What are the implications when the church sells some of its holdings?

Media bias in one picture and two stories. Picture below. Malia Obama, bad girl or embattled?

Image: news.google.com

The Iran deal--wishing it was better

So the US, France, Russia, the UK, China, Germany, and Iran settled on a nuclear deal after years of negotiations to put sanctions in place and years of negotiations because the sanctions worked in putting the screws on Iran.

The deal is not spectacular. Most countries were hoping that Iran would give up its nuclear enrichment capability. Instead, Iran held fast to its sovereign right, and didn't back down on some enrichment. They could have sent a reassuring message to the world, but that's not what they chose to do.

Instead, they played on weaknesses among the countries supporting the sanctions, and got themselves more leeway for producing nuclear fuel. Yes, there are inspections and limits that they've agree to. But they haven't renounced the capability, as most people hoped they would.

Still, this may be the best deal available to hem them in. The alliance for the sanctions was breaking down. Russia is definitely more belligerent than when they agreed to the sanctions. China rarely wants to forego trading partners, so they were probably not strongly dependable on sanctions.

So maybe this weak deal was the best we could do.

Regional arms race next?

I'm not worried about Israeli reaction to the deal. They already have their nuclear weapons, but those weapons aren't particularly destabilizing. Israel has been suspected of having nukes since the 1960s, and that hasn't caused much of a blip in the Mideast compared to other aspects of Israeli policy.

Iran's nuclear capability causes more worry, partly because it might set off a nuclear arms race in the Mideast. I don't want to imagine what could happen if Saudi Arabia started building nukes. Imagine if ISIS or Boko Harum or a similar successor overran a base and got their hands on nukes. If Saudi Arabia builds nukes, the risk of this kind of scenario would be much higher than we've endured before. I'm not saying it's inevitable, but the risks are definitely there.

So Iran has increased the instability of the Mideast with its nuclear posturing. Sanctions didn't completely stop them, and neither will this deal. I'm not sure whether this deal will increase instability or decrease it. A lot depends on whether Iran misbehaves, and whether other countries will wait to see if Iran misbehaves.

Perhaps this is the best we can do. Iran doesn't want to give up its edge, and they have good reason not to. They have a lot of implacable enemies who wouldn't mind seeing them in ruins. Saudi Arabia would blow them off the planet if they could avoid the consequences of such an action. Lots of countries would blow their enemies to smithereens if they could get away with it. But consequences are unavoidable, and that keeps many people and countries in check.

Cooler heads?

Maybe the Saudis will realize that Iran assures its own destruction (by the US or others) if they ever use nuclear weapons, and therefore the Saudis won't start their own nuclear program. Maybe the Iranians will realize it too, and not proceed to building and testing a bomb.

I've really got to hope for that, since actually stopping them would take entail a huge war--bigger than anything since WWII. No country has the stomach for that.

Image: maxpark.com

Extras. I have a strange argument with a hawk who focuses, oddly, on UN issues. His thesis is that Russia and China would be too embarrassed to break a standing sanctions regime. Color me dubious about this claim.

Interesting article that delves into this question: "Is Iran an irrational rogue state or a rational, cooperating party?" Much of the success of the sanctions were due to US financial centrality, and the US could still exercise that power if Iran backslides. Read the funny/devastating tweets in this article.

Short: Gaza ceasefire

I think about foreign issues fairly often, but I don't write about them because my lack of background makes my opinions as worthwhile as, um, the proverbial bucket of warm spit.

That said, perhaps I should refrain now. However, I want to share a few sources from my research into the lead-up to the recent upsurge in fighting:

• A timeline from the Jerusalem Post
• A timeline from the site Electronic Intifada
• A timeline of rockets fired from Gaza

This information confirmed one thing I already knew--there are frequently rockets shot from Gaza into Israel. I don't particularly want to argue whether they are justified or not. I also learned something that I hadn't heard or read before--Israel broke the most recent truce on November 8.

Maybe with four more years of Obama, there will be the impetus for the Israelis to seriously negotiate. Maybe. I won't hold my breath for that possibility.

[No extra picture of destruction needed.]