Trump’s China gambit
I’m so risk-averse I don’t even like to play the stock market.
My aversion to risk is one of the many, many, many reasons I’m not Donald Trump.
On the other hand, I do own some stocks, and I understand the point of taking risks. I understand that with high risk can come high yield, but if you’re not canny and a little lucky it can come with big losses. And this isn’t true just in the financial world of personal investment. It’s true in general.
When Donald Trump threatened China with tariffs, a lot of pundits and politicians on the left acted as though they didn’t know anything about the idea of taking risks to get positive change. That obviously was what Trump was trying to do, however, and he was wagering that the chance of gain was a lot higher than the chance of failure. One can disagree with Trump’s assessment of his chances of bringing about a good result, but it would seem necessary to at least acknowledge that that was his assessment. But Trump doesn’t often get even that much respect.
Now it seems that a few people on the left are saying—grudgingly and hesitatingly—that maybe, just maybe, Trump’s opening moves will end up working to his advantage. From Robert Kuttner, editor of the left-leaning The American Prospect [emphasis mine]:
Trump started a tariff war with Beijing. China vowed to retaliate in kind. But Beijing was more vulnerable because China has more to lose—it exports far more than it imports and China indeed violates trade norms of fair pricing and fair access.
A number of commentators, me included, faulted Trump for the incoherence of his moves. But Trump’s blunderbuss approach seems to be harming the Chinese economy and catching the leadership off guard.
The incoherence of his moves? What does that even mean? Are they faulting Trump’s rhetoric? Kuttner doesn’t explain, so I’m not sure. But “incoherence” is not usually a problem when you’re making an opening gambit. It’s a move, not a speech.
I use the word “gambit” for a reason. Its definition is:
1. clever action in a game or other situation that is intended to achieve an advantage and usually involves taking a risk
2. a way of beginning a game of chess, in which you intentionally lose a pawn (= game piece) in order to win some other form of advantage later
That’s not esoteric knowledge. Again, you can disagree that an opening gambit such as Trump’s will work in a positive way or as intended. For example, here’s an article about the risk to some of the “pawns”—California farmers (almond growers, for example)—which is considerable and could backfire if this goes on too much longer. But don’t misunderstand the gambit’s essence as an opening move.
The Kuttner message goes on to say [emphasis mine]:
Whether by luck or design, Trump picked a moment when China’s economy was precarious, due to its heavy reliance on debt, the instability of many of its money-losing enterprises, and its inflated stock market.
Oh, so Trump didn’t even take a look at what might be going on in China before he made his move? He just happened to pick that moment, like a blind squirrel finds a nut? That seems pretty preposterous to me. As does this [emphasis mine]:
The Chinese leadership is skilled at scoping out America’s trade policy, cutting separate deals with multinational corporations, buying influence, and besting Washington at trade negotiation. But how do you play chess when the other guy is playing a schoolyard game that he makes up as he goes along?
So not only does Kuttner think Trump’s gambit wasn’t any good except by blind luck, but he doesn’t even think Trump is playing chess. The Chinese are playing chess, of course. But somehow they are possibly being bested by Trump, a guy who doesn’t even know which chess pieces move which way, who just stands there playing some “schoolyard game” like perhaps dodgeball (only he doesn’t even know the rules of that). And yet somehow, when Trump releases the ball, it goes careening out of control and happens to hit the chessboard the other side is playing on, providentially knocking a piece off in exactly the right way to lead Trump one step closer to victory
This meme of Trump the stupid clueless lucky bumbler is very popular, but it really makes little sense on the face of it—particularly in the context of the negotiation of a financial deal by Trump. After all, it’s not as though Trump hasn’t announced his intentions of making better deals for the US and written a book on his deal-making tactics and strategy.
[NOTE: When Trump started his threatening of China, I wrote a post, too. At the moment, I think it holds up pretty darn well. Excerpt:
The MSM and many others often treat Trump’s proposals as something he wants to actually do, because they might be something he actually wants to do. But Trump also might be just making the opening move in a negotiation game. ]
Of course Trump is guilty because we say he is
Josh Marshall on Trump and Russia:
The greatest conceit in public life today is the notion that we don’t already know President Trump is guilty. Guilty of what? Conspiring, by whatever level of directness, with a foreign power to win the Presidency and then continuing to cater to that foreign power either as payback for the assistance or out of fear of being exposed. In other words, collusion, a national betrayal that may break some statute laws but which far transcends them and isn’t in the past but is rather on-going.
Evidence? Marshall doesn’t need it. Mueller? He must be in on the Trump-exonerating conceit too. Hillary Clinton and Fusion and the Steele dossier? Let’s not pay any attention to that evidence, either.
Then there’s how hard Trump actually has been on Russia in terms of policy. Ignore. And don’t ask yourself why “we” on the left (and that’s who Marshall is addressing; not the right) would be going so easy on Trump and denying what we know is true. Could it be that we don’t hate him quite enough?
One of the most touching of the #Walkaway stories
I’ve now watched a great many #WalkAway videos at YouTube. If you’re not familiar with #WalkAway, it’s a movement of people attesting to their decision to walk away from the Democratic Party and/or voting consistently liberal.
That doesn’t necessarily make them Republicans or conservatives at this point. One of the hallmarks of these stories is that the tellers all don’t end up in exactly the same place politically—so far, anyway, because the movement is rather young and most of these people had their “walk away” moments relatively recently. But portions of their stories are remarkably similar, and definite patterns emerge.
Obviously I’ve been taking a great interest in this movement. Something of the sort—something I’ve called by the much less catchy name “political change”—has occupied and fascinated me for over 15 years. I’ve also written reams about it on this blog (see categories on right sidebar), beginning in late 2004. So I plan to say a lot more about (and to) the #WalkAway movement, which is composed to a large extent of young people.
Here’s a video that I found particularly moving in the emotional sense. I’ve edited out the first six minutes or so in order to cut to the chase:
Here’s another that’s in the same vein, but far shorter.
This next one is very different, much more cerebral but still very interesting, and in this case entertaining because the speaker is pretty humorous. I’ve cued it up to start towards the middle; the first part mainly involves him saying he was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016. This guy had a very accelerated change experience, because everything he describes from here on occurred after Trump announced his talks with North Korea’s Kim:
The propaganda from the left says the WalkAway movement is fake and that the people in it are mostly Russian bots. Originally the WalkAway stories were just text (I believe on Facebook), but after that accusation, a lot of people have posted YouTube videos to show they’re not Russian bots.
And of course, the left probably doesn’t really expect anyone going to the website and reading the WalkAway stories to think, “Russian bots, naturally!” or watch the WalkAway videos and say, “Obviously, that’s a Russian bot!” The purpose, as with so much leftist propaganda, is to get liberals to dismiss the movement out of hand and not become curious enough to even go there and read or watch for themselves. If they were to read or watch, it might be the genesis of their own WalkAway process, and that must be prevented. Best way to prevent it is to make them believe it’s not worth the time or trouble to find out, but to just take the left’s word for it.
A lot of these change stories began with a person becoming curious and doing research for him or herself. That’s how my story began, too, so many years ago.
Hungary’s Orban and government censorship of the academy
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is continually referred to as “far right.” And perhaps he is. For example, I saw this article describing how Orban has decided to ban gender studies programs in the two universities in Hungary that have offered them in the first place. The headline is quite alarming (and I read similar ones elsewhere): “Viktor Orban moves to ban gender studies courses at university in ‘dangerous precedent’ for Hungary.”
What Prime Minister does such a thing, except one who is bent on stifling civil liberties and on a path to tyranny? Even the teaching of the often-useless and always-leftist topic of gender studies should be the school’s decision, not the government’s.
But a little bell went off in my head, sounding a note of doubt. Is this really what Orban had proposed? Or was it something milder than a ban?
So I turned to the body of the article. It did seem as though they were indeed talking about a ban [emphasis mine]:
A proposal by the Hungarian government to ban gender studies at universities in the country has been criticised as a “dangerous precedent” for state interference.
Hungary’s ministry for human capacities said the proposed ban, which would come into effect at the start of the 2019 academic year, had been introduced because employers showed no interest in graduates from the subject.
But critics say the ban is part of a campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to attack NGOs or institutions that oppose his Fidesz party’s socially conservative narrative.
Andrea Peto, a gender studies professor at the Central European University, one of the two universities that could be affected, said the proposed ban violated the Hungarian constitution, which protects the freedom of scientific research and learning.
And the reason for the ban sure sounds odd, doesn’t it? If employers aren’t interested, why not stand back and let the market take care of it?
I read the entire article and it was quite consistent in describing the proposed action as a “ban.” But that little bell of doubt kept going off in my mind, and so I kept looking. And then I found this, which told a slightly different story [emphasis mine]:
Hungary’s government will stop financing gender studies university courses, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Tuesday, marking one of the first concrete steps in a cultural shift signaled last month…
Gender studies courses are taught at the state-run university ELTE and Central European University, which are among the top universities in Hungary.
Gulyas said those already enrolled could finish their studies but Budapest would stop financing the courses from the next academic year.
Ah. So we learn two things from this article. The first is that it’s not a ban, it’s a defunding. The second is that one of the two universities in Hungary that even offer gender studies in the first place is run by the state. So why should the state pay for something it considers counterproductive and worthless?
I’m actually not the least bit in favor of governments banning areas of coursework. But withdrawing funds is a different thing, although if the state university is the only school that teaches a certain course, then withdrawing funds has the effect of eliminating it. However, if someone or some group wants to start a private college and offer it, providing their own funding, they are still free to do so.
Or so it would seem. After reading about six articles on this and trying to decipher what might actually be happening,I gave up because the truth was remarkably elusive.
It does indeed appear, however, as though a sort of reverse cultural revolution might be taking place in Hungary, a campaign by Orban’s party to restore the older ways and stamp out some of the leftist/progressive cultural agenda:
The most recent cultural target of the pro-Orban press is a Budapest exhibition of the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, which was denounced in an article headlined: “This is the way communism is promoted using state money.” Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and had an affair with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
In June, the Hungarian state opera scrapped several performances of the ballet musical Billy Elliot after the same right-wing newspaper called it “gay propaganda”.
Szilvester Okovacs, the opera’s general director, insisted that commercial rather than political pressures were behind the decision. This week, he announced that the theme for the opera’s 2019-2020 season would be “Christianity”.
Orban wants the Granscian march to go in the other direction for a change. And (as I wrote recently), Europe has a much weaker tradition of “liberal capitalism—the Enlightenment, Locke and the rest” than the US does. So it would be no surprise if Orban had instituted a ban, and started more heavy-handed direction of the country’s cultural life, although it’s not at all clear that those moves are occurring right now.
Why are so many intellectuals collectivists?
Milton Friedman’s answer to the question, circa 1972:
I think it’s in their own self-interest, in a double way. First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system. In the 1930s, the New Deal created an enormous number of jobs that didn’t exist before for intellectuals. I had one myself, so I am speaking from personal experience. There has been a “drang nach Washington” since the New Deal which intellectuals everywhere recognize as having improved their personal status. Second, it is much easier to sell simple-minded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the same basic topic approximately forty years later. I have only read a small portion of it, but I recommend just about everything Sowell ever wrote.
What the heat wave in Britain has revealed
When I first read the headline of this article—“‘Millennia of human activity’: heatwave reveals lost UK archaeological sites”—I imagined something like a fantasy movie in which some hulking ancient ruin comes heaving out of the ground, astounding the watching crowd.
But that’s not what’s actually happening, which is this sort of thing:
Those are what’s called scorch marks:
Lost sites have been turning up all over Britain and Ireland, ploughed flat at ground level but showing up as parch marks from the air, in areas where grass and crops grow at different heights, or show in different colours, over buried foundations and ditches. A treasure trove of discoveries, including ancient field boundaries, lost villages, burial mounds and military structures, was revealed on Wednesday, recorded during the summer by aerial archaeologists flying over the landscape for Historic England…
Among dozens of sites revealed in Cornwall were an unusual prehistoric settlement surrounded by concentric ditches at Lansallos, and an iron age settlement surrounded by a circular ditch with marks of other circular and rectangular structures within one field at St Ive – evidence of continuity of settlement over at least 4,000 years.
What is believed to be a Roman farm, with buildings, fields and paddocks, has showed up at Bicton in Devon, and at Stogumber in Somerset four bronze and iron age farms have been spotted, one with signs of having been abandoned and a new settlement built on top.
It’s as though these structures and settlements had been written in invisible ink, and the drought was the catalyst for revealing the messages they hold. Excavation will further reveal them.
It’s interesting, too, that in a slight parallel, some invisible inks are revealed by the process of being heated, which usually turns them brown.
Another study on low-carb diets…
…comes up with some interesting results that might disturb advocates of low-carb diets:
In a large cohort of adults living in four diverse US communities, with more than two decades of follow-up, mid-life dietary patterns marked by both low carbohydrate (<40% of energy from carbohydrate) and high carbohydrate (>70% of energy from carbohydrate) consumption were associated with increased mortality risk and shorter residual lifespan, with minimum risk observed with 50–55% of energy from carbohydrate. These findings reflect a U-shaped relationship between carbohydrate intake and mortality, and were corroborated by data from other North American, European, Asian and multinational cohorts, combined as part of a meta-analysis. However, low carbohydrate dietary patterns that replaced energy from carbohydrate with energy from animal-derived protein or fat were associated with greater risk. However, this association was reversed when energy from carbohydrate was replaced with plant-derived protein or fat.
I’ve written many times about my own experiences with low-carb diets, as regular readers here probably know, but the summary version is that I hate them for many reasons, including a very important one: I don’t lose weight on them. I also don’t like eating a lot of meat or cheese of any kind, and it makes me feel lousy. Really lousy. Among other things, my digestive system shuts down. It’s just a miserable, unproductive experience for me.
But I know a lot of people love and swear by them, and that they say that their bloodwork improves immensely and they feel and look better. More power to you, folks.
I believe that low-carb advocates will shrug off the findings mentioned in that quote about the study, for the following reasons and probably more:
—they’ll say the low-carb diets studied don’t reflect the type of diet they advocate.
—they’ll say that studies of diet and health that rely on self-report of food intake have inherent flaws
—they’ll say that other studies don’t find the same results, so this one is an outlier (I’m not sure, though, that the other studies measured all-cause mortality, which this one appears to do, so it may be apples and oranges).
One thing I have noticed, here and on other sites, is that some low-carb advocates treat it almost as a religion, and they proselytize. I cannot tell you how often, when I write any sort of post on the topic of these diets, people come here and ignore what I’ve written about how low-carb diets have worked (or not worked) on me in the past. There’s also a tendency among advocates to become hyper-rigid about diet.
What’s more, some of the historic arguments about paleo don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Humans have been eating grains and fruits and vegetables and cereals for many thousands of years—different forms of the foodstuffs, to different extents, in different societies—and I think it stands to reason that there has been quite a bit of evolution and natural selection to deal with that since the earlier time when paleo diets supposedly were dominant.
But I’m not trying to talk anyone out of something that seems to work for that person. I think we still know very little about optimal diets, and I also think that each individual reacts very differently to diets and we especially don’t know how to tailor dietary instructions to the individual.
Aretha Franklin has died
She had a troubled life in certain ways, but boy could that woman ever sing.
Most people think of “Respect” as Aretha Franklin’s anthem, and I suppose it was. I liked a great many of her songs very much—including that one—but this one had a special place in my heart:
RIP, Aretha Franklin.
What I saw today in Tuscany
San Gimignano is a lovely place, but not quite as lovely when all the parking lots are full and you must circle around and around the town loop looking for a space to open up in one of the lots, along a lot of other circling cars. And it’s really really hot climbing up those hills. On the other hand, if you can climb in a patch of shade, it feels much better.
This is the beautiful setting:
And one of the entrances to the town taken from in-town:
Brennan’s security clearance revoked
Good. The only bad part about the news is that it gives Brennan the golden opportunity to be in the limelight again, and to fume against Trump—his favorite position and his favorite occupation.
I really don’t question this decision of Trump’s, which is one of those overdetermined moves:
“Erratic” properly describes [Brenna’s] shrill and often mindless attacks on Trump. Moreover, his hatred of the president is so palpable that one can easily imagine him using access to secret information to harm the administration.
To be sure words like “erratic,” “shrill,” “mindless,” and “hatred” are not objective terms…
However, in Brennan’s case, objective factors also support Trump’s decision. Brennan was caught lying about breaking into the computers of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s staff. And, reportedly, he’s in jeopardy with the House Intelligence Committee for lying to Congress about the anti-Trump dossier that collection of falsehoods gathered by partisans for partisan purposes. Indeed, Brennan appears to have played a significant role in promoting the dossier as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump.
A guy like that really ought not have a security clearance…
Brennan, of course, is talking about how his freedom of speech is being curtailed as he gives interviews about the subject of how intimidating this could be. Well, he doesn’t seem at all intimidated and it probably wouldn’t intimidate most people who are no longer in jobs that require such clearance. It also might serve notice to subsequent heads of the CIA or ex-heads of the CIA not to leak or to lie, or to demonstrate extreme partisanship and animus against a president, and still expect to get access to sensitive and confidential information (after retiring) that they will then try to use to destroy that president. Works for me, no matter who the president might be. No president owes such people anything at that point. And they remain perfectly free to talk.
But there’s another factor regarding Brennan and his clearance, one I discussed at some length in this previous post, which can be summarized as the fact that I think Brennan should never have gotten a security clearance from the CIA in the first place, much less become head of that organization.
I also believe—as I wrote in this post—that former officials should not automatically retain their security clearances after leaving office.
Why socialism is okay now (and, did you even actually listen to some of the claptrap that emanates from Bernie Sanders’ mouth?)
Seems that socialism is no longer a dirty word these days in the US as long as you call it “democratic socialism.” How did socialism get rehabilitated?
I suppose that enough kids have finally matured who got little at school to counter the idea of socialism (or who actually heard it touted), and who don’t personally remember Communism and the Cold War. They think there’s something very nice about socialism; can’t we all just be more equal?
And then in 2016 the candidacy of Bernie Sanders legitimized it. Grandpa the socialist was surprisingly attractive to a lot of young people. He also made the Democratic primaries far more interesting than they otherwise would have been.
I believe that initially Sanders was mostly there to give Hillary Clinton enough competition to stop the Democratic race from being such a big snoozefest that no one paid attention. He wasn’t expected to be competitive–old white Jewish socialist guy–but when he appeared to be developing into a serious challenge to Clinton, it was probably panic time for the Democratic party establishment, who set about making sure he didn’t actually get the nomination. They had no intention of letting him do that, and it didn’t happen (superdelegates, anyone?).
But Bernie’s candidacy was the gift that kept on giving to the growing leftist wing of the party, because his popularity let the Democratic Party know what they hadn’t known up till that point and probably didn’t see coming, either: that it was now possible for them to claim the mantle of socialism and give it voice. No need to hide any more—although they may be a bit premature on that.
If you take a trip back in time, Bernie Sanders used to be quite cagey and secretive about the socialist that he undoubtedly was and is. I find these quotes pretty extraordinary in their open admission of deception:
Sanders, 73, has been preaching socialism for nearly half a century, and he cites Eugene Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, as his hero. But he hasn’t always embraced the label.
“I myself don’t use the word socialism,” he said in 1976 in the Vermont Cynic, a student publication at the University of Vermont, “because people have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech.”
Brainwashed, eh?
Here’s one of my favorites:
“I’ve stayed away from calling myself a socialist,” Sanders said in the Boston Globe in the aftermath of his win in ‘81, “because I did not want to spend half my life explaining that I did not believe in the Soviet Union or in concentration camps.”
Wouldn’t want to actually have to answer any questions about where leftism has so often led, would we?
And here’s Bernie’s definition of socialism. You can see where that “democratic” label came from in the recent move to call it “democratic socialism”:
All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small ‘d.’ I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who’s making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well.”
You see? Socialism is just economic democracy, my friends. Nothing to fear.