Monthly Archives: August 2019

The flowers keep coming.

When it comes to the current economic conflict with China, I don’t think President Trump and his advisors really have much of a clue. Consider this remark by Stephen Moore:

“We’re learning that maybe China has a higher pain threshold than we thought here,” said Stephen Moore, who was an economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 election and remains close to the White House. “They don’t seem to care that this is having extreme negative effects on their economy. It’s kind of a mutually assured destruction game right now.” [WaPo]

Implicit in Moore’s remark is that this is a simple trade dispute. He doesn’t seem to be conscious of the reality that the Chinese Communists are playing for survival and even dominance.

Trump’s vast inexperience in foreign policy is working against him. He’s been banging the drum for more concessions, and that flies in the face of what the Chinese, or rather leader Xi Jinping, is likely to do, given his position as an autocrat who could be retired at any time.

But even more concerning is that Trump tends to be highly transactional, which is to say he treats the world as if it has no memory. But in the political world, things don’t work that way. Embarrass the Chinese, and even if Xi is removed as a result, the Chinese will remember who did that and may do it to them. It’s fine to make enemies of the Chinese, but you have to know what you’re doing, and Trump is clearly clueless.

I must confess, since having read Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut, it seems like I’m seeing its predictions playing out right here in the United States, even if we’re not the agrarian society on which it is based. Case in point: Turchin notes that when things are falling apart, the commoners begin abandoning the farmlands as the elite gain control of more and more farmland and demand a larger and larger share of the produce – there’s a lot more to it, but I’ll just leave it at that.

So what’s been happening? The American family farmer has been under attack for many years, and now we have the latest bump in the road:

Agriculture has been a weapon of choice in the escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

With China officially pulling out of buying U.S. agricultural products, American farmers are losing one of their biggest customers. It could be a devastating blow in an already tough year for crops and commodity prices. It may also dent U.S. gross domestic product and hurt companies like Deere, whose business is directly tied to farming in the Heartland.

“Sales have already been lower this crop year because of the existing tariffs. If we went all the way to no China exports whatsoever, that would of course result in even larger market and price impacts,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “Cutting China completely out of the market would be a very big deal.” [CNBC]

This is the sort of thing that, if it goes on to long, will shake out anyone without capital reserves, and that means many of the small farmers will go under, selling their land out to the survivors. The survivors will be the Big Ag companies that should easily survive a period of falling profits or even losses, and then we’ll see the farmlands become even more deserted as Big Ag consolidates.

Another aspect of the decline of a society, only hinted at in Secular Cycles, is the deepening of societal divisions, principally between the commoners and the elite. The elite preoccupies itself with internal competition, as everyone competes for a position on the summit. Recent statements from CEOs concerning the importance of the advancement of profits at the expense of workers and customers sounds suspiciously as if the elite in control of corporate entities doesn’t much care for the common worker, doesn’t it, nor even for the customers. Just think of the once cheap drugs whose prices have gone through the roof – not due to manufacturing or material costs, but lack of competition.

The Republican political elites fall into the same category as they dance to the tunes of corporations, as they use the speaker of ALEC, and of special interest groups such as the NRA, notorious for demanding absolute gun rights on behalf of the guns & ammo industry. The resultant behavior of “Moscow Mitch” and now “Leningrad Lindsey” (Senator Graham (R-SC)) has been mind-boggling in its callous disregard for anyone not in the elite group.

Of course, at some point the burgeoning population, both of commoners and elite, along with falling profitability in absolute terms, leads to conflict within the elite group. What will it look like this time? Will it happen at all, or does Turchin’s theories not apply to corparatist states masculating as democracies?

The future is not clear, but the hints are troubling.

I see that China is reported as having blinked in the one day currency war:

Dow closes higher after China blinks

Dow Jones Industrial Average

The Dow and the broader US stock market rebounded Tuesday, driven by optimism that currency tensions between the United States and China would ease.

INDU) finished up 312 points, or 1.2%, while the S&P 500 (SPX) closed 1.3% higher. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (COMP), which was hit worst in Monday’s selloff, closed up 1.4%. …

The yuan continued to slide Tuesday, but the pace of its decline slowed. One dollar last bought 7.0235 yuan in China, and 7.0530 yuan in the offshore market, where the currency trades more freely.

Stock investors also took comfort after the Chinese central bank announced plans to issue central bank bills worth 30 billion yuan next week. That propped up China’s currency, which bounced back slightly against the dollar after the announcement. [CNN/Business]

But is this the only reasonable way to interpret events? In all but the most barbarous of conflicts, it’s necessary for the two sides to be able to communicate, whether it’s as for truce, surrender, prisoner exchange – or something else.

In this case, the two warring countries, America and China, have been bludgeoning each other with financial weapons. My interpretation isn’t that China “blinked,” because Chinese leader Xi Jinping cannot afford to be seen as weak, either within or outside of China. After all, in practical terms he’s an autocrat, and autocrats are never guaranteed their seats of power – they have to prove themselves both tough enough and competent enough to keep them. If Xi even looks like he’s weak, he might suddenly be retired by some younger wolf, hungry for power.

Another interpretation, one that makes Xi look tougher, is that he was waving his war club around enough to demonstrate to Trump, a known coward and deeply confused about foreign policy, that Xi has the power to screw up the economy of the United States if he so chooses, and is willing to pay the price, which would be uproar in the Chinese economy as well.

In this respect, the open-ended nature of Xi’s power puts him in a commanding position with regards to Trump, who must win a Presidential election in order to remain the Chief Executive of the United States – and who is vulnerable to impeachment and removal if he begins to lose his base to disillusionment. Indeed, if he loses the GOP faithful to economic disappointment, he may resign in disgrace rather than continue.

And Xi knows this.

China may have blinked, but only with planning and malice aforethought. If Trump tries to continue the tariff and currency war, we may see China resume its currency manipulations, and while Trump’s attacks on American politicians may sting, I really doubt Xi gives a shit if Trump calls China a currency manipulator.

He has bigger fish to fry.

Yeah, they’re as tall as me.

Close ups are more fun, though.

What did you just say about me?

It’s always fun to prepare oneself to watch some utter drek, and discover it’s not drek at all. X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) fits neatly into this niche, what with it being made by the King of the Bs (or schlock), Roger Corman, during the Golden Age of B movies. Yet here we have a soberly considered premise: if a human eye could be modified to be sensitive to the entire electromagnetic spectrum, rather than that small chunk we call the visible spectrum, what would we see, and, more importantly, how would we manage it?

Dr. James Xavier is a research M.D. driven by the thirst of knowledge, specifically the improvement of our ocular equipment, and when he concocts a drug which appears to improve the sensitivity of the eyesight of mice, he’s all excited. This was the first hint that this movie was not what we were expecting, as the simple experiment he puts together to show the mouse is seeing more than it should is simple, easy to understand, and really rather delightful to see done.

The next step? Self-experimentation, because Dr. Xavier is simply too hungry for knowledge to use intermediaries. The first experience is a terrifying blur, but as he sharpens his control, it lets him stop another surgeon from improperly operating on a child. He becomes fixated on the advantages of his vision, if he can only master it, and when his assistant, Dr. Brant, decides to forcefully end the experiment, the driven Xavier accidentally tosses him out a window.

Xavier slips away from the research facility as the police arrive, and fades into a traveling carnival, where he does simple tricks. His enhanced eyesight lets him examine people desperate for a cure for their illnesses, but between his failing eyesight and his crooked manager, he’s unhappy. When his love interest, Dr. Fairfax, tracks him down, he flees with her, but with a plan: to move to Las Vegas in order to use his powers to cheat the casinos, and use his winnings to fund his research.

But casinos dislike cheaters, and when Xavier overreaches, he must once again flee. By now, his non-stop exposure to the electromagnetic spectrum has rendered his sanity a chancy thing, and following police pursuit and a car accident, he stumbles into a revivalist tent.

And I’m sure my reader knows what the Bible says about eyes.

Not only is the plot good, but so is the acting and the surprisingly well managed special effects. Not that this is movie is a triumph, as Dr. Brant is more or less a shell of a character, and Dr. Fairfax isn’t entirely believable, either. But the drive and authenticity of Xavier is almost mesmerizing.

And what does Xavier’s sad end say about science? For those looking for a dose of morality, it might be the dangers of science meme. Then again, given the extensive time spent letting the audience experience, as can best be done, the enhanced vision, the commentary may be refined to observations that humanity’s ability to comprehend the reality around them is limited, and trying to go beyond it using direct experiential stimulation will end in disaster. Evolutionary biologists might come up with even more fascinating themes.

But in any case, this is quite a reasonable movie, given its parentage and era. A very pleasant surprise for the audience member who, like ourselves, didn’t know just how good it can be.

Paul Waldman is worried that the legacy of President Trump in the world of white supremacists will last for years:

In the wake of two horrific mass shootings over the weekend, particularly the one in El Paso where 20 people were allegedly murdered by a man who apparently left an online message echoing some of the themes of President Trump’s rhetoric, many have been putting blame at least partially at the president’s feet. We can debate how justified that is, but for the moment I want to shift focus just a little. There’s another vital question we need to ask: not whether Trump is inspiring murderers, but whether he is now, and will in the future, disappoint them in ways that could lead to more deadly violence. …

For many of them, that’s enough. To hear their sentiments echoed from the highest office in the land provides enormous satisfaction, even if the results don’t match the rhetoric.

But others, the less stable and the more heavily armed, will not be assuaged. They may well see in Trump’s presidency nothing but failure. After all, didn’t he promise a return to when people like them were on top? The Muslims would be banned, the minorities would be shown their place, a “big beautiful wall” would be built from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — and Mexico would pay for it.

Waldman may be right, in fact I fear is right, that there will be more mass shootings as the white supremacists become more and more disappointed that America didn’t rally around their whiteness and proclaim itself a white homeland.

But, in the long, tragic, and painful end, every shooting traceable to white supremacy discredits white supremacy. It demonstrates the immaturity of every single member of the white supremacist movement, their inability to intellectually persuade anyone capable of a moment of logical thought, of introspection, of simple decency.

It’s emblematic of the sheer laziness that is the inevitable traveling companion of white supremacism, that reluctance to admit that competing with anyone who is not white might result in their failure. It’s so much easier to point at their skin, earned without the sweat of the brow, than to work hard, or study hard. To pull out a gun, shoot others, and perhaps die in the attempt is so much easier than to cope with the problems of peaceful co-existence, those problems that might leave their desperate egos burdened with the knowledge that, their skin-God shown to be empty, they cannot compete.

Fear and laziness.

So, for the press, it’s quite one thing to label some barbaric murderer a white supremacist; it’s quite another to, once again, destroy the position, a shield for nothing more than power-seeking. That’s what needs to happen. Some people need to see the same arguments over and over before they comprehend it.

And some never will comprehend it. For them, gun control may be the closest we can come to an answer in a free country.

China has decided that its return volley in an “easy to win” trade war will be a devaluation of its currency:

The yuan weakened sharply after the People’s Bank of China set its daily reference rate for the currency at 6.9225, the lowest rate since December. The central bank said in a statement that Monday’s weakness was mostly because of “trade protectionism and new tariffs on China.” President Donald Trump threatened a new round of tariffs on the country last week. [CNN]

And the markets, as I type this at 1:15 Central, respond right on cue, as the NASDAQ is currently down nearly 4%. But is it significant?

Markets, once upon a time, reflected the predictions of the investing entities that used them, but I wonder if that’s true any longer. As the markets are moved increasingly by algorithms which are predicting movements in stock prices in time increments utterly irrelevant to my investing strategy, I tend to look at big drops at these as, at worst, an incident to simply ignore, and at best a chance to pick up some investments on the cheap.

I’m not saying that China’s devaluation is unimportant, but I am saying that it’s impact may have been magnified by the algorithms used by many firms in an attempt to make money off of micromovements in micromoments. They chase each other down the rabbit hole, as it were, even though they’re aware of the news that started it all.

In other words, faux-investing. I don’t know that I’d take this to be predictive of an imminent trade disaster.

On the other hand, it is indicative of the amateurism of President Trump. Trade wars are not easy to win; that’s why they’re called wars. In fact, both sides can be badly hurt by them, particularly if they’re heavily dependent on that trade. In fact, the question may be, Can the United States hope to win? Let’s skip the conservatives and liberals, and go with someone whose job is to properly predict results – an industry insider. From the same CNN report:

“Risks of Trump intervening in foreign exchange markets have increased with China letting the yuan go,” wrote Viraj Patel, FX and global macro strategist at Arkera, on Twitter. “If this was an all out currency war – the US would hands down lose. Beijing [is] far more advanced in playing the currency game [and has] bigger firepower.”

Not having even a passing interest in currency wars, I can’t guess if he’s right. But I can say this: if the President decides, or is goaded into, winning this currency war at all costs, he will in fact try to do so regardless of how many Americans he may hurt. After all, he’s a narcissist with a sensitive ego, and if he looks like he’s losing a war that he promised would be easily won, he can’t afford to look bad to his base.

And that will hurt the Chinese as well. I think this may turn into a game of chicken, and the question will be whether or not a President with a rabid base but deeply opposed opposition and independents can outlast an iron-fisted autocrat who is facing internal pressures of his own. Presidents can be impeached; autocrats can be overthrown.

This has the potential to become very interesting.

Local academics believe that water wheels, used all around the world, were discovered on the banks of the Euphrates River in Anbar province and should be on the World Heritage List. [“Can Iraq get its water wheels on UNESCO World Heritage List?” AL Monitor]

Perhaps it’s unfair of me, but all I can see is a vast herd of waterwheels, prancing about the Euphrates, waiting to be discovered.

From Claims Journal via a retired insurance adjuster and friend:

Source:: Claims Journal

An electronics engineer who moved to the Dallas area from Chicago decided that he had to do something about Texas’ stormy weather after both his GMC Jimmy and his wife’s Acura Integra were damaged by hail. Six years ago, Michael Siciliano launched the patented Hailstorm Protector System, an inflatable canvas car cover that prevents damage by deflecting hailstones.

A cool, simple idea. It might help with debris flung by a tornado as well. I wonder if it’s reusable.

Against the background of the two mass shootings in the last 24 hours, this seems somewhat trivial, but art is a vital part of a culture for the lessons it can convey. In that spirit, I’d like to note that we greatly enjoyed two shows at the Minnesota Fringe Festival over its first weekend, and there’s still time to attend them, although you may have to reserve tickets if you choose to go.

Edith Gets High is the modern day story of a video game warrior named Edith, who loves video games, pot, and her girlfriend, Ari. When a video game troll claims to have kidnapped Ari, Edith begins the pursuit, and finds herself stepping right into a videogame, where she learns the courage it takes to truly battle in the real world. Full of music and enthusiasm, this is a real spirit lifter.

Frankenstein: Two Centuries are radio play renditions of two original Frankenstein tales. Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society, the company behind this show, aims to do more than just recite a script, however skillfully, behind radio microphones, they also want you to experience the historical context. These shows are written and told in the style of two different authentic series, complete with commercials (fortunately few) and some announcer banter replete with pun wars. The stories themselves are interesting for the plot twists, but the real star of the show is the presentation, as the actors work behind what appear to be old-fashioned microphones and introduce us to what used to be a dominant art form.

Finally, my Arts Editor and I agree that The Zoo Story featured strong performances from its two talented actors. As neither of us cares for Theater of the Absurd, it left us a bit cold, but then that may have been the point.

Folks who live in more salubrious climates may not be aware, but in real winters – where snow falls and sticks – the storm clouds are just not visually interesting. Not like summer storm clouds. I clicked these two last night after the pop-ups had cleared from directly overhead:

From CNN comes a note on just how much involuntary military turnover occurs:

Gen. David Berger, the new Marine Corps. commandant, said he was “troubled by the extent to which drug abuse is a characteristic of new recruits and the fact that the vast majority of recruits require drug waivers for enlistment.” He also said over the last ten years more than 25,000 Marines were dismissed from the service for misconduct, and drug and alcohol offenses.

Is this a lot? Over ten years, this suggests 2500 Marines are dismissed for drug and misconduct each year, or nearly 7 a day, 365 days a year.

Wikipedia lists Marine Corp strength at 182,000. Assuming that’s an average figure over the last ten years, then roughly 1.3% of the Corp is lost to drugs and misconduct each year. While it’s highly unfortunate, and speaks to the problems of the greater society, it’s a little hard to get excited about it without a time series that tells us if this is a waxing, waning, or weird outlier number. I don’t know how to find that information.

Not sure what this thing might be.

This should need no explanation:

Nah, last time there was a joke at a debate it became president. https://t.co/7glq9lfUwS

— Comedy Central (@ComedyCentral) August 1, 2019

I’ve been watching the growing controversy over the refusal of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to bring various proposed legislation concerning foreign interference in Federal elections to the Senate floor. For example, his reaction to the recent is reported in Roll Call:

The House has sent two major election security bills to the Senate since Democrats regained the majority. McConnell has sidelined both. He has made clear that he believes control of elections should reside primarily with state and local governments. …

McConnell defended his position on Russian interference in the 2016 election, acknowledging that it happened, and he said that the Obama administration should have done more to protect the U.S. election system. Members of that administration, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, said McConnell prevented the administration from being more public about the Kremlin’s 2016 attacks, claiming he would not sign a bipartisan statement condemning the Russian actions.

“Let me make this crystal clear for the hyperventilating hacks who haven’t actually followed this issue. Every single member of the Senate agrees that Russian meddling was real and is real,” said McConnell. “We all agree that the federal government, state governments and the private sector all have obligations to take this threat seriously and bolster our defenses.”

How about the Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE), and other such legislation? What does he think of them? Scott Anderson, et al, on Lawfare discuss McConnell’s response:

Schumer later moved for unanimous consent to consider the SAFE Act. But Senate Majority Leader McConnell objected, calling the bill “partisan legislation from the Democratic House of Representatives relating to American elections.” Referring to Democrats’ flagship House bill addressing a range of voting and election-related issues, H.R. 1, McConnell stated:

This is the same Democratic House that made its first big priority for this Congress a sweeping partisan effort to rewrite all kinds of the rules of American politics. Not to achieve greater fairness, but to give themselves a one-sized political benefit. The particular bill that the Democratic leader is asking to move by unanimous consent is so partisan, that it received one, just one, Republican vote over in the House. So clearly this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent. It is very important that we maintain the integrity and security of our elections in our country. Any Washington involvement in that task needs to be undertaken with extreme care and on a thoroughly bipartisan basis. Obviously this legislation is not that. It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia and who continue to ignore this administration’s progress in correcting the Obama administration’s failures on this subject in the 2018 election. Therefore I object.

McConnell’s claim that the House GOP refusing to vote for it means the Democrat-written legislation is partisan is a very poor, even shameful argument. There are several reasons the House GOP may have given it a futile down-thumb, from technical reasons to partisan reasons, including their own partisan reasons, such as it might interfere with their elections to simply, It’s not a Republican-sponsored act and therefore we won’t vote for it, which would be the mark of a very insecure party. Incidentally, a lot of GOP behavior over the last twenty+ years has resembled that reasoning.

But, in case you’ve been puzzling over the hashtag #MoscowMitch, this is its origin.

I was curious about the wording of partisan national security legislation might look like, so I tracked down FIRE here. It’s quite short and … not very partisan. In fact, not at all. It strikes me as being quite neutral. It boils down, in my untrained eye, to “If any member of a political campaign is contacted by a foreign individual, it must be reported to an individual responsible for reporting such incidents, and that individual must report it to the FBI within a week. There are exceptions, and there are fines.”

And it’s that last part that interested me the most. How do you punish a campaign for accepting foreign-supplied intelligence?

SEC. 4. CRIMINAL PENALTIES.

Section 309(d)(1) of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (52 U.S.C. 30109(d)(1)) is amended by adding at the end the following new subparagraphs:

‘‘(E) Any person who knowingly and willfully commits a violation of subsection (j) or (b)(9) of section 304 or section 302(e)(6) shall be fined not more than $500,000, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

‘‘(F) Any person who knowingly or willfully conceals or destroys any materials relating to a reportable foreign contact (as defined in section 304(j)) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.’’.

It seems woefully inadequate, especially if the guilty campaign ends up winning the election by, shall we say, a hairsbreadth? Of course, we could go on and on about how a properly patriotic, or at least loyal, campaign wouldn’t require such laws, and, indeed, in the past that has been true, but in the Age of Trump, of a man who really doesn’t seem to understand the operational realities of governing, it seems that we need such legislation.

But what if the offending campaign wins? Here we are, at the very edge of democracy, trying to define how elections are run, and this is where it’s possible to run into very hairy situations. Should this legislation deprive the winners of their fruits, instead of a measly fine that could be cancelled by an unscrupulous President?

Do we need a new Amendment to clarify the situation? The bitterness resulting from a trial in which the winners become the losers would be a problematic social situation, to say the least.

It’s a problem worth thinking about.

In fact, this may be one of those situations in which the communal ethics of any people undertaking the democratic experiment must, for want of a better analogy, clear a certain bar. I have often felt that the activity we call nation-building, which consists of both material assistance and, more importantly, the installation of a democratic government, is, at least in the latter part of the definition, a waste of time.

Democracy is, quite frankly, a lot of work: the citizenry, in addition to working for a living and all the other distractions that go along with life, also must keep up with all the complex subjects that come with self-government. In particular, this includes the concept of disinterest when it comes to actually being a member of government. Disinterest is, in this sense, the opposite of self-interest, where self-interest is the gathering of tangible benefits.

Today, we label people who use their job in their self-interest when they work in the public sector as corrupt. But this is not some eternal concept of Western Civ, but rather an innovation. Several hundred years ago, it was quite common to use a seat in the British Parliament to acquire wealth, and no one blinked at it. I regret that I do not know when, or who, came up with the idea that the use of a position, at least while occupying it, to accumulate wealth or other perks is not in the public interest and should be considered corrupt.

Looping back around to nation-building, this is one of those key concepts that I think must be evolved by the society in question, and not simply assumed by the nation-builders to exist. Our communal ignorance of political history comes to the fore in this situation; we think democracy is easy and doesn’t require ethical / moral adjustments, because we don’t have that learning, that communal memory. But I think that a society must come to an agreement that those who will participate in government must have, as a core ethical concept, that of disinterest; otherwise, the system becomes unstable as people fight for positions and use those positions to engage in behaviors contraindicated for the nation as a whole. A person’s self-interest isn’t necessarily aligned with a country’s self-interest.

That moral position is really one of the key pillars on which democracy is built, and when someone comes along who just doesn’t subscribe to it, yet wins approval of the people, it tells me two things: the people have either been fooled or have lost their moral footing, and that nation is in trouble.

I don’t know exactly what this might be, but my Arts Editor likes it.

The Fringe 2019 starts tonight – some family friendly shows were on last week. If I see something really worthwhile in the first couple of nights, I’ll review it here, otherwise I’ll probably not comment further.

Go and enjoy! Or cringe. Depending on the show.

Countenance:

noun
the appearance or expression of someone’s face:
Her countenance masked her feelings.

verb
to find an activity acceptable; to approve of or give support to something:
This school will not countenance lateness.

[Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump,” Shane Harris, WaPo:

In 2017, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited Fox News pundit Andrew Napolitano’s claim that three intelligence sources had told him the Obama administration used Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, to spy on Trump and avoid “American fingerprints.” GCHQ took the extraordinary step of issuing a public statement, saying the claims were “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

The British intended to put the White House on notice that they would not countenance such accusations, but Trump has repeated them, most recently in April, a few days after the president’s state visit to Britain was announced.