Who Wins a Slapping Contest?

My latest at PJMedia VIP. When the goal of White House policy is not to cross Iran’s Red Lines even when they cross yours, winning and losing become slippery concepts.

The Limits of Tit for Tat
Andrew McCarthy takes up a subject I have discussed before, proportionality. He writes in the National Review: “For about the millionth time, the law-of-war concept of proportionality does not hold that a response to an attack has to be on the same scale as the attack itself.”

Bird Box

New at the Belmont Club. The media debates whether it is safe to broadcast live coverage of Donald Trump, lest unsuspecting viewers be poisoned by his raw speech.

Belmont Club: A Glimpse of the Gorgon
Media is agonizing over the moral dilemma of showing Trump live on TV, since his appearance might cause harm to audiences. “Even as Donald Trump seeks his third straight Republican presidential nomination, his live appearances still present an unsolved riddle for many news outlets: How do you cover him?”

The Power of Bad Luck

My latest at PJMedia VIP. In late 2021 Joe Biden told the UN: “as I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war.” Then it began to fall apart.

A Reversal of Fortune
Nine months into his first term in 2021 an elated Joe Biden told the UN: “as I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years the United States is not at war. We’ve turned the page.” Biden had just pulled out of Afghanistan. All seemed good. Although the big news was still Covid which precipitated a global chip crisis, an energy crunch and a worldwide supply crisis the pandemic was expected to fall before the new vaccines. The expectation was that the world economy would soon recover. There were murmurs about migrants flooding across the US-Mexico border but the media played it down. So in this sunny interlude Joe’s priority was pledging $11B toward fixing the Climate Emergency, the existential challenge of the progressive age.

The End of Control

Half a decade ago the trustees of the future were confidently planning the global tomorrow. Then pandemic, war and deglobalization covered the crystal ball with mystery. 2024 may reveal what’s ahead. My latest at The Pipeline.

The Year The Future Disappeared | The Pipeline
The One World of the Davos set is now gone.

Tomorrow Beats Today

New at the Belmont Club. Nothing is more real than the inevitable future. What’s going to happen is more important than what’s happening.

Belmont Club: Earth Vs The Flying Saucers
Recently the WHO and World Economic Forum have been making headlines about the need to prepare for “Disease X”, which is a hypothetical pandemic. How one might ask, does one prepare for something that doesn’t exist yet? Well this anticipatory preparation has been happening for some time and it is part of the phenomenon of the inevitable future.

Endless Bummer

My latest at PJMedia VIP. When wars can be created but not destroyed.

War As A One Way Street
The Russians, according to some pundits, are fighting beyond the point of reason in Ukraine. Anne Applebaum writes in the Atlantic: “Kremlin officials are now telegraphing to everyone — to Western politicians and journalists, to Ukraine, to the Russian people — that they can absorb 300,000 casualties and massive equipment losses.” This unreasonableness is forcing the Ukrainians and potentially their Western allies to match the Kremlin’s grim steps; to move past the splendid volunteerism of the early days to conscription, nonstop production and all the coercive apparatus of total war.

Follow the Power

New at the Belmont Club: How Does One Decode the Strange Politics of Recent Years?

Belmont Club: The Mystery of 2024
Joe Biden’s Jan 6 speech raises some interesting problems. What does he really want to achieve by declaring his foes outlaws? Even if he succeeds in jailing, disqualifying or otherwise delegitimizing his 2024 political opponents the challenge to “our democracy” he posits will not go away for two reasons. First, the crisis facing the status quo does not arise from one man, Donald Trump, but from the failure of the establishment to deliver across a wide range of issues. Second, the discontent of which Trump is a figurehead now includes significant parts of the electorate and has political strongholds in a number of states.

Judging Books By Their Covers

New at the Belmont Club. Crimes of Fashion. The media can make a star, but only God can make a gentleman.

Belmont Club: Crimes of Fashion
Sometimes we are governed by considerations that fly below the radar. Take de-risking, also known as de-banking. It “is the closure of people’s or organizations’ bank accounts by banks who perceive the account holders to pose a financial, legal, regulatory, or reputational risk to the bank.” Ostensibly it’s chief use is to keep money launderers and criminals out of banks. But ‘reputational risk’ is an elastic term and it is sometimes used to keep social undesirables out.

Gate of Grief

New at the Belmont Club: America’s guarantee of the sea is challenged from ashore by someone Joe Biden wants to be his friend.

Belmont Club: The Gate of Lamentation
Houthi attacks on shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait threaten to increase the shipping cost of oil and natural gas and hence the world price of these commodities for everyone. The ominous English phrase for the strait is the “gate of grief” and that is the fate which has befallen an increasing number of ships, including container ships and tankers. “In 2018, an estimated 6.2 million barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil, condensate, and refined petroleum products flowed through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait… Total petroleum flows through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait accounted for about 9% of total seaborne-traded petroleum (crude oil and refined petroleum products) in 2017. About 3.6 million b/d moved north toward Europe; another 2.6 million b/d flowed in the opposite direction mainly to Asian markets such as Singapore, China, and India.”

The State vs State of the Art

New at the Belmont Club. What will baby AI be when it grows up? Can bureaucrats regulate AI? Or are we doomed to race with China?

Belmont Club: Only AI Can Protect Against AI
AI evolving faster than Western AI regulators know what to regulate. According to the NYT: “When European Union leaders introduced a 125-page draft law to regulate artificial intelligence in April 2021, they hailed it as … ‘future proof’ … then came ChatGPT.” Government is losing the battle, and the bureaucrats can’t do a thing about it.

Confusion Abroad, Confusion at Home

My latest at PJMedia VIP. Joe Biden promised to return the world to the way it was and nothing was ever the same again.

Challenge to the World Order
The Houthi Red Sea attacks on international sea lanes, Venezuelan preparations to annex most of Guyana, and human shields in Gaza are incidents that suggest “international law” is dying. The old rules are increasingly ignored, not just by great powers like Russia, which invaded Ukraine, or China advancing in the South China Sea, but even by relative second-raters, the Houthis in Yemen, a bankrupt socialist regime in Caracas, and a terror group in the Middle East. America, that linchpin of the Pax Americana, seems to have vanished.

Crazy Is Real

New at the Belmont Club. We presume rational actors in a world that is often insane.

Belmont Club: The Amorite Iniquity Effect
The big build up of Gaza as an impregnable Hamas tunnel fortress has turned in a comparatively short time into the saga of martyr city, soon to be displaced person’s camp, the West’s wards. Leaving politics and ethics aside, the military collapse suggests Hamas soldiers have been poorly served by t…

Whoops. Gone.

My latest at PJMedia VIP. When the Obama future becomes obsolete before it ever happens.

The Fate of Obama’s Third Term
Joe Biden has now presided over the Great Fracture, which has essentially ended the “global world,” thus putting the kibosh on the Davos Great Reset and many other grand plans. “Russia’s war on Ukraine split the world into two camps, nations that condemned Vladimir Putin’s invasion and those that di…

Discontinuity

New at the Belmont Club: Joe Biden’s brave new world. Where am I?

The Belmont Club: Inflection Point
The unambiguous loser of the Iran vs Israel war is Joe Biden’s Middle East policy. Any plausible continuation requires a completely different set of people, policies and approach. The former road now seems fundamentally flawed. It’s not a question of waiting for things to blow over and keep going be…

Forever Wars

New at the Belmont Club. Military pointlessness is disproportionate.

The Belmont Club: A War Designed To Be Perpetually Inconclusive Is Not Always Moral
One of the most poorly informed debates in the media coverage of war, is the concept of ‘proportionality’. The average person understands it as a kind of transaction. If X kills N citizens of Y, then Y can fairly retaliate by killing N*(1+i) citizens of X, i being a penalty. But what it really means…