Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Jeff Buchanan]

I thought Tucker's dialogue on the US Economy and how the Biden administrations is responsible for its woes was over-the-top but it was well put together. If you're into bashing the Biden administration and the liberal left Ds, it resonates. My take is that its journalistic hyperbole designed to shape a particular narrative.

Economics is hard. I managed an overall C in 4 semesters of it at M in the 60s, the department dominated by Milton Freidman's economic thinking. I remember little except that I was taught about Friedman's “Stabilization” policies. That refers to correcting the normal behavior of the business cycle thus enhancing economic stability. The term generally refers to "demand management" by Fiscal and Monetary policy to reduce normal fluctuations and output. Also referred to as "keeping the economy on an even keel."

The Biden administration's spending, as a matter of fiscal policy, would be inconsistent with Friedman's approach. This is one specific area that Biden (well, the congressional political left that he seems to be catering to) deserves criticism if you are a follower of Friedman's views. The problem I have with Carlson's criticisms are that they lack context. If he had offered conflicting viewpoints, such viewpoints based on opposing economic philosophies, e.g., MMT, and compared and contrasted them, his piece would have had some weight.

To me all he did was run videos of Biden, Janet Yellen, Larry Summers et.al. making them look stupid by extension the current administration's economic policies are stupid. People are going to look stupid trying to explain complex economic principles in 15 second takes. Low hanging fruit for Carlson that he exploits. None of these people, including Biden's writers, are likely to be "stupid" if you were to read anything they have written or published.

Shaping a narrative, whether it is fact based or biased toward a political viewpoint, is the task of today for political journalism. That viewpoint is important to understand, to recognize when it's happening and to work to understand that other narratives exist.

[Jeff Buchanan]

For those that think what Putin is doing in Ukraine isn't really affecting us and our national interest, I'm going to risk posting a pay-walled Economist article that I found profoundly important in understanding Vladimir Putin, his brand of fascism and the global risks to social liberalism and Democracy his actions and his political views present to us. Here goes - its in two parts:

What matters most in Moscow these days is what is missing. Nobody speaks openly of the war in Ukraine. The word is banned and talk is dangerous. The only trace of the fighting going on 1,000km to the south is advertising hoardings covered with portraits of heroic soldiers. And yet Russia is in the midst of a war.

In the same way, Moscow has no torch processions. Displays of the half-swastika “z” sign, representing support for the war, are rare. Stormtroopers do not stage pogroms. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ageing dictator, does not rally crowds of ecstatic youth or call for mass mobilisation. And yet Russia is in the grip of fascism.

Just as Moscow conceals its war behind a “special military operation”, so it conceals its fascism behind a campaign to eradicate “Nazis” in Ukraine. Nevertheless Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University, detects the tell-tale symptoms: “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism,” he wrote recently in the New York Times, “but today’s Russia meets most of the criteria.”

The Kremlin has built a cult of personality around Mr Putin and a cult of the dead around the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. Mr Putin’s regime yearns to restore a lost golden age and for Russia to be purged by healing violence. You could add to Mr Snyder’s list a hatred of homosexuality, a fixation with the traditional family and a fanatical faith in the power of the state. None of these come naturally in a secular country with a strong anarchist streak and permissive views on sex.

Understanding where Russia is going under Mr Putin means understanding where it has come from. For much of his rule, the West saw Russia as a mafia state presiding over an atomised society. That was not wrong, but it was incomplete. A decade ago Mr Putin’s popularity began to wane. He responded by drawing on the fascist thinking that had re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This may have begun as a political calculation, but Mr Putin got caught up in a cycle of grievance and resentment that has left reason far behind. It has culminated in a ruinous war that many thought would never happen precisely because it defied the weighing of risks and rewards.

Under Mr Putin’s form of fascism, Russia is set on a course that knows no turning back. Without the rhetoric of victimhood and the use of violence, Mr Putin has nothing to offer his people. For Western democracies this onward march means that, while he is in power, dealings with Russia will be riven by hostility and contempt. Some in the West want a return to business as usual once the war is over, but there can be no true peace with a fascist Russia.

For Ukraine, this means a long war. Mr Putin’s aim is not only to take territory, but to crush the democratic ideal that is flourishing among Russia’s neighbours and their sense of separate national identity. He cannot afford to lose. Even if there is a ceasefire, he is intent on making Ukraine fail, with a fresh use of force if necessary. It means that he will use violence and totalitarianism to impose his will at home. He is not only out to crush a free Ukraine, but is also waging war against the best dreams of his own people. So far he is winning.

War is peace

What is Russian fascism? The f word is often tossed around casually. It has no settled definition, but it feeds on exceptionalism and ressentiment, a mixture of jealousy and frustration born out of humiliation. In Russia’s case, the source of this humiliation is not defeat by foreign powers, but abuse suffered by the people at the hands of their own rulers. Deprived of agency and fearful of the authorities, they seek compensation in an imaginary revenge against enemies appointed by the state.

Fascism involves performances—think of all those rallies and uniforms—laced with the thrill of real violence. In all its varieties, Mr Snyder says, it is characterised by the triumph of the will over reason. His essay was entitled “We should say it. Russia is fascist”. In fact the first to talk about it were Russians themselves. One of them was Yegor Gaidar, the first post-Soviet prime minister. In 2007 he saw a spectre rising from Russia’s post-imperial nostalgia. “Russia is going through a dangerous phase,” he wrote. “We should not succumb to the magic of numbers but the fact that there was a 15-year gap between the collapse of the German Empire and Hitler’s rise to power and 15 years between the collapse of the ussr and Russia in 2006-07 makes one think…”

By 2014 Boris Nemtsov, another liberal politician, was clear: “Aggression and cruelty are stoked by the television while the key definitions are supplied by the slightly possessed Kremlin master…The Kremlin is cultivating and rewarding the lowest instincts in people, provoking hatred and fighting. This hell cannot end peacefully.”

A year later Nemtsov, by then labelled a “national traitor”, was murdered beside the Kremlin. In his final interview, a few hours before his death, he warned that “Russia is rapidly turning into a fascist state. We already have propaganda modelled after Nazi Germany. We also have a nucleus of assault brigades…That’s just the beginning.”

Nobody has signalled the growing influence of fascism more loudly than Mr Putin and his acolytes. Far from Moscow’s prosperous streets, the Kremlin has marked tanks, people and television channels with the letter z. The half-swastika has been painted on the doors of Russian film and theatre critics, promoters of “decadent and degenerate” Western art. Hospital patients and groups of children, some kneeling, have been arranged to form half-swastikas for posting online.

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin, an exiled German cultural critic, analysed fascism as a performance. “The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” he wrote. These aesthetics were designed to supplant reason and their ultimate expression was war.

Today the two faces of the war on television, Vladimir Solovyov and Olga Skabeeva, are caricatures of Nazi propagandists. Mr Solovyov is often dressed in a black double-breasted Bavarian-style jacket. Ms Skabeeva, severe and chiselled, has a hint of the dominatrix. They project hatred and aggression. They and their guests decry the West for having declared war on Russia and plead theatrically with Mr Putin to reduce it to ashes by unleashing the full might of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

This fantasy Armageddon is matched by real violence, the basis of the relationship between the Russian state and its people. A Levada poll commissioned by Committee Against Torture (now itself blacklisted) showed that 10% of the Russian population has experienced torture by law-enforcement agencies at some point. There is a culture of cruelty. Domestic abuse is no longer a crime in Russia. In the first week of the war young women protesters were humiliated and sexually abused in police cells. Nearly 30% of Russians say torture should be allowed.

Atrocities committed by the Russian army in Bucha and other occupied cities are not just excesses of war or a breakdown in discipline, but a feature of army life that is spread more widely by veterans. The 64th Motor Rifle Brigade, which allegedly carried out the atrocities, was honoured by Mr Putin with the title of “Guards” for defending the “motherland and state interests” and praised for its “mass heroism and valour, tenacity and courage”. The brigade, based in the far east, is notorious in Russia for its bullying and abuse.

Like much else coming from the Kremlin, fascism is a top-down project, a move by the ruling elite rather than a grassroots movement. It requires passive acceptance rather than mobilisation of the masses. Its aim is to disengage people and prevent any form of self-organisation. The Kremlin and television bosses can turn it up and down. In the early years of his presidency Mr Putin used money to keep the people out of politics. After the economy stalled in 2011-12 and the urban middle class came out on the streets to demand more rights, he stoked nationalism and hatred. During the political calm after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 fascism was turned down as suddenly as it had come up.

Its resurgence in 2021-22 followed the decline in Mr Putin’s legitimacy, protests against the poisoning and arrest of Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, and the growing alienation of younger Russians who are less susceptible to television propaganda and more open to the West. To them Mr Putin was an ageing, vengeful and corrupt grandpa who had a secret palace exposed by Mr Navalny’s much-watched YouTube film in 2021. Mr Putin needed to turn the volume back up again and Ukraine offered him the means.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Freedom is slavery

Russian fascism has deep roots, going all the way back to the early 20th century. Fascist ideas flourished among White émigrés after the Bolshevik revolution and they were partly re-imported to the Soviet Union by Stalin after the war. He feared that a victory over fascism, won with America and Britain, would empower and liberate his own people. So he turned Soviet success into the triumph of totalitarianism and Russian imperial nationalism. He re-branded war allies as enemies and fascists hellbent on destroying the Soviet Union and depriving it of its glory.

In the decades that followed, fascism was constrained by official communist ideology and by Russians’ personal experience of fighting the Nazis alongside the Western allies. After the Soviet collapse, however, both of these constraints disappeared and the dark matter was released. In addition, the liberal elite of the 1990s completely rejected the old Soviet values, sweeping away a strong tradition of anti-fascist literature and arts.

All the while fascism had festered undercover, within the kgb. In the late 1990s Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of democratic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, talked openly about the security services as a cradle of fascism. “The danger of fascism in Russia is real because since 1917 we have become used to living in a criminal world with a criminal state in charge. Banditry, sanctified by ideology—this wording suits both communists and fascists.”

Such ambiguity was on full display in “Seventeen Moments of Spring”, a hugely popular 12-part television series made on the kgb’s orders in the 1970s. On the face of it, the series was nothing more than an attempt to rebrand the Stalinist secret police. Yuri Andropov, then kgb chief and later Soviet leader, wanted to glamorise Soviet spies and attract a new generation of young men into the service. As it turned out, the programmes helped introduce a Nazi aesthetic into Russia’s popular culture—an aesthetic that would eventually be exploited by Mr Putin.

The hero is a fictional Soviet spy who infiltrates the Nazi high command under the name Max Otto von Stierlitz. He is a high-ranking Standartenführer in the ss, whose mission is to foil a secret plan forged between the cia and Germany near the end of the war. Played by the best-loved Soviet actors, the Nazis in the film are humane and attractive. Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played the role of Stierlitz, was a model of male perfection. Tall and handsome, with perfect cheekbones, he shone in a sleek Nazi uniform that had been tailored in the Soviet defence ministry.

Ordinary Russians were mesmerised. Dmitry Prigov, a Russian artist and poet, wrote: “Our wonderful Stierlitz is the perfect fascist man and the perfect Soviet man at the same time, making transgressive transitions from one to the other with subduing and untraceable ease...He is the harbinger of a new age—a time of mobility and manipulativeness.”

Mr Putin was the beneficiary. In 1999, just before he was named as Russia’s president, voters told pollsters that Stierlitz would be one of their ideal choices for the office, behind Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army’s commander in the second world war. Mr Putin, a former kgb man who had been stationed in East Germany, had cultivated the image of a latter-day Stierlitz.

When vtsiom, one of the pollsters, repeated the exercise in 2019, Stierlitz came in first place. “An inversion has occurred,” the pollsters said. “In 1999 Putin seemed the preferred candidate because he looked like Stierlitz; in 2019 the image of Stierlitz remains relevant because it is being implemented by the country’s most popular politician.” On June 24th this year a statue to Stierlitz was unveiled in front of the Foreign Intelligence Service (svr) headquarters that was part of the Soviet kgb.

For Mr Putin, the fascist aesthetic is matched by a distinctively Russian fascist philosophy. He and most of his former kgb peers embraced capitalism and rallied against liberals and socialists. They also projected the humiliation they had suffered in the first post-Soviet decade onto the whole country, portraying the end of the cold war as a betrayal and defeat.

Their prophet is Ivan Ilyin, a thinker of the early 20th century who was sent into exile by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and embraced fascism in Italy and Germany. Ilyin saw fascism as a “necessary and inevitable phenomenon…based on a healthy sense of national patriotism”. He provided justification for their self-appointed role as the state’s guardians. As such, they were entitled to control its resources.

After the second world war, Ilyin rejected what he saw as Hitler’s errors, such as atheism, and his crimes, including the extermination of the Jews. But he retained his faith in the fascist idea of national resurgence. In 1948 he wrote that “fascism is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and, historically speaking, far from being outlived.” Accordingly, Mr Putin embraced religion, rejected anti-Semitism and eschewed collective leadership for his own direct rule, confirmed by plebiscites.

Ilyin’s book, “Our Tasks”, was recommended by the Kremlin as essential reading to state officials in 2013. It ends with a short essay to a future Russian leader. Western-style democracy and elections would bring ruin to Russia, Ilyin wrote. Only “united and strong state power, dictatorial in scope and state-national in essence” could save it from chaos.

The Ilyin work Mr Putin is said to have read and reread is “What Dismemberment of Russia Would Mean for the World”, written in 1950. In it the author argues that Western powers will try “to carry out their hostile and ridiculous experiment even in the post-Bolshevik chaos, deceptively presenting it as the supreme triumph of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and ‘federalism’…German propaganda has invested too much money and effort in Ukrainian separatism (and maybe not only Ukrainian)”.

In 2005, following the first popular uprising in Ukraine, known as the Orange revolution, Mr Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. Drawing on anti-Ukrainian feelings in Russia, he then set his country on a path of confrontation with the West. That same year Ilyin’s body was brought back to Russia from Switzerland, where he had died in exile in 1954. Mr Putin reportedly paid for the gravestone from his own savings. In 2009 he laid flowers on Ilyin’s grave.

Ignorance is strength

The fact that Mr Putin has embraced fascist methods and fascist thinking holds an alarming message for the rest of the world. Fascism works by creating enemies. It makes Russia the brave victim of others’ hatred even as it justifies feelings of hatred towards its real and imagined foes at home and abroad.

Dmitry Medvedev, a former president and “moderniser”, recently posted on social media: “I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates. They want us, Russia, dead…I’ll do all I can to make them disappear.” He did not bother to say who he had in mind. But Russia’s hostility has three targets: the liberal West, Ukraine and traitors at home. All of them need to take stock of what Russian fascism means.

Mr Putin has long sought to undermine Western democracies. He has supported far-right parties in Europe, such as National Rally in France, Fidesz in Hungary and the Northern League in Italy. He has interfered in American elections, hoping to help Donald Trump defeat the Democrats.

Even if fighting stops in Ukraine, the devotee of Ilyin in the Kremlin will not settle into an accommodation with Western democracies. Mr Putin and his men will do everything in their power to battle liberalism and sow discord.

For centuries Russia has been partly European, but Kirill Rogov, a political analyst, wrote recently that the war in Ukraine enabled Mr Putin to cut off that part of its identity. As long as Mr Putin is in power, Russia will build alliances with China, Iran and other anti-liberal countries. It will, as ever, be in the ideological vanguard.

The outlook for Ukraine is even more bleak. A few weeks after the start of the war Ria Novosti, a state news agency, published an article that called for the purging “of the ethnic component of self-identification among the people populating the territories of historical Malorossia and Novorossia [Ukraine and Belarus] initiated by the Soviet powers.”

Ukraine, Mr Putin said, was the source of deadly viruses, home to American-funded biological labs experimenting with strains of coronavirus and cholera. “Biological weapons were being created in direct proximity to Russia,” he warned.

On Russian state television, Ukrainians are called worms. In a recent talk show Mr Solovyov joked: “When a doctor is deworming a cat, for the doctor it is a special operation, for the worms it is a war and for the cat it is cleansing.” Margarita Simonyan, the boss of rt, a state-controlled international tv network, stated that “Ukraine cannot continue to exist.”

The purpose of the invasion is not just to capture territory but to cleanse Ukraine of its separate identity, which threatens the identity of Russia as an imperial nation. Along with its punitive forces, the Kremlin has also dispatched hundreds of schoolteachers to re-educate Ukrainian children in the occupied territories. It equates an independent sovereign Ukraine with Nazism. Either Ukraine will cease to exist as a nation state or Russia itself will be infected by the idea of emancipation that will destroy its imperial identity.

The bleakest of all is the outlook for Russia. Mr Putin did not plan on a war of attrition. He imagined that a strike on Kyiv would rapidly lead to a new regime in Ukraine and the submission of Ukrainian society to his will. So far, Mr Putin has failed to defeat Ukraine. But he has succeeded in defeating Russia.

Talk of bodily contamination and cleansing is not limited to Ukraine. Russia also contains alien elements—oyster-slurping, foie-gras-eating traitors who mentally live in the West and are infected with ideas of gender fluidity. The Russian people, Mr Putin declared in a tv address, will “simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth” leading to “a natural and necessary self-detoxification of society”.

Like Stalin, Mr Putin distrusts and fears the people. They need to be controlled, manipulated and, when necessary, suppressed. He excludes them from real decision-making. As Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist, argues, they are needed for the ritual of elections that demonstrate the legitimacy of the ruler, but the rest of the time they should be invisible. Mr Yudin calls this attitude “people on call”.

The war changed everything. As Hitler told Goebbels in the spring of 1943, “the war…made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times”. Soon Mr Putin was able to impose de-facto military rule and censorship. He blocked Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and any remaining independent media, isolated the country from poisonous Western influence and chased anyone who objected to the war out of the country. Any public statement that challenges the Kremlin’s version of events in Ukraine is punishable by a 15-year prison sentence.

Gregory Asmolov, of King’s College London, argues this new political reality was unimaginable only months ago and is the Kremlin’s most significant achievement in the conflict. The war has enabled Mr Putin to transform Russia into what Mr Asmolov calls a “disconnective society”. He wrote that “These efforts are driven by the notion that it’s impossible to protect the internal legitimacy of the current leadership and keep citizens loyal if Russia remains relatively open and linked up to the global networked system.”

So far Mr Putin’s aim has been to paralyse Russian society rather than rally the crowds. The show of unity and mobilisation is achieved by television operating in the information space cleared of alternative voices. Among television viewers—mostly people over 60—more than 80% support the war. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, who get their news from the internet, it is less than half. This is perhaps why the symbolic representatives of the z-operation are not working men and women, but a babushka with a red-flag and an eight-year-old “grandson”(painted on murals and imprinted on chocolate wrappers, respectively). They are the ideal television viewers and reality-show extras.

The combination of fear and propaganda produces what Mr Rogov calls an “imposed consensus”. The state publicises opinion polls showing that the majority of Russians support the “special military operation”. The main reason people support Mr Putin is that they think everybody else does, too. The need to belong is powerful. Even when people have access to information, they “simply ignore it or rationalise it, just to avoid destroying the concept of self, country and power…created by propaganda,” notes Elena Koneva, a sociologist.

The engine of fascism does not have a reverse gear. Mr Putin cannot turn back to a reality-based brand of authoritarianism. Expansion is in its nature. It will seek to expand both geographically and into people’s private lives. As the war drags on and casualties mount, the question is whether Mr Putin can mobilise the passive majority or whether they start to grow restive. The elites in the Kremlin, the army and the security services will watch closely.

Two plus two make four

Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who fought in the first world war and survived the second, wrote that “Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions.” His book, “The Language of the Third Reich”, describes how the dissociating prefix ent- (de-) gained prominence in Germany during the war.

As Russian tanks stormed Ukraine in the small hours of February 24th, Mr Putin began his war against Ukraine with that same dissociating prefix. The goal, he said, was denatsifikatsia (de-Nazification) and demilitarizatsia (de-militarisation). Ria Novosti, the state news agency, later added that “De-Nazification inevitably will be also de-Ukrainisation.”

“Germany was almost destroyed by Nazism,” Klemperer wrote, “The task of curing it of this fatal disease is today termed ‘de-Nazification’. I hope, and indeed believe, that this dreadful word…will fade away and lead no more than a historical existence as soon as it has performed its current duty…But that won’t be for some time yet, because it is not only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also…the typical Nazi way of thinking and its breeding-ground: the language of Nazism.”

[Dr. Strangelove]

One race I keep forgetting about because there's been almost no national coverage of it is the open Senate seat in North Carolina. Polls have been showing that's a pretty tight race.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Urkaine was able to hit Russia's Naval Headquarters in Sevastopol with a drone attack this morning. Reportedly just 5 injured, no one dead, but that will give the Russians something to think about.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I've read about the drone attack on Russia's Naval HQ. Symbolic but not destructive enough - more like a mosquito bite to Putin. I know it's long but I hope some of you read the entire Economist Article I posted.

Another news feed I'm reading on Ukraine reveals the extent of Russia's efforts to "annex" the Ukrainian territory they have occupied. This is a big deal. Possibly more important than the flood of news I read on battlespace events. These battle space reports are heavy on the suffering narrative lite on meaningful information on what opposing forces are doing to each other - winning and/or losing. That's to be expected and these battle space narratives that do appear are biased anyway depending on who is writing them.

The Ukrainian armed forces supported by local Ukrainian self-defense units are having some successes in the Kherson Oblast which include the city of Kherson. The Ukrainians are targeting logistic and C&C points with HIMARs and by all accounts are having an impact of Russian ground operations. Reportedly (From CTR), local Russian administration officials inside Kherson organized a people's meeting of some sort to discuss the future of Kherson under Russian administrators. One Russian official showed up and a bunch of "Ukrainian collaborators." The dearth of Russian officials was attributed to orders from somewhere in Russia for them to evacuate as they feared the fall of Kherson to Ukrainian forces. This sort of stuff is hard to verify but it's an indicator of how the Russian military views its position vis-a-vis holding on to the city of Kherson.

Also involving this area, 3 bridges across the Dinipro river have been rendered unpassable by heavy traffic due to Ukrainian overt and covert attacks on them. This has been verified by CTR through available public overhead imaging and local social media posts. The immediate impact is that Russian forces occupying the Kherson city proper are cut off from resupply either from the east or Crimea. IOW, they are vulnerable to artillery and ground assaults. Outcome TBD.

Elsewhere in the east, Russians continue to have limited successes in seizing additional territory west of the Donbas region. Bhakmut is the apparent target as it sits on a major E/W supply route for both the Russians and the Ukrainians. The CTR does not think the Russians can occupy it as it is too well defended. What that reveals is that the Russians can't mount effective combined arms ops at the moment. The retort to that limitation is that Russia just keeps sending soldiers and equipment - inexperienced conscripts and old soviet era stuff - which there is apparently no shortage of supply. Reported yesterday was buildup of forces west of Belgorad. If you ask for input from Ukrainian Army guys who will risk talking, their standard line is that "we're holding on but the Russians just keep throwing young conscripts and old equipment into the war." The point is, Putin is NOT going to give up. Not happening.

[Da Geezer]

Good article Jeff. Thanks.

[Da Geezer]

I thought Tucker's dialogue on the US Economy and how the Biden administrations is responsible for its woes was over-the-top but it was well put together. If you're into bashing the Biden administration and the liberal left Ds, it resonates. My take is that its journalistic hyperbole designed to shape a particular narrative.

Economics is hard. I managed an overall C in 4 semesters of it at M in the 60s, the department dominated by Milton Freidman's economic thinking. I remember little except that I was taught about Friedman's “Stabilization” policies. That refers to correcting the normal behavior of the business cycle thus enhancing economic stability. The term generally refers to "demand management" by Fiscal and Monetary policy to reduce normal fluctuations and output. Also referred to as "keeping the economy on an even keel."

The Biden administration's spending, as a matter of fiscal policy, would be inconsistent with Friedman's approach. This is one specific area that Biden (well, the congressional political left that he seems to be catering to) deserves criticism if you are a follower of Friedman's views. The problem I have with Carlson's criticisms are that they lack context. If he had offered conflicting viewpoints, such viewpoints based on opposing economic philosophies, e.g., MMT, and compared and contrasted them, his piece would have had some weight.

To me all he did was run videos of Biden, Janet Yellen, Larry Summers et.al. making them look stupid by extension the current administration's economic policies are stupid. People are going to look stupid trying to explain complex economic principles in 15 second takes. Low hanging fruit for Carlson that he exploits. None of these people, including Biden's writers, are likely to be "stupid" if you were to read anything they have written or published.

Shaping a narrative, whether it is fact based or biased toward a political viewpoint, is the task of today for political journalism. That viewpoint is important to understand, to recognize when it's happening and to work to understand that other narratives exist.

Well, at least you watched the Carlson monologue.

I majored in Economics and Math, so I had occasion to be front-row on the economic debates of the 60s. Most schools were deep into Keynesian Economics, and so was UM. Friedman is associated almost totally with monetary theory, and honestly was much more about increasing supply. Keynes and Friedman both thought government action should be used to stabilize economic cycles. Friedman proposed a "k" constant by which the money supply should be increased every year to facilitate smooth growth. Keynes believed in countercyclical spending,

I heard a great debate once between Friedman for the Monetarists and Walter Heller for the Keynsians. I was a liberal at the time, so I was most impressed by Heller. The Keynesians said there should be two forms of countercyclical spending, discretionary and structural. Setting up structural countercyclical spending was a big thought at the time because the Great Society tax and spending policies were being debated. If you legislated that everyone below a certain level of income would get money sent to them in the form of welfare, then there would be an automatic influx of cash into the economy during a recession without having to pass a spending bill through Congress. It really sounded logical at the time. Of course, I was a liberal and, as such, figured man was essentially good and nothing untoward would happen. $ 20 Trillion later, the Great Society stands as evidence that my view at the time was misguided.

[Da Geezer]

This from James Freeman in the WSJ:

The news here is doubly frustrating. Parents would never have tolerated school closures if politicians had accurately described how long it would take to change air-filtration systems. The bureaucratic pace of work also suggests that President Biden’s signature law may continue to feed inflation as state and local governments deploy taxpayer dollars to demand goods and services.

Mr. Chapman reports:

Schools have been given access to billions of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funding for building upgrades under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that may be used to pay for ventilation fixes. U.S. districts as of May had spent about 7% of $122 billion invested in the K-12 education system as part of the American Rescue Plan, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.

Since the Covid panic is over and the money is being spent so slowly, perhaps there’s now time to consider whether some of it should not be spent at all.

[Obi-Jon]

Young people.......

My wife filled her car up with gas this morning. The clerk, 18-20 years old. Asked if she wanted a dollar coin in her change. She said sure. Got home and found he gave her a very fine 1885 Morgan dollar. Is youth today that oblivious?

[AlabamAlum]

Yes.

I’ve gotten a 1922 Peace dollar in change.

[AlabamAlum]

It’s really kinda sad. You know in both cases someone had saved those coins for years and spent it because they had no other choice to be able to buy gas (or groceries in the case of the coin I got).

[Jeff Buchanan]

Back in FL. I can now enjoy multiple news feeds without the affliction of data roaming and it's attendant fees. While in hotels, onboard the River Cruise and with my daughter in Lausanne, I had good w-ifi connectivity. Europe's infrastructure for both data and wi-fi cabling is much newer and seemingly better than anything I'm familiar with in North America. It is also much more strictly regulated among EU member states. The result is that there is censoring and filtering going on. That's the downside of EU regulation. A bene is that web pages are remarkably free of distracting ads. Downloads are waaaay faster mostly because of that.

Anyway, great article today of the upcoming, multiple pandemic cancelled meetings of the Review Conference (RevCon) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt). Amid tensions between Russia and the US over Ukraine, it's assessed in information available to the public that, remarkably, Russia has strictly complied with existing nuclear arms treaties. I was shocked by that assessment given Putin's Nuclear saber rattling over his invasion of Ukraine. IVO the dark article that I posted a full, paywalled hit piece on him, I have a hard time believing the accuracy of that assessment.

Some key points in the article beyond that which I posted above are that the RevCon will likely convene in NYC with a lot of hoopla and hypocrisy and end in hostility and zero progress in actually controlling nuclear proliferation. No surprise there. China has increased its stockpile of nukes (China is not a signatory to any arms agreements including those that apply to nukes) but still they fall far short of the even limited arsenals of the US and Russia. Finally, one arms control expert believes that rather than protecting signatories of arms control treaties, in particular the US, at the current limits, the US cannot effectively deter both China and Russia (MAD). He suggests the need for both sides (Russsia and the US) to be allowed additions to thier nuclear weapons arsenals with commensurate allowances for the other seven nuclear weapons capable nations. If anything, Russia's behavior in eastern Europe has moved multiple nuclear armed countries to change their nuclear stance. France is noteworthy in that regard deploying 3 nuclear armed subs instead of their usual 1. Israel is another but mostly in response to Iran's moves in the nuclear weapons direction.

[Hannibal]

The ACLU -- fighting for "civil rights" by fighting for the ability to discriminate against whites and Asians. Hooray for the ACLU!!!

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[Da Geezer]

reports are coming in that the CIA droned Al Zawahiri this afternoon. Biden to take credit at 7:30 with a speech.