In all the fuss and bother about the coming presidential election, there has been remarkably little talk about skyrocketing US deficit and the resulting skyrocketing interest’s payments. Regardless of who is president, these are going to be the things that govern what the ruling class can do. But these concerns still don’t factor into the political discourse although they are starting to come up with increasing frequency in the financial press. So I want to take step back from all the political drama and review the essay “Why you should panic about the US Deficit” that I wrote in September of last year.
The recent Israeli attack against Yemen reinforces my view of the Israeli/Iran balance of terror. For those who have not been following the story, the Houthis managed to fly a drone that got through Israeli’s air defenses and hit Tel Aviv. In response, Israel blew up a bunch of oil storage and dock cranes in Houthi’s only port that they control. The result was very striking images of burning fuel that continued for quite some time. I have seen it alleged that Israel chose to target the fuel depots just because they knew that that they would produce very striking visuals for all population living under Houthi rule to see.
Now Israel tried to dress this attack up as attacking military targets on the grounds that the port was being used to import Iranian weapons. But what they were fundamentally trying to do is put the only port that the Houthis control out of action. As all the bleeding heart aid groups were quick to point out, this threatened all the food aid that was coming into Houthi controlled territory and “continued the pattern of Israel using starvation as weapon.” I don’t know how much Israel is really trying to use starvation as weapon and how much they are truly trying to make it difficult for the Houthis to import the things needed to keep themselves armed like the Israelis claimed. But in a practical sense, there is no difference because when you truly start targeting the crucial infrastructure you threatening a society’s ability to function in both a military and a civilian sense.
What I am driving at is that this situation demonstrates the point I was trying to make in “A Strategic Overview of The Conflict Between Iran and Israel.” The fact that America had a carrier group sitting off the coast of Yemen bombing “military targets” for long time now without accomplishing anything helps make the point of why Israel would not target pure “military” targets. When Israel was the victim of successful attack on the heart of their economy (which is based around Tel Aviv in terms of where the GDP is generated), they immediately struck what is an essential economic target in Yemen. They did not waste their limited ability to get planes down into the area to strike at “military targets” because as the Americans have shown that does not work.
What is more striking is how dramatic this attack was compared to other recent counter strikes by Israel. Iran fired a ton of missiles at Israel and got a much more subdued counterstrike then the Houthis got for landing one successful drone attack. But as I pointed out in my Strategic Overview, Iran only aimed their serious weapons (as far as we can tell) at military targets. So in response they got a much milder counterstrike. The same can be said for the on going tit for tat with Hezbollah. Israel has been killing Hezbollah targets left and right but no dramatic attacks like the one the Houthis got. And I think that this is because Hezbollah has been careful not to strike at areas of core importance to the Israeli economy. What the attack on the Houthis illustrated is what Israel really feels sensitive about and how they respond to what they regard as true threats.
Much has been made about how the fact that the attack on the Houthis shows that Israel can strike Iran because the distance is similar. In one sense this ignores the fact that that striking Iran requires flying over other nations while the attack on Yemen did not and the fact that Houthis have no air defense to speak of. But in other sense, this does demonstrate that Israel recognizes the futility of attacking “military targets” in Iran. If Israel does not feel able to hunt “military targets” in Yemen where they don’t have to worry any kind of serious air defenses, why would they go through the effort of trying to hit those targets in a much better defended Iran?
This is hardly a novel idea on my part. The implications for Iran’s oil export infrastructure are mentioned in the below video which also recaps the entire story in a rather dry way.
In once sense this discussion is nothing but an interesting intellectual exercise. But in another sense, it should tell you that as the risk of an Iran/Israel conflict heats up, the risk of a sharp rise in oil prices also climbs dramatically. Oil prices are set at the margin and that means even small changes in supply can produce outsize swings in prices until weaker parties are priced out of the market. Iran is the fourth largest oil exporter in the world. If they are taken out of the market in a sudden fashion, the swings in oil prices will be extreme.
As Iran/Hezbollah and Israel head towards a conflict that neither of them seems to want but neither of them seems to be able to avoid, it is worth stepping back and taking a look at the overall strategic picture between those two warring parties. Because of the high emotions that surround this conflict, the reporting is particularly bad regardless of which sides reporting you get. In a world that grows ever more divided, the Israel and Iran conflict still stands out as one in which it is particularly hard to get a dispassionate analysis. For this reason, I think it worthwhile to review basic facts that tend to get forgotten in the high emotions that surround this conflict.
The fundamental problem with most analysis of the conflict between Iran and Israel is that it often reduces the conflict to one of mutual hatred. Iran hates Israel and Israel hates Iran and so they fight. Therefore, the people talking about the conflict pick a side depending on their tribal preferences and hype up the conflict as if it was a sport’s game that both sides were trying to win. What this type of analysis misses is that both Iran and Israel draw benefits from the existence of the other even as they hate each other. To understand this paradox, you must look deeper into the strategic factors at play then is normally portrayed in your average news story. Continue reading →
When I was a young child I went to a live enactment of Peter Pan. We children were enjoined to clap our hands and believe so that Tinker Bell would live. Even though I was a child, I was angry and insulted that we were being asked to believe that my belief or lack therefore had any impact on Tinker Bell living. If it was up to me, she would have died on the spot. Fortunately for the script, the other children were more tractable.
Is faith clapping your hands and believing what the nice man on the stage tells you to believe?
There are many who grew up in Christian churches for whom the Christian faith is no different than children clapping their hands so that Tinker Bell can live. The lived it. They grew up in it. They found nothing but fakery and make believe in the entire experience. For them faith is a dirty word. An expression used only by charlatans and the credulous. Continue reading →
Yesterday I read an article on Ars Technica called “Why the US government’s overreliance on Microsoft is a big problem.” It was one of those things that I read that did not make the cut as I did not think there was anything educational enough in the article to be worth passing along. But one comment in the article about the reliance of Microsoft in effect creating a huge single point of failure stuck with me and made me think long after I could no longer remember what else was in the article.
One of the things that bugs me is when people talk about how to government should do this or do that to prepare for some possible disaster but don’t take responsibility for doing even the smallest things themselves. If people took even small steps towards preparedness it would make them less of a burden in those same disasters and in aggregate be more beneficial most things people want the government to do. So if you think it is stupid for the government to create a massive over reliance on Microsoft what are you doing in your life that makes it so you have alternatives?
On one hand, my reaction to those thoughts is that if Microsoft and its products ever fail in a systematic way I will have much bigger problems then if I have a spare laptop that can run a Linux distro or not. Also, I have limited bandwidth to deal with various contingencies and things like clean water or ways to deal with gas shortages seem higher on the list then the ability to use a computer.
On the other hand, this reaction is tempered by my recent experience with the COVID pandemic. If you had asked me prior to everything kicking off what would be the likely result of a pandemic, I would have talked about supply chain disruptions. This would have been no act of genius on my part. The historical record clearly indicates that those are common problems during serious pandemics and everyone pre-COVID who bothered to think about pandemics had the same concerns. So this was no great genius on my part but the experience of COVID showed that those concerns are well founded (even if in COVID’s case the issues were more caused by mass hysteria then any real impact caused by COVID itself).
But what I would not have predicted is that the single best prep for my extended family would be an investment in increasing the reliability and speed of the internet connection. In fact, if you had asked me prior to COVID if spending money on better internet was a good way to prepare for a pandemic, I would have told you no. I would have said that it was better to spend the money on backup power sources/greater food storage instead. And maybe if the Black Death came again I would have been right.
As it turns out, Black Death has not yet come again. And for our particular family and for the particular insanity that was COVID, investing in better internet was best preparation that could have been done even though it was not done for that reason. I guess the lesson here is that becoming more resilient is not all about preparing for the end of the world. Sometimes it is worth investing in a little redundancy in the things that are important to you just because you never know what kind of curve balls will be thrown at you.
I would not invest a couple of hours to make it so that I had a slim chance to play computer games even if someone hijacked Microsoft’s update system to bring down everyone with a windows computer. But would I invest a few hours to enable myself to still have some word processing and maybe basic spreadsheet abilities simply by creating a way to boot up my laptop on Linux if I wanted to? If the cost for doing so really was that low (as rumor has it) maybe it is something I should move up on my to do list.
When I originally started this website, I felt that just providing links with no commentary provided no value. When I felt that the commentary I was providing was worthless and I did not have time to improve on it, I let the blog die for awhile.
A chance comment that let me know that someone missed seeing my links to stuff he did not normally see on his own lead to reactivation of this blog as a link centric thing that it is now. It might be very low value added, but it is very low cost to me as well. It adds very little time cost to keep a window open and add links to it as I go about my reading. My main trouble is to remember to hit publish when I am all done.
But even though it is low cost, there is editing involved. I don’t post to a link to everything I read. I try to keep it to things that I think might have at least one or two people besides myself who would find it interesting. And I worry that having too many links will crowd out the ones that are really interesting and of value to other people. So I thought I would go over the thought process behind yesterday’s links for the day and see if my readers had any thoughts on what added value and what did not. Continue reading →
Stereotypically speaking, your average elite are in favor of more taxpayer support for Ukraine than your average hillbilly. But your average hillbilly is more willing to take seized Russian assets and give them to Ukraine then most members of the elite. As usual, the elite position makes no sense to the average hillbilly. You want to spend extra taxpayer money on Ukraine but you don’t want to spend Russian money that has already been seized? What kind of logic is that?
To be honest, I am a little bit in the hillbilly camp here. I am not sure I do understand the logic. But I have more faith in the average elite then most blue collar folks do in that I believe the elites usually have reasons for what they do. Often they are cowardly reasons. Often they are the result of trying to avoid making hard choices so that they can have their cake and eat it as well. But the hillbilly solutions are almost never as simple and consequence free as your average redneck believes. So I am presupposed to believe that there is a reason that your average elite is more willing to spend taxpayer dollars then seized Russian dollars to fund Ukraine. But that still leaves the question of why? Continue reading →
In a recent post, I said “Regardless of what happens in the War in Ukraine, Russia has 20 years at most before its political system breaks down.” I did not go into why that was the case because it was not main focus of that particular post so today I figured I would rectify that. Continue reading →
In 1930 there were a lot of people who would have predicted that communism would be a major threat to the western way of life (including the communist themselves who had this as an openly avowed goal). The first “red scares” date to shortly after World War I and never went away as a concern for the religious, the small farmers, and the business elite. This fear of the communists would lead many to embrace or at least tolerate fascism on the grounds that it was a useful counterweight to the communists. No one up to the time that World War II started would have thought that next world war would have been fought against the fascists by both communists and the Anglo-Saxon world. Such an alliance would have been inconceivable to those who knew the level of hate and distrust between the ruling classes in the Anglo-Saxon World and the Soviet Union.
The people who predicted that communism would be a major threat to the Anglo-Saxon world were right. But those who sole matrix for looking at the world was communism and the huge threat it presented were often the most blind to dangers posed by the Nazis. Churchill was a famous exception this rule, but even he did not start warning about the rise of Germany until 1933. And his supposed fellow conservative Neville Chamberlain would write “The real danger to this country is Winston. He is the warmonger, not Hitler.” What is often forgotten is that Chamberlain way of looking at the world was the rule on the right and Churchill was exception. Conservatives by and large were blind to the threat posed by the Nazis because they feared communism so much.
Fast forward to today and many are obsessed with demographics and with good reason. There is no more sure guide to the future available to mankind then the study of demographics. We might not know how many people will die in the next 20 years, but we can say with a high degree of confidence what the maximum number of 20 year old can exist in 20 years time because those people will have been born today. And those numbers are so horrific for many countries that those who are aware of the numbers can’t stop thinking about them or interpreting everything they see in the light of those numbers. But there are more things that can profoundly change our world then just a free fall in the numbers of babies being born as bad as that can be over the long term.
A while back Trump was praising himself for the increased spending by NATO countries that has happened during and after his time in office. Just to make sure he got a lot of air time, he threw in a gratuitous comment about how he would not defend and in fact encourage Russia to attack NATO countries that did not pay their fair sure. Predictably, this worked like a charm and all the shrieking Karens went around talking about what a bad man he was and how horribly irresponsible he was.
All they accomplished by all this caterwauling was to further convince the poorer economic classes that Trump was their man. All your working class people heard in all that screeching was a defense of NATO free riding on the poor working class taxpayer. And why should they pay for the defense of those effete snobs when the border is wide open and food prices are sky high?
Contrary to Trump, I think the improvement on this front (slight as it has been) has more to do with Putin then Trump. But this quibbling about small details is not a productive way to counter Trump. Especially when any fair-minded review of recent history will show that while serving as president Trump brought more attention and pressure to bear on this issue than any other President in the post cold-war era. I think he did this mostly because his strategy is the find the weak points in the ruling classes that shun him and hammer them for all they are worth then him having an particular strategic concerns. Nonetheless, the fact remains that he did more on the issue then his contemporaries.
The below video gives a pretty fair overview of the situation including quoting Trump in all his glory….
Regardless of what you think about the above facts, those running around outraged by what Trump has said are doing nothing to improve the national discourse. But those running around being outraged by the ruling class are not doing any better either. All too often their arguments boil down to simply repeating that the ruling class is stupid and corrupt and trying to imply that all the problems with the world would be so much better as long as their messiah was made president. What is missing is people trying to explain the issues and facts involved. What is missing is people arguing about an issue instead of personalities. And that is where Republican Representative Mike Turner has taken steps to improve the situation. Continue reading →
