January 05, 2020

Some Perspective On Iran

January 05, 2020/ Francis Menton

As you probably know, over the course of several weeks in December Iranian proxies known as the Kataib Hezbollah carried out multiple attacks against military installations in Iraq.
On January 3, the U.S. military, under orders from President Trump, conducted a retaliatory strike that killed the leader of Iran’s so-called Quds Forces, Qasem Soleimani. Subsequently, Iran has threatened further rounds of retaliation against the U.S., although those have not occurred as of this writing.
Before getting too caught up in the tensions of the current moment, perhaps we should step back and look at how things have been going lately for Iran. The answer is, not very well.
This is one of those things that you can figure out if you look around enough, but rarely is the information compiled in one place. So I’ll do it for you. As I have remarked before, the U.S. has been incredibly blessed over the years by the rank incompetence of its geopolitical adversaries. . . .

January 03, 2020

Thoughts On The Latest Census Data

January 03, 2020/ Francis Menton

On December 30, the Census Bureau issued its latest population numbers, going up through July 2019. Here is a link to the press release; and here is a link to various charts and graphs of statistics.
The long-time official spin on U.S. population changes has been that people are leaving the cold North and East in favor of the warmer South and West. Hey, people like warmer weather!
But while there may be something to that, a closer look supports a strong inference that what people really like is lower taxes, even if accompanied by a lower level of government spending and services. In other words, the news is not good for “blue model” governance.
Some ten states are estimated to have lost population in the year from July 2018 to July 2019; they are Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and West Virginia. Many of those declines are small, and perhaps based on special circumstances (e.g., the decline of Alaska’s North Slope oil fields).
But two states stand out for remarkably large losses. The leader is my own New York, with a loss of about 77,000 residents — 0.39% of population in one year. . . .

December 31, 2019

December 31, 2019/ Francis Menton

Woodrow Wilson was the President who began the transformation of the U.S. federal government into a collection of huge bureaucracies staffed by supposedly neutral and apolitical “experts” who could run things so much better than we ordinary humans could. A hundred plus years into this, we now have dozens of massive bureaucracies staffed by these so-called “experts.”
President Trump appears to have a somewhat different view. The New York Times of December 28 has a piece by Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport that addresses how one particular group of these so-called “experts” — scientific ones — is faring under Trump. The headline is “Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work.”
But do supposed “experts” like scientists or economists in and out of the government really have a clue what they are doing? Or are they just ordinary humans who use the cover of credentials and position to see how much power they can seize unto themselves at everyone else’s expense? Let’s consider some examples that come up here at the end of 2019. I have three good ones for today. . . .

December 29, 2019

December 29, 2019/ Francis Menton

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us.
Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.
If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident.
Overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.
To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism. . . .

December 25, 2019

December 25, 2019/ Francis Menton

The most famous Christmas display in New York City is in Rockefeller Center, but they also put on a good show down on Wall Street, near where my office is located.
You may also know that the corner of Wall and Broad Streets is the very location where George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States in 1789.
It’s not just the Stock Exchange that was founded on Wall Street, but also the federal government of the United States. Don’t let the symbolism of that get lost on you.
It’s been a great year for this blog. We have broken 1 million page views (currently 1.21 million and counting) for the first time, an increase of some 60% over last year. Thanks to all readers for visiting, and especially to those who have added their thoughtful comments to the discussion. . . .

December 22, 2019

December 22, 2019/ Francis Menton

The Washington Post has gotten big play the past couple of weeks for a huge six-part series of articles about the Afghanistan war, all bearing the date of December 9. The overall title is “THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: A secret history of the war.”
You can get the sense of the main point of the series from the headline of the first installment, “At War With The Truth: U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.”
It’s certainly a thesis with surface plausibility, given constant government deception about many subjects.
But does the thesis that the American people have been massively deceived for years about progress in Afghanistan really stand up? I don’t buy it.
I think it’s been obvious for a very long time to anyone who looks at it critically that the Afghanistan war is not “winnable” in any conventional sense. Indeed we don’t even have a working definition of what “winning” might consist of. . . .