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…