Actually, Some of Us Do

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Greg Ip, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has an extensive article delineating how the People’s Republic of China is growing economically at the direct expense of the rest of the world.

Far from missing the opportunities of an international free market process whereby everyone gains, the PRC is doing this deliberately. Its overtly stated goal is to economically dominate (not effectively compete with) us. Its unstated but longer term goal is to economically dominate the rest of the world.

And with economic domination comes political domination.

Ip’s subheadline, though, isn’t entirely accurate:

No one knows how to cope with Beijing’s “beggar thy neighbor” economic model

Some of us do know how. The PRC is an enemy nation. This is amply demonstrated by the PRC’s control and use as national security-threatening weapons of such Critical Items as rare earths, both ore and processed, and of the basic components of medicines. The PRC’s enmity toward us is corroborated by their “graduate students'” efforts to smuggle into our nation, via university labs, fungi that if loosed would severely damage if not wipe out, much of our food plant agriculture.

We should be doing no economic business with the at all; the cease and desist will eliminate the PRC’s economic weapons. It will be extremely expensive and disruptive for us to pull our supply chains entirely out of the PRC and to stop selling anything at all to the PRC or its companies and buying anything from them, but it will only grow more expensive as we delay moving. But those expenses will pale compared to the cost of having our economy and our politics controlled by the PRC.

Who Tested this Stuff?

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram (which he controls through his Meta) claims to be protecting child users from predators.

However.

When Instagram began fencing off teen accounts last year for safety reasons, content from people under 18 all but vanished for adults.
Teen accounts were automatically private, and posts and reels from those accounts no longer circulated in the Explore tab and main feeds, except in the case of adults who were already following teens. Predators suddenly had a lot harder time finding targets.

Actually, not so much.

But two moms affiliated with the family-advocacy organization ParentsTogether Action discovered a workaround, which they shared with me: When a teen account comments on a public post or video reel, and an adult account that hasn’t already been flagged for suspicious behavior sees it, the adult can chat up the teen in the comments and even send that teen a follow request. If the teen accepts, the two can engage in private direct messaging.

Those direct messages can—as these tests also proved—include nude picture exchanges, and then the sextortion operations can begin.

Zuckerberg’s claims, through his Instagram team, regarding these exchanges:

When the test accounts shared nude images with one another, they initially appeared blurred in the teen account, but the teen account user could opt to view the photos. Instagram says its nudity protection feature—on by default for teen accounts and including warnings about the dangers of sharing such images—has encouraged teens to think twice. In June, more than 40% of blurred images received in direct messages remained blurred, the company says.

And 60% did not remain blurred, apparently. If Zuckerberg’s Instagram programmers are that capable of identifying the teen accounts, why are nude images allowed to be transmitted to them at all?

These “workarounds” are so obvious that I have to question how seriously Zuckerberg is taking these threats to our children.

Who tested this stuff? Apparently, no one qualified or serious.

A Thought on the National Security Strategy Doc

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The Wall Street Journal‘s news writers had some, and so I have one.

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

Who has kept the peace? Only one member of the alliance.

It’s possible this doc is of a piece with Trump I’s statements that European NATO nations have been welching on their own commitments to NATO for too long, and maybe the alliance isn’t worth our trouble, blood, or treasure anymore, especially since it’s been us who’ve kept the peace all these years. It was us who flew the Berlin Airlift, it was us all along who was ready to risk nuclear war’s destruction across our homeland to defend Europe against potential Russia-led attacks.

Trump I’s threats were followed, if fitfully, by many of those nations finally stepping up and honoring their fiscal and equipage commitments. Still, though, one-third of those nations continue to welch on their commitments.

There’s this, too:

The strategy says the EU—an institution that the US helped establish decades ago—and other transnational organizations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.”

What the WSJ is ignoring here is that we helped establish the EU as an economic union, which was the EU founders’ goal, also. Since then, the operators of the EU have been trying to transmogrify the economic union into its own national entity—and that attacks the member nations’ individual sovereignty. This is the mother of all mission creeps.

Maybe the NSS document is another prod, after too many decades of pretty please.

Or maybe not. But it’s interesting that the WSJ chooses to ignore any interpretation that differs from its own.

A Brief Thought on Politics and Government

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It’s necessary to keep in mind a fundamental fact of government: government does absolutely nothing; it’s purely a hypothetical construct.

That hypothetical aspect, though, is made concretely extant by the men and women who populate a government and occupy the various positions within it. In our American case, our government is given a framework and the positions within it by our Constitution and the statutes within our Constitution that create specific Departments and Agencies and their structure. Our government—this construction—still does absolutely nothing. It’s the men and women who occupy those positions within our government who do the things vernacularly attributed to “government.”

Politics is what those men and women do. It’s politics that those men and women employ to do things, to enact statutes, execute or rescind regulations, generate legal cases for our government’s courts, and issue court decisions (yes, politics is involved in judges’ and Justices’ development of their decisions, especially at the appellate levels where groups of judges and Justices must agree at least more or less on a ruling).

Those politics center on trading off support or obstruction of this or that position in return for support or obstruction of that or this position. Every politician or court official has something to gain or lose or trade in these tradeoffs. At bottom—because we humans at bottom are venal creatures—these political tradeoffs are as much for personal gain—generally in political power, sometimes for explicit financial—as they are for the nation’s good.

And that’s the danger of politics in government: the men and women who are the real actors, in the name of government, tend to act for their own weal first and the weal of our nation, the weal of us citizens, second.

Against that framework, it’s important to consider the philosophies underlying our two major political parties. In broad strokes, one of the parties holds the position that government can solve most, if not all, of the problems us citizens face, whether as groups of us or individually. This leads to this party moving to constantly expand the role of government in us citizens’ lives.

The other party holds the position that government is necessary because some problems are best worked, or can only be worked, by government, and so statutes should be kept simple and regulations to a minimum. This leads to moves to limit government power and intrusion into our lives.

Thus, one party moves to expand its politicians’ own political power and financial gain, while the other party moves to limit those gains or at least expand them at a much slower rate.

While the two parties tend to converge, they’re not there yet, and elections still have consequences.

I Have a Question

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President Donald Trump (R) wants to set up financial accounts for children, initially funded with $1,000 of government money—taxpayer money redistributed. Wall Street wants in on the action. This bit is what raises my question:

Participating financial firms likely would earn lower management fees than their typical rates, but the program would be a potential gateway to acquire millions of new customers the companies hope will stay with them into adulthood and grow their accounts over time.

And this:

One priority for the government is to offer low-fee investment options.

Who will pay those fees? Would they be one-time set up fees, or would they be ongoing account maintenance fees? If the latter, and if they’re paid by the account holder, which is the usual case, even low fees would sap the accounts over time just as thoroughly as even low management fees on mutual funds do.

On the other hand, there’s this:

The Treasury Department is considering choosing an exchange-traded fund or working with firms to potentially create a market-tracking fund with no fees, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

That’s the firms betting on the account holders becoming future broader account holders/investors with those firms, and that would be a good bet.

No-fee (as most brokerages do for DIY investors) or (very) low fee, these accounts would seem like a good idea—give children a leg up on investing and thereby give them a long-term level of game skin for their betterment and their better judgment and interest in our economy.

Except.

How strong would that skin be if handed to the children (even if managed with the assistance of, or by, their parents)? Possibly, the benefits would outweigh that risks, given the size of the proposed seed money.

The far greater danger, though, is the Progressive-Democratic Party, with its penchant for Know Better Government intrusions, returning to power. At that point, the accounts will become permanently and annually government funded in ever increasing amounts—so long as the accounts invest in Party-approved vehicles. See, for instance, Party’s demand for continued (and increasing) subsidies for their unaffordable Affordable Care Act policies.