Category Archives: Web Article Review

RAND solves the border crisis!

RAND has all the answers on what we need to do at the border.

While politically challenging, a holistic update to U.S. immigration laws based on a better understanding of American immigration needs and the factors that are driving people to make the dangerous trek to cross the border would help reduce the numbers of migrants arriving daily to the U.S.-Mexico border and the challenges migration poses to receiving localities. This would require building on the current efforts to provide lawful pathways, easing the burden on host communities, matching immigration policies with the needs of the labor market, and addressing root causes of migration, while adhering to American legal and humanitarian responsibilities.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/02/the-crisis-at-the-border-a-primer-for-confused-americans.html

There you go. This sounds like a decade-long project at least, so politicians with 2-4 year election cycles would need to sell voters with 20 minute attention spans on it now, then competently implement it over the course of a generation.

March election poll check-in

Here’s where we stand as I write this on March 1, 2024. Polling averages now include some polls concluded in late February.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent Real Clear Politics Poll Average (as of 3/1/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +5.5% (February 4: Trump +4.5)
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +6.5% (February 4: Trump +7.2)
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +1.0% (February 4: Trump +0.2%)
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +5.7% (February 4: Trump +5.4%)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Biden +0.8% (February 4: Biden +0.3%)
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +3.6% (February 4: Trump +5.1%)
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +7.7% (February 4: Trump +7.0%)

The electoral college vote, as it stands at the moment, would be 293 for Trump to 245 for Biden.

About the best you can say is that things look bad for Biden, but it is not unequivocally clear that they are not getting worse… If only elections were decided by the second derivative of the vote!

Do I even need to make the case against Trump?

  • Climate change is just beginning to impact our homes, our economic livelihoods and our food supply. The impacts we are seeing today are the result of emissions decades ago, and we have not even begun to see the impacts of more recent emissions let alone today’s emissions. We are just on the cusp of starting to bend back the curve of producing more emissions every year, and this progress needs to continue if we are going to see impacts continue to increase, then peak, then finally start to decrease (derivatives again!) We are doing too little, too late, but at least we are doing something. Elect Trump and we will monkey wrench the whole process and set progress back by a decade AGAIN.
  • The threat from nuclear weapons (proliferation, use in war, use in terrorism, accidents) is high and getting higher. Trump let key treaties lapse, and electing him will bring this existential threat even closer to reality.
  • The United States is not doing so well that it can risk having morons in charge. Trump is just one singular moron, but he will appoint incompetent political hacks to key leadership positions whenever he gets a chance. The U.S. economy and bureaucracy might be able to blunder through four years of business as usual, but throw in one or more serious crises – war, plague, famine, natural disaster, financial/cyber-meltdown – and the hacks will not be able to deal with it. Covid-19 was just a taste of what a really serious crisis could look like. Without competent leadership, our ability to bounce back from a crisis is impaired, and either a succession of smallish crises or a single major crisis could be the one that brings out nation to its knees.

dystopian world of “Rainbow’s End” inching closer to reality!

at least augmented reality, which now seems to be called mixed reality. A company called “Oppo” seems to be a player and has a new prototype.

Following the rapid rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI has begun to show up in everything from productivity apps to search engines to smartphone software. Oppo is one of several companies — along with TCL and Meta — that believe smart glasses are the next place users will want to engage with AI-powered helpers. Mixed reality has been in the spotlight thanks to the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro headset in early 2024. 

Like the company’s previous smart glasses, the Air Glass 3 looks just like a pair of spectacles, according to images provided by Oppo. But the company says it’s developed a new resin waveguide that it claims can reduce the so-called “rainbow effect” that can occur when light refracts as it passes through. 

Waveguides are the part of the smart glasses that relays virtual images to the eye, as smart glasses maker Vuzix explains. If the glasses live up to Oppo’s claims, they should offer improved color and clarity. The glasses can also reach over 1,000 nits at peak brightness, Oppo says, which is almost as bright as some smartphone displays. 

cnet.com

Who cares about AI playing music with my glasses? I want to see things labeled when I am out and about in the real world.

boomers

Vanity Fair (why them out of all possible publications? I don’t know) got “unprecedented access” onboard a U.S. strategic nuclear submarine. There are plenty of attention-catching quotes.

As the ominous backstop to America’s national security, the Department of Defense relies on a triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range bombers, and submarines. The latter are considered the triad’s least vulnerable leg and carry 70 percent of all deployed nuclear warheads in the inventory. Boomers are officially known as Ohio-class SSBNs—Navy-speak for “submersible ship, ballistic, nuclear”—and were built, as even the juniormost sailor will tell you (without a hint of irony), to “preserve the peace” and, in the event of strategic attack, to inflict unimaginable destruction. “We are prepared to unleash hell,” Admiral William Houston told me, adding that, of course, “We never want to do it. Those sailors know if their weapon system is ever used, they are probably not coming home to their families. And so they take their business very, very seriously. It’s what we refer to as a no-fail mission. You are working directly for the president when you’re out there.”

Um, I’m supposed to be comforted that the missiles are under civilian control, i.e. the military will not launch the missiles themselves. There is some comfort in this I suppose in that only the person who got a majority of electoral votes (many disproportionately representing empty land rather than human voters) can annihilate the planet. The military’s senior officers seems to have more faith in the mythical constitution and presidency than most of us civilians do.

On 9/11, Packer, then a lieutenant commander, was the engineer officer on the USS Ohio, an SSBN that was in the Pacific for a worldwide war game… The United States is under attack.” Over the next few hours, the Ohio received fragmentary reports: The twin towers had been hit; the Pentagon had been struck (true) and destroyed (not true). They also understood that the president was airborne—another portentous sign to those who wait on orders from the National Command Authority, which the president directs. The Ohio, Packer recalled, began the march from DEFCON five. To four. To three. “You take actions to make the platform more ready to complete its mission. You open safes and look at and access war plans that are normally not known or accessible.” When I asked how unusual those actions were, he replied, “I’d never seen those things. Ever.” Sailors on the Ohio began to speculate about who was behind the attacks. “The consensus on the boat was that it was Iran. And, as far as we were concerned, they were going to be radioactive glass…

Chilling – why do we jump to the conclusion that there is an Iranian boogeyman behind everything, evidence be damned…

Packer, like so many others interviewed for this story, told me he is bracing for a very different battle than the ones fought in the aftermath of 9/11. “2027 is the year Xi Jinping said they need to be ready to go to war,” … “In the Taiwan fight,” Packer maintained, “we’re prepared to go into the jaws of the Chinese undersea forces and take them all out.” All the surface ships as well.

So a U.S. China war is not only a foregone conclusion, it is on the calendar…

Over the second half of the last century, Western national security officials were preoccupied with trying to keep one adversary (the USSR) in check, even as the dueling nuclear powers ratified landmark arms control treaties. With those efforts now in eclipse and nuclear proliferation a chilling reality, America and its allies are currently contending with two near-peer opponents, Russia and China, as well as their own set of allies with nuclear aspirations, including North Korea, Iran, and, by extension, the Axis of Resistance—a term that encompasses armed groups like the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq.

Axis of resistance to what? being dominated by the threat of nuclear attack?

Don’t get me wrong. I am comforted that these people take their jobs deadly seriously. because their jobs are so deadly. I just don’t really buy into the idea that the United States needs a nuclear “deterrent” of thousands of warheads to outweigh the risk of accidental or intentional use of nuclear weapons. And I don’t like the idea that arms control treaties have fallen by the wayside and we cynically assume no further progress is possible.

I have no opinion on the politics of Indonesia…

I am familiar with some facts though. Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian civilians were massacred by its military and paramilitary thugs in the 1960s, and again in East Timor in the 1970s. In the 1990s, street thugs attacked citizens of Chinese ancestry and some families chose to flee the country.

Here is what The Intercept has to say about Indonesia’s (presumptive?) new president:

The heir of a wealthy banking family, Prabowo holds hundreds of thousands of acres of plantation, mining, and industrial properties. He was the son-in-law of the late dictator Gen. Suharto, who, with U.S. support, ruled Indonesia for 32 years…

Prabowo, as Suharto’s son-in-law, was a senior commander of the massacres in occupied East Timor. In one, at Kraras in 1983 on the mountain of Bibileo, “several hundred” civilians were murdered, according to a United Nations-backed inquiry. Prabowo also personally tortured captives; one told me of Prabowo breaking his teeth…

In 1998, with Suharto hobbled by the arms cutoff and facing growing demonstrations, Prabowo abducted 24 democratic activists, 13 of whom he “disappeared.” He also engendered a campaign of murder, arson, and rape, mainly against ethnic Chinese residents.

The Intercept

Compare and contrast with what the BBC had to say:

Where the president is famously soft-spoken and conciliatory, Mr Prabowo has a reputation for ill-tempered outbursts and abrasive opinions. He takes pride in the long career he had as an officer in the Indonesian special forces, despite allegations of serious human rights abuses made against both him and the unit in the past.

BBC

No further comment, except to say the rich and powerful run the world, and maybe in Southeast Asia they don’t go to such great pains to hide it.

checking in on the 2024 election

Here’s where we stand as I write this on February 4, 2024. Most of the polling averages now include some polls conducted in January.

STATE2020 RESULTMost Recent Real Clear Politics Poll Average (as of 2/4/24)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +4.5%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +7.2%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Trump +0.2%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +5.4% (RCP doesn’t provide this average but I have averaged the ones they provide, some of which are quite old)
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Biden +0.3%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Trump +5.1%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +7.0%

It is not hard to figure this out from the above numbers, but if I make a customized electoral college map on 270towin.com, the picture is awful for Biden, with 293 Trump electoral votes to 245 for Biden.

The “538 Politics Podcast” generally has been much reduced in quality post-Nate Silver and post-ABC buyout, but they did have this interesting episode (actually – I can’t figure out how to link directly to it, this is how shitty their website is now – but search for “How Americans feel about the economy”) recently about research on how peoples’ shock over episodes of inflation “decay” over time. Basically, the shock declines by about 50% of the remaining amount over the course of a year. So, even though the rate of price increase has declined, we are now feeling about 50% of the shock from the shocking inflation of 2022. By the November election, we will be feeling about 25% of the shock. Is this enough to count on? Certainly not, but even to realize this the economy needs to stay as good as it is now for the next nine months, and inflation needs to not go back up again.

Fentanyl

El Pais has a long article that goes through the entire supply chain for Fentanyl. Basically, there is a huge demand for drugs in the United States. Because they are criminalized and highly profitable, organized crime is going to find to meet that demand. Organized crime in Mexico is going to find a way to bring the chemical precursors in, manufacture the product, and move it across the border, with extremely violent consequences. Businesspeople in China (I use the term loosely as these are also gangster-like, but the actual chemicals involved are typically not even illegal) are happy to manufacture and ship these precursors to the organized criminals in Mexico. Politicians and bureaucrats at all levels get wrapped up through bribery, threats of violence and actual violence.

how many U.S. troops in Yemen?

Well, the answer to this one has to be zero, right??? According to the War Powers Report submitted to Congress by the White House in December, the answer is “a small number”. The summary letter I have linked to also lists other deployments the U.S. considers part of its “counterterrorism” efforts in the greater Middle East. So the “war on terror” is very much continuing. Most of this is about combating “ISIS” and “ISIL”, more or less at the invitation of the host government. These groups are not “Iran-backed” as far as I know, and in fact are even threatening to Iran.

The U.S. is also sometimes attacking Iran-backed groups and Iranian military advisers under the umbrella of counterterrorism. This particularly catches my eye:

As reported on November 22, 2023, I directed United States forces to conduct discrete strikes on the night of November 21, 2023, against facilities in Iraq used by the IRGC and IRGC-affiliated groups for command and control, logistics, and other purposes.  These strikes followed attacks against United States personnel and facilities in Iraq and Syria that threatened the lives of United States personnel and Coalition forces operating alongside United States forces, and that were perpetrated by the IRGC and militia groups affiliated with the IRGC.  A United States contractor suffered a fatal cardiac incident while moving to shelter during one of these attacks.  I directed these discrete military actions consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive and to conduct United States foreign relations.

whitehouse.gov

I’ll try: “Iran-backed” groups are fighting “US-backed” groups in various countries. Iran and the US both have military advisers in various countries. U.S. troops and contractors are occasionally getting hurt in attacks maybe aimed directly at them, and maybe aimed at more local parties. We’re there because they are fighting us, and they are fighting us because we’re there.