Category: Philosophy

Do You Want Some Cheese With That Whine?

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Ordinary investors who are paying attention understand that aggressively managed mutual funds almost always under perform the market over any significant time horizon.

These same investors also understand that you pay more in fees for this lackluster performance, and so they tend to invest in passive investments.

You cannot continue this, because it is worse than Communism:

The rise of passive asset management threatens to fundamentally undermine the entire system of capitalism and market mechanisms that facilitate an increase in the general welfare, according to analysts at research and brokerage firm Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC.

In a note titled “The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism,” a team led by Head of Global Quantitative and European Equity Strategy Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, says that politicians and regulators need to be cognizant of the social case for active management in the investment industry.

“A supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active market led capital management,” they write.

High fees and subpar returns, coupled with the creation of a plethora of relatively inexpensive exchange-traded funds that track major equity indexes have helped fuel a massive shift in asset flows away from active management in favor of passive. While policymakers are quick to praise the benefits of these low-cost options for retail investors, Bernstein argues that this is a short-sighted view that doesn’t take into account the potential downsides involved with the increase in passively-managed assets.

………

The social function of active management, in a capitalist society, is that it seeks to direct capital to its most productive end, facilitating sustainable job creation and a rise in the aggregate standard of living. And rather than be guided by the Invisible Hand and profit motive, capital allocation under Marxism is conducted by an oh-so-visible hand aimed at producing use-values that satisfy each member of the society’s needs. Seen through this lens, passive management is somewhat tantamount to a nihilistic approach to capital allocation.

No.

The mutual fund is a relatively new phenomenon.

You are having a kitten over this because, to quote Blazing Saddles, “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

Words to Live By

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I came across a Chassidic story related by Martin Buber:

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Martin Buber.

This has always been my philosophy:  If you have to use God to justify your actions, you are doing something wrong, it turns out that I have some esteemed Jewish authorities who agree.

BTW, I also love it how Jewish stories use “Clever” as a euphemism for asshole.

Am I the Only Who Sees Fail Written All Over This?

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NASA is looking at handing operations of its space station to private business in the next decade:

NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid 2020s.

“NASA’s trying to develop economic development in low-earth orbit,” Hill said, speaking on a panel of NASA staff assembled to discuss the upcoming Mars mission. “Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-earth orbit, so that research can continue in low-earth orbit.”

The timing fits with the end of The U.S. Government’s current funding of the ISS program, which was extended by President Obama’s administration from its original deorbiting date of 2016 through 2020. Operations were prolonged through 2024 to help give NASA a platform from which to run its near-Earth preparatory missions leading up to the ultimate manned mission to Mars.

If this works as well as the privatization of British rail, I would be very surprised.

Brownback’s Folly

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Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0

— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016

Well, Boehner is happy

Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.

“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.

Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.

As you can see, it did not work.

BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.

Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.

I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.

Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.

Quote of the Day

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People ignore experts because the experts have been systematically misleading them about what the benefits of policies are likely to be.

—Sandwichman at Angry Bear

He is talking about how various “experts” are perplexed by the fact that a majority of the voters in the UK ignored them and voted for Brexit.

As he notes, the experts for years have been saying that structures can be established for the winners to support the losers, but the policies they support not only make 90% of the population worse off, but it diminishes the political, economic, and, social power of the bottom 90%, which means a withdrawal of support.

This leads to more policies that disadvantage a majority of the population, further increase the power and wealth of the elites.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Read Taibbi

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He makes what should be the obvious point, “If you believe there’s such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably don’t believe in democracy at all:

In 1934, at the dawn of the Stalinist Terror, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel offered a daring quip at the International Writers Conference in Moscow:

Everything is given to us by the party and the government. Only one right is taken away: the right to write badly.

A onetime Soviet loyalist who was eventually shot as an enemy of the state, Babel was likely trying to say something profound: that the freedom to make mistakes is itself an essential component of freedom.

As a rule, people resent being saved from themselves. And if you think depriving people of their right to make mistakes makes sense, you probably never had respect for their right to make decisions at all.

This is all relevant in the wake of the Brexit referendum, in which British citizens narrowly voted to exit the European Union.

Because the vote was viewed as having been driven by the same racist passions that are fueling the campaign of Donald Trump, a wide swath of commentators suggested that democracy erred, and the vote should perhaps be canceled, for the Britons’ own good.

Social media was filled with such calls. “Is it just me, or does #Brexit seem like a moment when the government should overrule a popular referendum?” wrote one typical commenter.

On op-ed pages, there was a lot of the same. Harvard economics professor and chess grandmaster Kenneth Rogoff wrote a piece for the Boston Globe called “Britain’s democratic failure“………

………

I would argue that voters are the critical ingredient to save elites from themselves, but Sullivan sees it the other way, and has Plato on his side. Though some of his analysis seems based on a misread of ancient history (see here for an amusing exploration of the topic), he’s right about Plato, the source of a lot of these “the ancients warned us about democracy” memes. He just left out the part where Plato, at least when it came to politics, was kind of a jerk.

The great philosopher despised democracy, believing it to be a system that blurred necessary social distinctions, prompting children, slaves and even animals to forget their places. He believed it a system that leads to over-permissiveness, wherein the people “drink too deeply of the strong wine of freedom.”

………

You have to be a snob of the first order, completely high on your own gas, to try to apply these arguments to present-day politics, imagining yourself as an analog to Plato’s philosopher-kings.

………

“Too much democracy” used to be an argument we reserved for foreign peoples who tried to do things like vote to demand control over their own oil supplies.

………

It doesn’t mean much to be against torture until the moment when you’re most tempted to resort to it, or to have faith in voting until the result of a particular vote really bothers you. If you think there’s ever such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably never believed in it in the first place. And even low-Information voters can sense it.

He’s right.  As political philosopher and political prankster Dick Tuck once said, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

At the end of the day, an fair election is a fair election.

Quote of the Day

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It seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

—Chris Arnade

The comment is about the Brexit, but I think that it can be applied more generally.

Good Point

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While there is a lot of finger pointing about the Brexit vote, there is a point to be made that the elites who support the EU and the Neoliberal agenda:

Over the past decade, elites broke the world, and were unrepentant about their failure. They created the conditions for the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, and made sure that their elite friends at the top would scoop up the post-crisis gains, stranding the vast majority of people. They decided their project of globalization and liberalization mattered more than democracy. Brexit is among the first tangible responses.

Yes, the victorious campaign to leave the European Union won on the basis of xenophobia and the demonization of immigrants. For anyone of a cosmopolitan bent it’s a terrible outcome. And those with long enough memories to remember the last time European nations broke apart instead of coming together will be pained by the outcome.

But if you tell people you know what’s best for them for years and years while their prospects wither and their lives are immiserated, at some point you should expect some kind of reaction. Practically all of the U.K.’s elites—including the leaders of both major political parties—supported remaining in the EU, and couldn’t convince enough of their citizens to go along. Democracy was the poison pill that halted the European project. And now, its architects have a choice to make: admit nothing is wrong with their abhorrent excuse for leadership and lose the rest of the continent, or change course and embrace the views of their citizens instead of ignoring them.

Consider how Europe acted after the 2008 financial crisis. They demanded balanced budgets and even surpluses from member countries that had no ability to both run them and provide for their citizens. They viewed every appeal from those countries, assembled mostly in southern Europe, as a personal affront. They turned a global recession into a morality play, so they could scold the weak sisters of the Eurozone as lazy slugabeds who deserved to suffer.

And they didn’t just do this out of spite: they explicitly wanted to empower multinational conglomerates at the expense of independent domestic producers. Last year’s list of demands for the Greek economy from the “troika” (the European Union, European Central Bank and the IMF) had little to do with preventing corruption and furthering economic opportunity. They were mostly about breaking the power of the local publishing industry, journalists, olive oil makers, mom and pop retailers, and so on. The goal was to make way for outside corporations and throw over the internal political and social culture.

………

But you must pair that with the arrogance of the elites, both in London and Brussels, to the growing desperation in the countryside. The technocratic administration of policy in the EU is obtuse to the average Briton or Italian or Frenchman. They viewed democracy the way most people view mosquito bites, as a nuisance rather than a collective voice worth listening to. Euroskepticism grew amid this neglect. For all the talk of burdensome migration, Leave did best in rural communities with few, if any, immigrants. These are the cities and towns that lost out from globalization, where deindustrialization has wiped them out and left them flat. Anger at economic stagnation played as much of a role in Brexit as anger at faceless foreigners allegedly ruining British society.

………

What Leave offers, a toxic stew of isolation and racism, isn’t any good either. But when elites spend this long doing nothing for large swathes of the population, they’re willing to listen to anyone with a different idea.

I would also note that these elites, with their “Rising Tides Lift All Boats” rhetoric have been consistently wrong for the past 50 years, and disastrously wrong over the past decade.

The rule by the “Technocrats” leads to not just undemocratic, but anti-democratic actions, and a complete lack of accountability.

This is how we ended up in our current state of affairs and how the EU ended up being run by people who are blithely wrong, because there are never any consequences to them or their policies when they are wrong.

The strength of democratic institutions is that if those making policy have screwed up badly enough, that they get tossed out and replaced.

Absent this, those in power will continue pursue failed policies, because they have no incentive to admit failure and fix things.

Uber Gets Even More Evil

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First Uber has redefined it app to conceal when it charges surge prices to its users:

An Uber exec recently disclosed that the company knows when you are more likely to pay surge pricing. (It’s when your phone battery is just about to die.) But with a potential app change Uber is rolling out, this might not matter, because you probably won’t notice that surge is even in effect.

The app change, The Verge reports, would eliminate the blue-and-black circle that pops up before you hail a ride, letting you know that your trip will cost you two or three times what it usually does. On that screen, users also have to manually input the surge percentage, a sort of formal acknowledgement they know the ride will cost extra. (Like guac.)

Instead, now when you order a ride, you’ll see a set fare, a small line of text letting you know there’s an additional cost, and no second confirmation or indication of the surge multiplier.

Did you notice that especially evil bit there? It jacks up the rates when it knows that your battery is about to die?  That is deeply evil on a level  that buggers the mind:

Other than the company’s notoriously lax attitude about background checks, allegations of drivers kidnapping and raping riders, and that, um, interesting new logo, the worst thing about Uber is surge pricing. And, not surprisingly, the company has figured out exactly when you are more likely to pay double or triple the cost of your ride: when your phone battery is low.

This is a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation, which means that this is a company that our society (or at least our financial system) lionizes.

This is a particularly searing indictment of the values we hold as a society.

Good Point

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Over at Angry Bear, Sandwichman makes a good point: For all the claims that “workplace flexibility” increases employment, the societies with the fewest worker protections have the lowest workforce participation rates:

In its report on “The long-term decline in prime-age male labor force participation,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers writes:

Conventional economic theory posits that more ‘flexible’ labor markets—where it is easier to hire and fire workers—facilitate matches between employers and individuals who want to work. Yet despite having among the most flexible labor markets in the OECD—with low levels of labor market regulation and employment protections, a low minimum cost of labor, and low rates of collective bargaining coverage—the United States has one of the lowest prime-age male labor force participation rates of OECD member countries.

Although it has indeed become conventional, the ‘flexible’ labor markets mantra is not a theory. It is dogma. An article of faith. The theory behind the nostrum of flexible labor markets is Milton Friedman’s natural rate theory of unemployment, which, as Jamie Galbraith pointed out twenty years ago, was constructed by adding expectations to the empirical Philips Curve observation of a relationship between unemployment and inflation:

The Phillips curve had always been a purely empirical relation, patched into IS-LM Keynesianism to relieve that model’s lack of a theory of inflation. Friedman supplied no theory for a short-run Phillips curve, yet he affirmed that such a relation would “always” exist. And Friedman’s argument depends on it. If the Phillips relation fails empirically— that is, if levels of unemployment do not in fact predict the rate of inflation in the short run—then the construct of the natural rate of unemployment also loses meaning.

Obama and his evil minions® should not be surprised by this.

Endorsing general crappiness to the working man has never increased labor force participation rates, because, absent a hyper-Dickensian society, people then opt out of the workforce if they can.

Jimmy McMillan for President

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Yet more evidence that the rent is too damn high:

A popular narrative of the U.S. housing market has been that big city prices are locking out young buyers, feeding a cycle in which a growing number of people are forced to rent at ever higher rates as demand overwhelms supply. Throw in the fact that wages haven’t kept pace, and you have a world where a wide swath of Americans can’t save enough to ever buy that first home.

The reality may be a bit more complicated. It’s true that, when combined with a lack of government support for affordable housing, this situation has pushed the number of cash-poor renters to a new high. Some 26 percent of U.S. renters paid at least half their income to landlords in 2014, up from 20 percent in 2001, according to the State of the Nation’s Housing report, published on Wednesday by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Unfortunately much of our economic policy has conflated price increases in real estate prices with economic prosperity, which has led to shelter become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to obtain.

We need to stop viewing housing and real estate as a way to generate returns that exceed inflation, and we need to discourage unproductive speculation in real estate.  (Full disclosure, I am speaking against my own interest as a homeowner with a 30 year fixed rate mortgage)

This Is Either a Scam, or This Will Become a Scam

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The latest thing in crowd funding is something called a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and my nose tells me that this is, or is going to be, a new way for people to have their money stolen:

We’ve flagged cryptocurrency enthusiasts’ distinctly mystic beliefs in spontaneously emergent headless organisms before.

Now something called the “Decentralised Autonomous Organisation” — The DAO, not to be mistaken with Tao — project has begun to attract actual column inches in mainstream publications, albeit in keeping with the new style of journalism… i.e. devoid of critical evaluation and taking all claims at face value.

The DAO is currently raising Ether tokens (the pre-mined currency of the Ethereum blockchain, itself funded via a bitcoin capital raising) — $110m at mark-to-market rates today — in exchange for DAO, a token which “grants its holder voting and ownership rights.” As Techcrunch put it, holders of DAO “can use their tokens to vote on big governance issues (akin to traditional shareholders) but also on minute details of how The DAO spends its resources. In this way, token holders have total control over The DAO’s assets and its actions.”

The DAO explicitly states its tokens are not a form of equity — even if to the average bystander everything about the DAO token looks, smells and feels like common equity. (Perhaps the feeling is that if you dazzle them with “tokens” instead of stocks, those pesky unlicensed stock solicitation rules won’t apply? We’re not sure regulators will see it that way.)

We won’t go on about how the world has had 100 years (or more) of feedback with respect to what happens when you remove the professional executive/management function from corporate identity, or transfer all day-to-day decision making to amateur committees. Any cursory review of modern history (or a quick read of Animal Farm) will flag up the problems: indecision paralysis; wasted time and resources on voting and bureaucracy; entirely non-diplomatic means of grabbing power just to get things done; uninformed decision making; exploitation of the ignorant; tragedies of the commons scenarios and last but not least: a lack of skin-in-the-game accountability for poor decision making leading to post-facto due diligence processes with dire consequences for capital, human resources and environments.

We won’t even mention that $110m raised in illiquid tokens based on mark-t0-market valuations is akin to a paper profit only, and might create a helluva Ether currency collapse if it’s actually spent on resources in the real-world…

I don’t know if this is a scam now, but I do know that it it isn’t, it will be, and it will be sooner than later, because this is what happens when people set up a business based on self delusion.

It Appears that the Stagflation of the 1970s Never Happened

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Oil Shock, Not Stagglation

We all know the story, how the “Stagflation” of the 1970s, a prolonged period of high inflation and low growth, broke our economy, and how Keynsian economics failed us, so we turned to Snake Oil Monetarist and Supply Side Economics.

It turns out that it never happened:

In a conversation with Dean Baker recently, I learned something interesting. This won’t be new to anyone deeply familiar with inflation statistics, but it was new to me. Maybe it will be new to you too.

The general subject is the stagflation of the 70s, which ushered in supply-side economics and the Reagan era. More specifically, the issue is the measurement of inflation during part of this era. Housing costs are incorporated into the CPI by measuring rents, but prior to 1982 it was done by directly measuring the price of buying a house. In an era when interest rates were steady, this didn’t matter much, but when interest rates went crazy in the mid-70s it made a big difference, overstating inflation by about two percentage points. If you correct for this, and also take a look at exactly when the worst periods of stagflation occurred, you get this:

(See picture)

If you correct the inflation figures and account for the two oil shocks of the 70s, the period from 1970-85 looks remarkably steady. Inflation and GDP growth are both running at about 4 percent for nearly the entire time.

So the sequence is:

  • Oil shock depresses economy and drives up prices.
  • Fed panics, and tightening pre-1982 erroneously drives up inflation statistics.
  • Fed continues to freak.
  • Rinse, lather, repeat.

Keynes was, and remains, right.

I Hate it When the Donald Says Something Sane

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He just continued low interest rates and a weak dollar.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Thursday positioned himself on the far left of the political spectrum on fiscal issues, coming out for low interest rates, against a strong dollar and a more aggressive managing of U.S. debt.

 ………
 “She [Fed Chair Yellen] is a low interest rate person, she’s always been a low-interest-rate person, and let’s be honest, I’m a low-interest-rate person,” Trump added.

 Trump shifted to a discussion of the impact that higher rates has on the dollar, and on the impact a rising dollar has on U.S. business.

 “If we raise interest rates and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’ll have some very major problems.”

 “I love the concept of a strong dollar, but when you look at the havoc that a strong dollar causes … it sounds better to have a strong dollar than it actually is.”

 ………

 One thing Trump advocated that the U.S. Treasury has resisted is a more active management of the debt. The U.S. Treasury hasn’t taken advantage of current low interest rates to issue more longer-term debt.

“I think there are times for us to refinance debt with longer term, we owe so much money,” Trump said.

While at times Trump seemed to link a conversation of refinancing with a situation where “the bubble popped” — at one point even suggesting a buyback of U.S. debt — he also made clear that he wanted to refinance now, to rebuild infrastructure.

This is a coherent and thoughtful, if someone iconoclastic, view of the economy, budget, and monetary policy.

It is also a refreshing departure from the conventional fetish about deficits that tends to promulgate austerity.

The economy remains depressed, interest rates are at historical lows, and it’s time borrow cheap and long term and spend on decaying infrastructure and create jobs.

I’ve said before that Donald Trump was the best Republican in the race,* and this reinforces my initial impression.

*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.

Quote of the Day

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There is one aspect, however, in which Game of Thrones has a claim to being the most realistic show on television. Despite the wizards, the wights and the way every character manages to maintain perfect hair even when they’re being pointlessly tortured to death, there is something horribly relatable about Martin’s world of Westeros, whose characters have now become part of public myth. What sets it apart is not the monsters, the nudity or the festering gallons of gratuitous gore, but the overwhelming sense that the plot got run off the rails three books ago and is being steered towards a terrible precipice by a bunch of bickering, power-mad maniacs. This, coincidentally, happens to be the plot of the entire 21st century so far.

—Laurie Penny

As an aside, I probably should to watch a few episodes this show eventually, if just to understand the Obama/Anger Translator Luther “Khaleesi is coming to Westeros” reference.

If These Guys Hate Him, Trump Might Be Right

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Over at FT, Edward Luce makes the obvious observation, that the foreign policy establishment who is having the vapors of Trump’s foreign policy, Luce ironically calls them the. “best and brightest, have been wrong about everything all the time for decades:

Intellectuals crave doctrines. The tidier the formula, the easier it is to make sense of that messy world out there.

In the view of the US’s strategic elites, Donald Trump’s mind is recklessly untidy. Last week they poured scorn on his much-awaited foreign policy speech. Not only was it self-negating — Mr Trump vowed both to be predictable and unpredictable — but he has yet to hire an intellectually respected adviser. It is doubtful he has read a book on foreign policy. Is further proof needed? Mr Trump is not only a loose cannon. He is also ignorant of the canon. The man could not even pronounce Tanzania (his version rhymed with Romania).

All of which is true. But the critique suffers from two weaknesses. First, the people making it, which includes almost everyone, are throwing stones from glass houses. These include form­er Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and their galaxy of advisers — 121 of whom signed a letter condemning Mr Trump’s platform. It also includes the Democratic elites led by Hillary Clinton. They may differ in degree but they share a basic worldview. The US must uphold universal values with force if necessary. That is how things are done. In the words of Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, the US sees further than other nations because “it stands taller”.

All of which adds up. Yet, with one or two exceptions, these were the same people who brought you the US-led invasion of Iraq. Mr Trump plays loose with detail when he claims to have opposed the 2003 war (he said very little until the scale of the disaster had become obvious). But few outside Washington bother with such timelines. What they grasp is that Mr Trump has united the same elites against him who were so collectively wrong on Iraq. This is no minor detail. Washington’s biggest brains have a record of miscuing in unison on the biggest questions.

Think of the Vietnam war, which competes with Iraq as the largest foreign policy disaster in US history. That was famously orchestrated by “the best and the brightest”. Their doctrine was the domino theory — if one state fell to communism, its neighbours would follow. It was simple, logical and disastrous. George W Bush’s doctrine was that pre-emptive war would stave off bigger threats down the line. It was also easy to grasp and catastrophic. The Iraq war spawned the monster child of Isis. On a smaller scale, the same could be said of the 2011 US-backed overthrow of Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi. Libya is now a second base for Isis. Given the chance, might these same elites drag the US into a Syrian quagmire, or a military clash with Russian president Vladimir Putin over Ukraine? Could we rule out a conflict with China in the South China Sea?

I think that it is highly likely that Trump’s foreign policy will batsh%$ insane.

It will be completely nuts.

That being said, there is a substantial possibility that this foreign policy will be saner and less destructive than the Council on Foreign Relations/Washington foreign policy consensus.

What Joe Biden Said

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In an interview with the New York Times, Biden makes a very trenchant point:

………

“I like the idea of saying, ‘We can do much more,’ because we can,” Mr. Biden said in an interview on the Washington-to-Wilmington, Del., Amtrak train he has ridden throughout four decades in national politics.

“I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big — we ought to really downsize here because it’s not realistic,’ ” he said in a mocking tone. “C’mon man, this is the Democratic Party! I’m not part of the party that says, ‘Well, we can’t do it.’”

It puts something about Hillary’s campaign for President in perspective.

Much like a dog chasing a car, she has no idea what to do if she catches the Presidency.

Quote of the Day

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But first, what would motivate any young person today to pull the plug?

Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.

Well, if you’re young and have an ounce of pride, doesn’t that list say it all? So f%$# you, I’m Going Off The Grid.

—Stephen Fry

(%$%# mine)

F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley

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Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.

I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”.

And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent:

Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described “foreign policy elites”? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post’s print edition on Saturday, under the headline “Foreign policy elites indecisive on Trump.” The Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But “foreign policy elites” have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all.

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If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of “foreign policy elites” — or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite.

What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to “foreign policy elites” has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That’s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That’s how long we’ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and naïve to use the Vietnam-era term “quagmire” to describe the United States’ situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore.

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Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.

 I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.