TESTING. NOT M.A.D.

the US has failed the test. the test was to test. South Korea can test 20,000 a day. we havent tested 20,000 in total.

shutting down the global economy is a mistake. the cure will kill the patient. test everybody. profile by attributes; e.g. old, fat and unhealthy versus opposite.

we will create a depression which will have an indirect and direct cost in excess of the loss of life and scar a generation.

Trump has failed. after 3 years, you own it.

TO NATION STATE OR TO NOT NATION STATE

In his first few weeks in office, Trump came out all guns blazing on a variety of topics, including if not especially immigration. there is so much about him and what he does and how he does it to non-plus and rational person. however, whether its Trump or Brexit or the rise of the nationalist parties, there are questions worth thinking through

Nation states, in order to be nation states need certain attributes:

they need borders. a nation without borders is not a nation

they need citizens. are you or are you not. if not what is your status and rights

now maybe we don't want nation states. that is a position. but if we are not prepared to give up the concept then we need borders and citizenship. and having national values, ethos and culture isn't such a bad idea either.

the globalist view of Europe is in conflict with the concept of a nation state. One of the drivers of Brexit was the fact that someone from say Somalia could somehow get into Europe and if they then found their way to England could go into the NHS. This led to increasing costs and "natives" having to wait longer for healthcare.

Trump got elected, in part, due to our unwillingness and inability to deal with some of these

MUSINGS ON OUR MESS

Most of us have read undated musings on how bad things are going in society and the world is coming to an end only to find out that it had been written a thousand years ago or more and somehow we muddled through

today could be no different. But as i read about the rise of identity populism, the clear mistakes of ayn randian globalism, the refugee crisis, the immigration crisis, the environmental crisis, protectionist trade policies, and you wonder.

a few things we got wrong:

Global Arbitrage. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if labor is cheaper in mexico, china, Bangladesh than in the US and Europe versus the cost of transportation that jobs will go to the lower wage places. The environmental standards are lower in those places which leads to further cost differential and environmental degradation. we export our pollution. but we are on the same planet.

Population. when i was born there were less than 3 billion people on the planet; now around  8 billion.  If you have a fish tank and you triple the number of fish in the same tank what happens?  It gets stressed. in theory with better technology and better leadership and better human values, this can be accommodated but we seem to not be coping very well with this

Climate change and Water Wars.  i am no scientist but the weather seems more volatile. Flooding and drought put pressure on people creating pressure for increased migration and the creation of millions of refugees that no one wants

Refugee crisis. my great grand parents came to the US in 1912, fleeing oppression in Ukraine. The world population was 2 billion. would they be allowed in today? refugees flee many things; outright legitimate fear of being killed to trying to flee local poverty, the latter sometimes labeled economic migrants.


Syria. it actually started when Bush 1 blew up the balance in the middle east by invading Iraq but really went nuts when Obama allowed Syria to disintegrate. This has sent millions toward Europe. Europe cannot accommodate this number of people and it is not going well. Deals have been cut with Turkey and Libya to stem the tide. the human cost is unbelievable.

what to do? however empathetic you might be, no matter what guilt you carry from the Holocaust, i don't think we can take in all the people who logically want to be taken in. it would be an interesting experiment. the second law of thermodynamics boiled down is about equilibrium. if you put an ice cube into hot tea, the system seeks thermal equilibrium and does. well we could do the same but i think the whole globe would be come unglued.

i think we need to ;

Nation build. a dirty word but if you don't want Libyans coming to Paris then you need Libya to be livable.

population control. Elon wants to go to Mars. i guess someday. but in the mean time there are too many people. i use the word TOO not out of classism or racism but out of environmental limits. once we kill all the coral and all the fish and all the bees, there will be no or few or at least less people.

running out of allotted characters for a post. 

LIVE BY THE PEN, DIE BY THE PEN

There is much hand wringing about all the executive orders that Trump is issuing. It would be interesting to show a graph with Trump vs. Obama over time in terms of executive orders. i have no idea what it would look like. however, ruling through executive order and regulatory fiat became the new normal under Obama. Clinton worked with Gingrich and a republican congress in his second term and got things done. Obama would say that the republicans wouldn't work with him and maybe he was right but others have done so. My theory is he irretrievably poisoned the well when he drove the ACA through. it was the first major piece of social legislation that was jammed through on a one party basis. He came into office with a lot of political capital which he chose to spend on the ACA. we were still in a major financial crisis, which he had nothing to do with but maybe if he had focused on that and tried to create some common ground on healthcare the escalation in partisanship would not have escalated to our now toxic levels.

Legislation is better than executive orders. much of what he created is now being disassembled

not all for the better; but some yes

PROTECTIONISM IS THE NEW GLOBAL ECONOMIC RISK

the EU going after Ireland, not Apple directly, to go after Apple is the latest indication that protectionism is afoot in the land and nothing good will come from it. Is the Apple/Ireland tax deal bad public policy? probably. But is was entered into 25 years ago when there was no EU limitation on such an arrangement. So this is an ex-post facto reach back attacking an agreement made by a sovereign. Not good

But as we look around the world at the backlash against trade agreements, globalization, immigration, trump and Hillary, competitive devaluation through ridiculous QE monetary policy and it feels like things may go badly.

by the way, all these reactions are rational or at least understandable. we as a society of nation states are doing a bad job managing change. maybe a trade agreement does increase GDP and GDP per capita but how is the increase allocated? If you are the one laid off, the trade agreement doesn't feel so good.

given how poor a job we do in the US managing change and the mess that calls itself the EU and an aggressive and transitioning China, i think things could go badly

remember Smoot-Hawley

THE GREAT UNRAVELING

timing is everything. we were all waiting for Trump to blow himself up and no matter what he did he seemed impervious to any thing he said or did. i believe he even said that if he shot someone, his followers wouldn't bat an eyelash. and it seemed to be self-fulfilling.

until

until he went after the parents of the dead soldier.

that was a mistake. on so many levels. aside from being morally wrong it was tactically wrong.  i guess his calculus was that what the gains from his anti-immigration positions gains him more than it loses but i think this will be deemed the turning point where enough people say, that was too much. he is not acceptable.

RIO WILL NOT END WELL

wouldn't it be nice to have a time machine and go back to the first Olympics? a lot has happened since then. Greece went bankrupt. among other things. but for those of us who do not have the time, patience, talent and perverseness to write a book vs. dashing out a screed, here are a few thoughts on the upcoming 2016 event in Brazil which gives me pause;

1)  there is barely a functioning government.

2) the facilities and infrastructure are suspect. this is often the case as they run out of time and money and slap most of it together just before the torch gets lit. the bridge that collapsed after an ocean wave gives pause

3) pollution. i happen to be a sailor. the water off of Rio is full of raw sewage and is a petri dish of bad stuff. i hope none of the competitors catch something really bad.

4) ZIKA. neither WHO or CDC will try to call this off. i understand sunk costs and vested interests and maybe they know what they are talking about. but it doesn't sound right. millions of people from all over the world are coming to Brazil and then going home. while it has been said that zika is coming, to the US and other places, no matter what, why throw gasoline on the fire? they are not suppressing mosquitoes effectively in Brazil and Olympics will create carriers and transmission

and there will be sex. check out the stats at the amount of sex that takes place at the Olympics. there will be an all time record of 450,000 condoms distributed to the 8255 athletes coming to the games.this includes 100,000 so called female condoms but still adds up to 500 per athlete. what stamina? how do they have any energy left for sport?

anyhow there will be a lot of sex. and Zika can be spread by sex. and the birth defects are horrific.

so lets not get in the way of the passion and the money.

lets have a party and spread ZIKA