Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Bells Of Barcelona

13 Comments

…toll for Europe:

Catalonia, to be sure, has trampled on the Spanish Constitution. But constitutions depend on the consent of the governed, and Catalonia refuses to be governed by Madrid. Rajoy now faces a political crisis without a clear solution. His minority government depends on the support of a Basque regional party, and the Basques are sympathetic to the Catalans. The governor of the Basque Autonomous Region proposed yesterday that Madrid adopt a British or Canadian solution, allowing the Catalans to vote on secession as did the Scots in 2014. The difference, of course, is that the Scots depend on British subsidies and voted to stay, while the Catalans subsidize the rest of Spain and would vote to leave. The Basques well might follow.

This is an existential crisis for the Spanish state, for reasons I laid out on Sept. 30. Spain is at the cusp of a steep rise in the proportion of elderly dependents (from 25% of the economically-active population to an insupportable 50% by 2050). The question comes down to who will be eaten first in the lifeboat: with the lowest fertility rate of any large European country, Spain cannot support its elderly, and the Catalans want to maintain themselves first.

There is a great deal of speculation about the possible knock-on effects in the rest of Europe. Catalonia is a singularity. The notionally separatist Lombard League has no stomach for a real fight, and no ambitions to create an independent country, as the League-affiliated Mayor of Bergamo explained in an interview yesterday. The Lombards merely want to keep a higher proportion of their tax revenue. The Italian regionalists are playing comedy, while the Catalans are enacting a tragedy: They perceive this moment as one of existential import for their future existence, and will not back down.

The first response of the rest of Europe, to be sure, will be to ask the Catalans as well as the Rajoy government to put the genie back into the bottle. We are well past that point. After demonstrating that mass civil disobedience could defeat the heavy-handed efforts of the national government to suppress them, the Catalans will not turn back. Nor should they. Europe’s infertility leaves the more productive regions of Europe with the choice of impugning their own future by picking up the retirement bill for the continent’s dead beats, or going their own way.

Something that cannot continue will eventually stop.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Vegas Massacre

37 Comments

Yes, based at least on initial reports, it does appear to be very, very strange.

[Update later afternoon]

The Vegas shooting and the attack of the carrion crows.

Every.Single.Time.

[Tuesday-morning update]

Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence.

And Nick Gillespie says that this is the time to defend the Second Amendment and less-strict gun control. Because gun control is not, and has never been, the solution.

I have a crazy idea that if you’re going to propose a policy or law in response to a tragic event, you should have to explain how it would have actually prevented that event. Everything this guy did and used was already illegal, as far as I can tell.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Puerto Rico Government

7 Comments

…is riddled with corruption and incompetence.

Yes, it is, and has been forever. We spent a lot of time there from ’98 to ’01. It was a mess long before the storms, which simply highlighted how bad it was. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of how it’s all that racist Trump’s fault that brown people are dying.

[Update a few minutes later]

People…OK, not people, partisan morons…were mocking Brock Long yesterday for his interview with Chris Wallace, when he said that this was “the most logistically challenging event the U.S. has ever seen.” Read the responses to this tweet, in which people talk about Apollo, the Berlin Airlift, the war in general…

My responses:

OK, so let’s go to the transcript. Yes, he did say that, but then (as I noted) he clarified, with Wallace’s help.

WALLACE: I want to pick up on something you just said because I have not heard this before. You say this is the most logistically challenging relief effort ever in the history of this country?

LONG: Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think people have to take a step back and understand what’s happened over the course of basically the last 40 days. We — you know, FEMA has led the response of the federal government on behalf of governors from Texas to Florida to North Carolina to South Carolina to Georgia to the Virgin Islands, and the bottom line is, is that we’ve registered almost 3 million people for disaster assistance and most likely many of those were uninsured and we’ve been able to get, you know, well over a billion dollars in their hands to support.

It’s not only a logistically complex event, just getting to the islands and being able to support an island that was hit not just by one major hurricane but two within basically a 10-day period. The bottom line is, is you can only shove so much into an island pre-storm because if you pushing too much stuff, the storm may damage it. So, we had to pull back, not only equipment and staff, because we don’t want to soak up vital shelter space, we want to continue to push forward after the fact and move more equipment in.

The ports were damaged. The airports were damaged. This morning, you know, somebody was saying, we’re not seeing flights in San Juan. We are not using San Juan near to the degree we were. Our goal was to open up incident support bases and other airports and we have three of those operating so that commercial flights can come back up in San Juan. [Emphasis added]

Everything he said there was true. And, of course, part of the challenge was in dealing with the local government(s), whose responsibility it should have been to be prepared for this, but was (as was the case in Louisiana with Katrina, and wait for it) incompetent and corrupt. Am I blaming the victims? I guess, to the degree that in a democracy people get the government they deserve. And, as usual…well, OK, as usual when a Republican is in the White House…the federal government (whose responsibility this isn’t) is blamed for local incompetence and corruption. And of course, it didn’t help that the Puerto Ricans threw the Navy out of Roosevelt Roads a few years ago, which would have provided a solid logistics base even in the immediate aftermath of the storm(s).

But let’s unpack the moon landing and war comparisons.

Yes, sending men to the moon was a tremendous logistics challenge, but it was one that was planned years in advance, and on which we expended a significant percentage of a pre-entitlement federal budget for that specific purpose. The Pacific War, the invasion of Italy, the Normandy landing, all took months and years of planning as well. The closest analogy might be the Berlin Airlift, but even there we could see the Soviet blockade coming months in advance, and it was preceded by the little airlift in the spring of ’48. And even then, it took weeks to spool it up.

So, as usual (and as with the Bush administration), the most despicable thing these people do is to force me to defend Trump and his administration, but also as usual, the criticism of the federal government for things that are not its responsibility is ignorant at best, and unfair.

[Update a while later]

Puerto Rico enters the American victim derby.

[Late-morning update]

Glenn Reynolds: Puerto Rico has many problems, but Donald Trump isn’t one of them.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space, Technology and Society

Writing The Future

9 Comments

Over at The Weekly Standard, I remember Jerry Pournelle:

…he had an outsized influence on U.S. space and defense policy. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, he and others would gather at Niven’s home in Tarzana, California, to hammer out policy recommendations. These meetings evolved into something more formal, the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which Pournelle chaired. In addition to several science fiction authors, the group included Buzz Aldrin and a handful of other astronauts, retired military officers like Army General Danny Graham, and several figures from the aerospace industry. (I was too junior to be invited, but my then-boss at the Aerospace Corporation participated.) Congressman Newt Gingrich was involved, too. The group recommended to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger the commencement of a missile-defense program, a proposal that helped inspire President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. To the extent that the prospect of American missile-defense technology hastened the end of the Cold War—by making it plain to Soviet leaders that mutually assured destruction would no longer be mutual—Pournelle can be said to have played a small but not insignificant part in nudging the world toward freedom.

RTWT, despite the fact that I wrote it.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Left

5 Comments

…is sitting on the biggest crime ever committed by a sitting president.

As many have pointed out, this is the Democrats’ Watergate, where the president actually committed the crimes of surveillance and siccing the IRS on his political enemies (unlike Nixon, who simply attempted to). Beyond that, one of the reasons why Lynch refused to let Clinton be prosecuted is that it would have almost certainly implicated Obama as well.

[Late-morning update]

Unmasking, yet another abuse of power. It may not have been illegal per se, but it was certainly that.