With Good Reason

Posted on by
Reply

The lede lays it out, if misleadingly so.

The Western alliance between the US and its European partners has been a pillar of the global order since the end of World War II. Bonded by a common belief in freedom and democracy, it prevented major global conflict, defeated Communism, and presided over a surge in global prosperity.

More like sharing common rhetoric, not common belief, regarding freedom and democracy. Europe’s NATO members have, since shortly after the alliance’s formation, free-loaded off American treasure and promise of blood while themselves living phat and short-changing their own obligations to the alliance. Decades of “pretty please” had no effect on that. It’s only been since Trump I’s threats to leave the alliance if those members didn’t step up to their own responsibilities that those nations started to improve, or at least give less short-shift to the alliance.

The subheadline continues the misleading aspect.

As relations between Europe and the US become increasingly strained, once unshakeable allies abroad are wondering whether the rift can be repaired.

Once unshakeable? As recently as the end of the 19th century, the US and UK were at loggerheads over a number of national-level problems. In the late 20th century, key NATO member France kicked our military forces out as that nation withdrew itself from the military aspect of the alliance, only recently rejoining.

Today, the European Union is busily attacking American multinational enterprises over the EU’s effort at censorship, its inability to compete with American goods and services sold through those enterprises, its demand for ever higher taxes in the face of lower taxes in the US. In that latter regard, the EU also is busy with its determined fratricide as it attacks Ireland over its even lower tax regime.

There’s never been anything unshakeable in our relationship with Europe, nor is there any reason to take the continent seriously, whether economically, militarily, or politically.

Even now, with European NATO members beginning to recognize that they need to act in measurable, concrete support for Ukraine in its existential struggle against the barbarian from the east, they’re still looking to us for the first move on weapons and other support, to us on “peace” initiatives vis-à-vis this war. They’re still too timid to act entirely on their own, with only a few exceptions in the form of the nations bordering Russia. Brussels is even too timorous to allow the Russian funds frozen by the EU at the start of sanctioning Russia shortly after it invaded Ukraine to be used as collateral for loans to Ukraine. Belgium is more interested in whether its funds in Russia might be seized by Putin than it is in supporting Ukraine.

Even now, fully a third of NATO’s member nations continue to welch on their own financial and equipage commitments to NATO as an alliance. With that welching, they betray their own fellow alliance members by keeping themselves wholly unable to come to the aid of their fellows should any of them be attacked.

NATO, which embodies most of Europe and so stands for Europe in so many critical ways, is steadfastly rendering itself useless and by extension is rendering Europe to irrelevance.

Why, indeed, should we take Europe seriously for anything other than their weakness being a threat to our own security given the bloodily acquisitive nature of the eastern barbarian?

A Step in the Right Direction

Posted on by
Reply

Against the backdrop of the multi-billion dollar Medicaid fraud being pulled off in Minnesota and so far only partially uncovered (for all the dozens of indictments and convictions), a fraud that centers on sending those billions of dollars overseas, comes this move by Missouri’s State Treasurer Vivek Malek:

Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek told Just the News he is teaming up with the state legislature to impose new requirements that remittance payment businesses ensure that customers are lawfully in the United States before they can send money to foreign countries….

It’s not just Somali immigrants and illegal aliens resident in Minnesota, either.

“It has been found that at least $4.4 billion in remittances sent to Mexico have been tied to cartel money laundering through small wire transfers,” [Malek] said. “Cartels don’t sneak money across the border or throw the bag across the border. They wire it. And if we are serious about crushing cartels, we have to shut down their financial arteries.”

This is a strong move, and it’ll be instructive to see which States—Progressive-Democrat-run vs Republican-run—start taking similar steps. State by State legislation, though, is patchy, incomplete, and slow. What’s needed is the same move done at the Federal level. Treasury should monitor such transmissions, blocking those sent by inappropriate senders—illegal aliens, for instance. Treasury has ample authority under our Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….

Remissions of US money to foreign relatives of those present in the US, whether legally so or illegal alien, is pretty clearly Commerce with foreign Nations.

Deterring the PRC

Posted on by
Reply

Deterring the PRC

The editors at The Wall Street Journal are correct in one respect regarding convincing the People’s Republic of China that it cannot successfully fight us at sea, but the editors fall woefully short of what’s truly necessary. And so does the Trump administration, although it is taking more serious steps regarding our national defense and our national security than has any administration since Reagan.

Today’s 296-ship Navy isn’t large or capable enough to prevent a war in the Pacific while deterring bad actors elsewhere. China is amassing military power with one adversary in mind: the US. This threat demands a diverse mix of firepower, including more stealthy submarines, longer-range aircraft, a deep cache of long-range missiles spread across more ships, and an unmanned fleet to deter an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.

Our Navy badly needs that, but it needs much more than that. It needs more combat ships, building rapidly to at least a 500 combat ship fleet, it needs more cargo ships capable of replenishing at sea those combat ships of everything from ammunition of all types, fuel, and such consumables as potable water and food. It needs better ship- and fleet-wide defenses capable of much earlier detection of incoming fires and countering those fires, including the PRC’s ship-, air-, and ground-launched hypersonic missiles. It needs hardening against EMP attacks and cyber attacks against shipborne software. It needs improved capability against PRC ECM measures. It needs its own ECM capability to isolate PRC shipping—surface and subsurface—from its command centers and from each other. It needs countermeasures capable of blinding PRC aircraft and missiles. It needs longer range and better detection systems against the PRC’s growing and increasingly capable submarine fleet.

Our Navy needs also to be backstopped by other services and measures, especially in cyber warfare and in space. When the PRC attacks our fleet, we need to be able to counter those attacks, at least in part, from space, kinetically and electronically. We need to fragment with cyber measures the PRC’s onshore energy distribution infrastructure. We need, with cyber measures, to isolate the PRC government from the PLA, and we need fragment the PRC government, preventing the several branches from talking to each other electronically.

And one more major improvement.

New battleships for the US Navy will “help maintain American military supremacy, revive the American shipbuilding industry, and inspire fear in America’s enemies all over the world,” Mr Trump said Monday. “We’re going to start with two” ships and “quickly morph into 10,” he said, with lasers, guns, missiles, and more.

We need all those things, but we need them now, not in 10 or 15 years. We need to get rid of the development and acquisition bureaucracy that infests DoD and replace it with personnel and procedures that streamline the process and get systems from the drawing board into production much faster than that. In conjunction, design and mission creep must be put to an end, with both frozen early rather than being allowed to continue past laying down keels.

2027 is two years off, and that’s when PRC President Xi Jinping intends to begin his war of conquest against the Republic of China, and in support of that, that’s when he will have the PLA attack our Navy. Nor will his attack be limited to that. His announced goal is to dominate us, and the PLA’s doctrine is total war across the entire spectrum. This has been clear for more than 20 years, since publication of Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui’s Unrestricted Warfare, China’s Master Plan to Destroy America in 2002.

Time’s a-wasting, and our freedom, every bit as much as the RoC’s, is in the wind since what we have in being is not much deterrence.

“News” Media Arrogance Personified

Posted on by
Reply

The lede demonstrates this “news” reader and opinionator Katie Couric’s personal arrogance in presenting what she’s pleased to call “journalism.”:

Katie Couric spoke out against “bothsidesism” in news coverage and insisted people don’t want “just the facts” in the current media environment.

Yes, we do. We want, even though “news”…presenters…don’t want us to hear, all the facts, even though Couric’s presenters prefer to provide only those that suit the presenters’ predetermined narrative. We object strongly to censored presentations, a censorship and bias that’s revealed by what facts are withheld as much as by what facts are selected for reporting.

We don’t mind biased, opinionated commentary, but we expect it to be in carefully labeled opinion pieces, not opinions masqueraded as fact in what is alleged to be news reporting. And, we expect even opinionated commentary to be informed by logic and facts, not hype or hyperbole. Couric again:

So what I try to do, and what we try to do, is help people stay abreast of everything that’s happening, which is increasingly difficult given the velocity of things that are thrown at us primarily by this administration. But try to understand and give them some perspective and context and help explain in some cases why people need to be aware and concerned about some of the things that are happening in this country.

Pick one. You can’t help us “stay abreast of everything that’s happening” when you insist on no ” bothsidesism,” when you insist on only presenting one side. [T]ry to understand and give [us] some perspective and context and help explain?

This is Couric insulting our intelligence. If she had the integrity to present all of the facts, we’d be able to understand for ourselves, to see for ourselves the perspective. We’re not stupid, as she so plainly says we are. Especially when she says she tries to give us some context when, with her own words, she withholds context by presenting only those facts she’s carefully selected for presentation. That contradiction is especially insulting to our intelligence.

And there’s Couric’s precious self-importance, her velocity of things that are thrown at us as though she and her cronies are the audience of any administration’s, much less the current one’s, actions. Couldn’t be that us citizens are the audience.

This is why the so-called news media—both reporting and opinionating—are so distrusted by so many of us.

AI and Entry-Level Jobs

Posted on by
Reply

Richard Smith, Johns Hopkins University’s Human Capital Development Lab Professor of Practice, and Arafat Kabir, writer about AI, in their The Wall Street Journal op-ed think that AI is spelling the death knell of entry-level jobs.

When AI automates routine tasks, organizations often find they need experienced employees who can combine AI capabilities with years of business knowledge. What those organizations don’t need is entry-level employees learning the basics. Data shows rising unemployment since 2022 among 22- to 25-year-olds in AI-affected sectors—even while employment for older workers remains stable.

Not so much. The transition from hand-spinning thread from cotton balls—an entry-level job for making cloth—changed with spinning jennies, powered looms, and the like. Entry-level work didn’t disappear, it transitioned to requiring different, and better, skills and the knowledge required to understand the more complex work. Hand spinners and weavers had to upgrade their skill sets and knowledge or go unemployed. New basic employees learned those new skills and gained that new knowledge. Employers who invested in the requisite training prospered, those that didn’t, didn’t.

Similarly, the transition from hand-fabricating and assembling automobiles to the assembly line changed the nature of entry-level work. Henry Ford blew away his competitors when he invested in training his new employees, which along with a small pay raise increased worker retention with its associated reduced labor costs from worker turnover and needing constantly to get new ones trained. OJT of hand crafters no longer could cut it, but the entry-level work, while changed in nature, remained in fact.

So it is with AI when it’s properly put to use. The scut work and grunt work of interns as gophers along with the routine most basic work that will be done by AI applications also does not replace entry-level work; it merely changes the nature of that basic work and, as before, requires a bit more knowledge of how to do it. The existing work force—those older workers—will retire sometime between sooner and later. Their loss will require companies to train their replacements in this new entry-level work, and those that do will move ahead, while those that do not will fall behind.

Smith and Kabir acknowledge as much without, apparently, recognizing so.

[R]ecogniz[e] that AI represents a fundamental shift rather than merely another tool. One example could be focusing on “AI native” tracks in which, instead of starting new employees with routine tasks that AI can handle, they begin with AI oversight and optimization roles. They learn to train, monitor, and improve AI systems while simultaneously building domain expertise—combining technical fluency with business acumen.

Yet, that’s precisely what a tool does. The steam-power was a fundamental shift for industry and industry-related work. It powered mining drills, heavy transportation, forges, and on and on. That fundamental shift, though, was just a means of getting new tools for more efficient work with an associated change in what constituted entry-level work. That basic work ranged from running those new tools to maintaining them to manufacturing them.

As technology evolves, so too does the nature of “entry-level.”