In Conversations, Many Young Britons in London Called the Monarchy Increasingly Irrelevant

By now, if you're even remotely attached to the news cycle, you heard word of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

I am a fan of the monarchy, and while no expert, I always teach the British case in my comparative politics courses each semester, and discussion of the history, role, and importance of the monarchy is a great part of that. So, though I'm a little late, expect a good number of posts on events happening in the U.K. over the next couple of weeks. This really is an end of an era.

The Queen's obituary is here, "Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96; Was Britain’s Longest-Reigning Monarch," and "Queen Elizabeth II obituary.

In related news, Britain's young people are apparently over the monarchy, because racism. 

At the New York Times, "In London, Mourning, Remembrance and Tributes. And Some Shrugs."

Though mourning and grief were visible in Britain’s capital on Friday, some young Britons were more muted in their reaction to an institution that many called increasingly irrelevant.

LONDON — Gertrude Dudley remembers sitting on her grandfather’s shoulders in 1953 at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch she came to know as “the fabric of Britain.”

On Friday, Ms. Dudley, 78, a retired entrepreneur, was mourning the queen’s death along with a friend at a London cafe. “This country is in such terrible state, she was the one stability,” Ms Dudley said. “Now she, too, has gone.”

Chrissy Mash, 29, who was shopping for groceries in London’s Islington borough, had a much different reaction, though.

“I am surprised by how unaffected I am,” she said. “The monarchy does not serve any purpose and if it does it is superseded by the damage of colonialism,” she said. “I don’t buy into the fanfare anymore, it’s an excruciating display of a violent past.”

Signs of mourning and grief were on display in Britain’s capital on Friday as residents woke up for the first time in 70 years in a country in which Queen Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. Billboards and cinemas in the city’s main thoroughfares displayed tributes, events were canceled, and small talk about the queen kicked off first dates and business meetings.

But while the death of Elizabeth was a unifying force for many, conversations with Londoners also revealed signs of a generational divide in which many younger people expressed indifference, if not hostility, to the complicated institution the queen represented.

According to a YouGov poll taken in May, 74 percent of respondents 65 and older believe the monarchy is good for Britain, compared with 24 percent of 18-to-24 year olds.

Some younger people expressed fatigue at yet another royal disruption after two years of many crises — including the coronavirus or the war in Ukraine. Others shared amused jokes about how the queen’s last public action was to appoint the Conservative Party leader, Liz Truss, as prime minister this week.

Signs of mourning and grief were on display in Britain’s capital on Friday as residents woke up for the first time in 70 years in a country in which Queen Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. Billboards and cinemas in the city’s main thoroughfares displayed tributes, events were canceled, and small talk about the queen kicked off first dates and business meetings.

But while the death of Elizabeth was a unifying force for many, conversations with Londoners also revealed signs of a generational divide in which many younger people expressed indifference, if not hostility, to the complicated institution the queen represented.

According to a YouGov poll taken in May, 74 percent of respondents 65 and older believe the monarchy is good for Britain, compared with 24 percent of 18-to-24 year olds.

Some younger people expressed fatigue at yet another royal disruption after two years of many crises — including the coronavirus or the war in Ukraine. Others shared amused jokes about how the queen’s last public action was to appoint the Conservative Party leader, Liz Truss, as prime minister this week.

Many people from older generations could be seen wearing black as a sign of mourning, or rushing to buy newspapers dominated by the monarch’s picture, and some recalled memories of a queen who has been for so long part of their lives.

Sitting in front of a candlelit photo of Elizabeth in London’s St James’ Church, Angela Kennedy, 71, a retired fashion journalist, said she struggled to cope with the loss of the queen, whom she had met and long admired.

“It’s very hard to take it in,” she said. “It’s truly the end of an era.”

Ms. Kennedy recalled how the queen had visited the media organization she worked for in the late 1970s. She said that while Elizabeth appeared more interested in magazines like Horse and Hound than fashion publications, she still gave the staff her time, looking “immaculate” for the visit.

“She represented a figurehead that was truly British,” she said, adding that she felt fortunate to live in a country with a monarchy like Britain’s. “I have just grown up with it, it’s just part of my life.”

Sitting in front of a candlelit photo of Elizabeth in London’s St James’ Church, Angela Kennedy, 71, a retired fashion journalist, said she struggled to cope with the loss of the queen, whom she had met and long admired.

“It’s very hard to take it in,” she said. “It’s truly the end of an era.”

Ms. Kennedy recalled how the queen had visited the media organization she worked for in the late 1970s. She said that while Elizabeth appeared more interested in magazines like Horse and Hound than fashion publications, she still gave the staff her time, looking “immaculate” for the visit.

“She represented a figurehead that was truly British,” she said, adding that she felt fortunate to live in a country with a monarchy like Britain’s. “I have just grown up with it, it’s just part of my life.”

That sentiment will likely be expressed at memorials being held for Elizabeth over the next 10 days, culminating in a funeral expected to take place at Westminster Abbey.

Outside St. Paul’s Cathedral on Friday, crowds gathered as a bell rang out at midday, once for each of Elizabeth’s 96 years, as they did at churches across the country. At the gates of Buckingham Palace, people laid flowers — among them the newly ascended King Charles III — and gun salutes honored the queen’s life. Fashion shows were canceled, as were labor union meetings, carnivals and protests.

Elizabeth Hastings, 69, who was named after the queen, was holding a newspaper with a picture of the monarch plastered across the front page as she walked to a yoga class.

“I was born in 1953, the year of the coronation,” she said, “I have been brought up with her reigning and I have read so much about her growing up,” she said.

Ms. Hastings said she met the queen in the 1970s when she worked at the foreign office in London, and she remembered her beautiful skin.

“Like a doll,” she said admiringly. “It’s a really sad day,” she added.

Dave Stanley, 78, a retired butcher, was walking his German shepherd in London in between the rain showers that intermittently washed over the capital on Friday. “I am choked,” he said. “I was a kid when she was crowned; now she is dead. It’s an end of an era. I can’t explain it. I have known her all my life. And now she’s gone.”

Felix Clarke, 31, a manager at a coworking space in central London, stood at his counter seemingly unaffected by the news of the queen’s death.

e said that while every death was sad, he saw the royal family as an institution “founded on a colonial and racist past.”

Earlier in the day, his mother and sister had shared their sadness with texts on their family’s WhatsApp group, but Mr. Clarke refrained from adding his own thoughts.

“I didn’t want to jump in and be rude,” he said...

 

Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine

See, Max Fisher, The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. 

'Hello It's Me

It's Todd Rundgren:

Michael Shellenbarger

Take Liz's advice:

Read every word of this thread to understand exactly how the leftist politicians like Newsom are lying to you about the CA heat wave & electric vehicles. https://t.co/ncw0xZizbk

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) September 7, 2022

The Honest Guide to College

It's Lee Burdette Williams, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "College students' mental health is suffering. Downplaying challenges of living away from home for the first time won’t make it any better":

About three million first-time college students will soon be arriving on campus—most of them coming directly from high school. About one million of them won’t make it through their first year or return as sophomores. This attrition is financially and emotionally devastating for families, and destabilizing for colleges. What goes wrong for so many students? And how can we stop the bleeding?

Financial challenges account for the largest chunk of these departures. But many others leave because the support services they and their parents feel they have been promised are often impossible for colleges and universities to provide. The number of students with mental health challenges has been rising for years—around 44 percent of all college students report symptoms of depression and anxiety. The rate of students taking psychiatric medication doubled between 2007 and 2019, and is now at 25 percent.

But what concerns my colleagues and me is the growing expectation among parents and students that college administrators are there not to guide young people, whatever their challenges, in mastering the tasks of adulthood, but to spare young people from them.

There are only about nine weeks between high school graduation and a student’s arrival on campus. That is very little time to prepare a teenager for the necessary shift from life under a parent’s management to (semi-) independent living. In as little as four weeks after classes begin, a first-year student who is unable to make that transition can end up unable to recover academically.

I have spent my career working with college students from enrollment through commencement. As a dean of students—at the University of Connecticut, and later at Wheaton College—I talked with numerous parents who were startled to discover that their child had not been attending class, had not been turning in assignments, maybe hadn’t bathed in days. The parents had expected more supervision; we had expected more personal accountability. Caught in that gap was a student about to lose a semester of academic credit and thousands of dollars of wasted tuition and housing fees, often covered by loans that still had to be paid back.

Here is my advice for students and their parents—as well as my colleagues in higher education—on ways to help make sure students are ready for college...

Keep reading.

 

As California Heat Wave Continues, Santa Monica Community College Loses Air Conditioning (VIDEO)

I've been teaching this week and it's been perfectly comfortable in my classroom. But there but the grace of God I go, it turns out. 

This heat wave is devilish. It's not just Santa Monica, of course. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "PG&E warns over 500,000 customers of possible rotating outages as California heat wave drags on." 

And at CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Pauline

On Instagram.

Eliza Fletcher Murder: Memphis Kidnapping Suspect Cleotha Abston Held Without Bond (VIDEO)

This is a must-watched segment with Tucker Carson below.

An at Fox News, "Eliza Fletcher was jogging in the early morning when she was abducted. Memphis police announce they have located and positively identified Eliza Fletcher's body."

Bryan Caplan, The Case against Education

This is excellent.

At Amazon, Bryan Caplan, The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.

How Many Books Actually Sell?

 See Lincoln Michael, "No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies: A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing":

OMG In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN ONE DOZEN.

— April Henry (@aprilhenrybooks) September 4, 2022

One thing the PRH/SS merger trial revealed is that publishing has a lot of problems. This is very true! At the same time, many of the problems seem to have mutated into unbelievable chimeras as they made their way around the discourse. Today, for example, much of the literary internet was debating a claim that 50% of books published sell fewer than 12 books.

This claim took off with the usual suspects—conservative pundits claiming publishing is too “woke” and self-publishing evangelicals saying every author would make a fortune if they ditched traditional publishing—but the publishing professionals I know said this claim is very fishy. (I’m pretty sure publishers would go out of business if 50% of their books sold less than 12 copies!) So this statistic isn’t true. Or at least it isn’t true in the way you might think.

But publishing statistics are often not what you think. This extreme 12 copies claim joins a couple others that have gone around the internet recently: “98 percent of books sell fewer than 5,000 copies.” “90 percent sell fewer than 2,000 copies” “Most books sell fewer than 99 copies.” Etc.

Are all of these true? None of them? Part of the problem with evaluating claims of “most published books sell [X] copies” is that it—[apologies for the Derrida voice]—it all depends on what you mean by “book,” “published,” and “sell.” No, I’m not playing postmodern games here. It really is confusing.

What’s “a book”?

The Platonic ideal of a book might be a collection of text printed on a few hundred paper pages. But the term encompasses much more than that, including books that have almost no text at all (for example the “adult coloring book” craze of the 2010s). Publishers publish novels and memoirs as well as cookbooks, puzzle books, Mad Libs, etc. But it’s even more confusing than this when it comes to those statistics.

Last year, Orbit published my debut novel The Body Scout. I wrote one novel, so published one book. Right? Not exactly. From a sales tracking perspective, books are published in multiple formats, each with different ISBNs. I wrote one novel, but from a title count POV I actually published 4 books: hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Other books have even more formats (mass market version, movie tie-in editions, etc.) and because they all have different ISBNs, they all have different sales figures. When it comes to classics that are in the public domain, like Pride and Prejudice or Shakespeare, there can be literally hundreds of editions in existence (put out by various publishers) each of which could be counted separately.

What’s “published”?

A published book can refer to a newly written and released book—aka frontlist, or a novel published for the first time in 2022—or it can refer to anything a publisher puts out in a given year, including a reissue of an existing book. But sometimes “published” means any book that exists in any format available for purchase. A hundred-year-old novel that no longer can be found bookstore shelves yet sits in cardboard box in the back of a warehouse somewhere is “a published book.” Some books are never published in print at all and exist only as ebooks and/or audiobooks. And many books exist in “print on demand” form in which a physical copy doesn’t exist until someone purchases it. In the old days, books would go out of print when people stopped buying them. But in the modern digital age books can exist “in print” for forever.

It’s also worth pointing out here that publishers range from tiny micropresses run as a hobby in someone’s garage to multi-billion dollar companies. If you’re counting books by ISBNs, this would also include many self-published books.

What’s “a sale”?

When people reference book sales, they’re typically talking using Nielsen’s BookScan numbers. Think of BookScan as the book industry version of Nielsen TV ratings. Briefly, BookScan is a “point of sale” tracking system that counts the number of print copies sold at participating retail locations. BookScan allegedly tracks about 75% of retail sales including lots of indie bookstores as well as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Walmart.

It’s a fine tool for what it is, but from a data perspective it’s only partial. I already mentioned the issue with multiple formats above. BookScan also only tracks print so doesn’t include audiobooks or ebooks. (There is a Nielsen ebook estimator, but it’s rarely included in these statistics. And ebook sales are tricky since prices fluctuate wildly.) Even restricting ourselves to print books, BookScan misses plenty. Sales to libraries, for example, can be a significant portion of a book’s sales. Many small press and self-published authors might sell directly via an author’s website or in-person events. And so on.

Additionally, there are dramatic differences between 1) lifetime sales, 2) sales in the first 12 months after publication, and 3) sales in any random calendar year. Most books sell most of their copies in the first year or two after publication. Some books are perennial sellers and others might break out later—e.g., when there is a TV or film adaptation—but most sell the bulk of their copies early. Any statistic based on 3) is going to give you a completely inaccurate impression of what a book has sold. Imagine a 1998 novel that sold 6,000 its first year and 10,000 copies to date. It might sell only 12 copies in 2022, decades later, but that hardly means it was a failure.

Okay, so what does all the above mean? Mostly it means these statistics are completely meaningless unless we know what’s being included. Are you counting lifetime sales or one year’s sales? One year’s sales for frontlist titles or backlist titles? Only Big 5 books or anything with an ISBN?

Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies. This seems shocking on its face. But if you dig into it, you’ll notice it was counting one year’s sales of all books that were in BookScan’s system. That’s quite different statistic than saying most books don’t sell 100 copies in total! A book could easily be a bestseller in, say, 1960 and sell only a trickle of copies today. In the same way, most old movies and albums aren’t frequently watched/listened to in 2022. It’s only a small percentage of past works that remain popular. Most backlist books selling fewer than 99 copies doesn’t tell you anything about how much newly released books sell.

(If you’re wondering—as people did on Twitter—why publishers keep books in print that don’t sell, remember that a book being in print doesn’t mean a publisher is actively spending lots of money on the title. It doesn’t break the bank to keep one box in the corner of a warehouse. And as I noted above a book can be “in print” these days and exist only in a digital form or awaiting “print on demand.”)

In terms of the dozen copies statistic, I can’t evaluate it because it is unclear what it’s referring to. Fifty-eight thousand books is more books than PRH publishes in a given year, but far less than their entire backlist. Is 58k all new books published with an ISBN, including self-published books? Is it something else? I really don’t know and none of the publishing professionals I follow seem to know either. (Editing to add: Jane Friedman, who posted this number originally on Instagram, noted there was no source given in testimony. Friedman gives her own guess in the comments.)

In my experience, and with the data I’ve seen, most traditionally published novels that you see on bookstore shelves or reviewed in newspapers sell several hundred to a few thousand copies across formats. Many sell much more of course. I’ve seen some flops that sold only a couple hundred. And of course not all traditionally published novels appear in bookstores or reviewed in newspapers. Is it possible someone has published a Big 5 novel that sold only 12 copies over its lifetime? I suppose. But I don’t think it’s 5% much less 50%! ...

Still more. 

Father Leaves Baby Kyler Parrott, 1-Year-Old, in Hot Car, Where Temperatures Inside the Vehicle Likely Hit 130 Degrees (VIDEO)

This makes me cry. 

Baby Kyler's obituary is here. 

At ABC News 5 Cleveland, "Father, 19, charged with murder after allegedly confessing to leaving 1-year-old son in hot car deliberately."

And at the New York Post, "Ohio dad, 19, admits he left his infant son to die in 130-degree car":

An Ohio dad reportedly confessed to leaving his baby son to die in a blazing-hot car as outside temperatures soared, after initially claiming the 14-month-old was alone just briefly.

Landon Parrott, 19 — who first said he’d left the infant alone during a short bathroom trip — allegedly copped to the heinous move after cops showed footage of him leaving the boy in the car at 8:30 a.m. and not returning until 1:50 p.m., more than five hours later.

“The child passed away after being left in the car unattended for approximately 5 hours, with an outside temperature of 87 degrees,” New Philadelphia Police Chief Michael Goodwin said in a statement posted on Facebook.

“It appears that this was not a matter of forgetting the child but was a deliberate act so as the child would not be a disturbance while in the house.”

Temperatures reached into the upper 80s on Thursday when the incident occurred. Police official Ty Norris told Fox affiliate WJW the car was likely as hot as 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Norris said Parrott had admitted to cops he knew about the dangers of hot cars for kids.

“We estimate that would’ve made the interior of the car about 130 degrees and this child was in there strapped into a car seat with no fluids, no air conditioning, nothing,” Norris told the station. “It’s heartbreaking to see this unfold before your eyes.”

Parrott has been charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter and two counts of endangering children, police said. He is being held in custody on $250,000 bond...

 

Kayla Erin

On Twitter.

China's Economy Won’t Overtake the U.S., Some Now Predict

I've long been bearish on the China challenge. China has grown, dramatically, and the hype has grown right up along with it. All we can do is "prepare for the worst but hope for the best."

At WSJ, "Slowing growth has dampened expectations that the Chinese economy will be the world’s largest by the end of the decade":

HONG KONG—The sharp slowdown in China’s growth in the past year is prompting many experts to reconsider when China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy—or even if it ever will.

Until recently, many economists assumed China’s gross domestic product measured in U.S. dollars would surpass that of the U.S. by the end of the decade, capping what many consider to be the most extraordinary economic ascent ever.

But the outlook for China’s economy has darkened this year, as Beijing-led policies—including its zero tolerance for Covid-19 and efforts to rein in real-estate speculation—have sapped growth. As economists pare back their forecasts for 2022, they have become more worried about China’s longer term prospects, with unfavorable demographics and high debt levels potentially weighing on any rebound.

In one of the most recent revisions, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a U.K. think tank, thinks China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy two years later than it previously expected when it last made a forecast in 2020. It now thinks it will happen in 2030.

The Japan Center for Economic Research in Tokyo has said it thinks the passing of the baton won’t happen until 2033, four years later than its previous forecast.

Other economists question whether China will ever claim the top spot.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said China’s aging population and Beijing’s increasing tendency to intervene in corporate affairs, along with other challenges, have led him to substantially lower his expectations for Chinese growth.

He sees parallels between forecasts of China’s rise and earlier prognostications that Japan or Russia would overtake the U.S.—predictions that look ridiculous today, he said.

“I think there is a real possibility that something similar would happen with respect to China,” said Mr. Summers, now a Harvard University professor.

Researchers debate how meaningful GDP rankings are, and question whether much will change if China does overtake the U.S. The depth and openness of the U.S. economy mean the U.S. will still have outsize influence. The dollar is expected to remain the world’s reserve currency for years to come.

Size alone doesn’t reflect the quality of growth, said Leland Miller, chief executive officer of China Beige Book, a research firm. Living standards in the U.S., measured by per capita gross domestic product, are five times greater than in China, and the gap is unlikely to close soon.

Still, a change in the ranking would be a propaganda win for Beijing as it seeks to show the world—and its own population—that China’s state-led model is superior to Western liberal democracy, and that the U.S. is declining both politically and economically. Over time, it could lead to more-substantive changes as more countries reorient their economies to serve Chinese markets.

“If China slows down substantially in its growth, it impacts China’s capacity to project power,” said Mr. Summers.

How the two countries stack up economically matters to Chinese leaders: After the U.S. economy grew faster than China’s during the last quarter of 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping told officials to ensure the country’s growth outpaces the U.S.’s this year, the Journal previously reported.

Economic fortunes can reverse quickly. In 2020, when China bounced back faster than the U.S. did from initial Covid-19 outbreaks, it looked like China’s economy might surpass the U.S. sooner than expected.

Some economists appear less perturbed by near-term threats to China’s growth. Justin Yifu Lin, a former chief economist at the World Bank who has long been bullish on China’s potential, argues its larger population means the country’s economy will wind up twice as big as the U.S.’s eventually. At a forum in Beijing in May, he predicted that process would continue despite the country’s latest slowdown.

Nevertheless, economic problems keep piling up in China, in part because of policy choices Beijing has made to contain Covid-19 and rein in debt.

The country’s real-estate slowdown is showing no signs of letting up. An index tracking consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in decades in spring this year. Urban youth unemployment is at a record high.

The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, noted in a March report that it expects Chinese growth to average only about 2% to 3% a year between 2021 and 2050, compared with some researchers’ expectations that China could maintain 4% to 5% growth until midcentury. The institute cited unfavorable demographics, diminishing returns from infrastructure investments and other challenges.

With growth of 2% to 3% a year, China could still become the world’s largest economy, the institute noted.

“But it would never establish a meaningful lead over the United States and would remain far less prosperous and productive per person than America, even by mid-century,” it wrote. Its growth also wouldn’t be enough to give it any significant competitive advantage.

In a response to questions, the Lowy Institute said China’s further economic slowdown since the report came out has “at minimum pushed back the likely moment when China might overtake the U.S., and made it more likely that China might in fact never be able to do so.”

With China’s urban youth unemployment at a high, a job fair was held in Beijing last month.

Measured by purchasing power, which takes into account differing costs of goods and services across countries, China already overtook the U.S.’s economy in 2016, according to World Bank figures. Measured in U.S. dollar terms, however, China’s GDP was 77% of the size of the U.S’s. in 2021, up from 13% in 2001, data from the World Bank shows.

Capital Economics researchers wrote in a report early last year that their most likely scenario envisions China’s economy expanding to about 87% of the size of the U.S.’s in 2030, before dropping back to 81% in 2050. It blamed China’s shrinking working population and weak productivity growth, among other factors.

“A lot of people for a long time have overestimated the competence of China’s leadership and have been shocked by the missteps with Covid and the property sector,” wrote Mark Williams, the firm’s chief Asia economist, in an email in which he reaffirmed his firm’s forecast. “The weakness these crises have revealed have been present and growing for a long time.”

Some researchers say China’s ability to overtake the U.S. will depend on whether it pursues more economic policy changes...

 

Sea Power Makes Great Powers

At Foreign Policy, "History reveals a country’s rise and decline are directly related to the heft of its navy. So why is the United States intent on downsizing?":

THE NUMBER OF SHIPS A COUNTRY POSSESSES has never been the sole measure of its power at sea. Other factors, of course, play a role: The types of ships it has--submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers--the manner in which they are deployed, the sophistication of their sensors, and the range and lethality of their weapons all make a difference. Still, on the high seas, quantity has a quality all its own. And over the past several decades, U.S. ship numbers have seen a dramatic overall decline.

The 1980s and 1990s marked the beginning of this downward trend. The U.S. government at the time cut subsidies for the nation's commercial shipbuilding industry, eventually hobbling the shipyards it would need to build a bigger fleet. With the end of the Cold War, policymakers went a step further, slashing funding to the U.S. Navy to create a shortsighted peace dividend. Now, with defense budgets flat or declining, leading Defense Department officials are pushing a "divest to invest" strategy--whereby the Navy must decommission a large number of older ships to free up funds to buy fewer, more sophisticated, and presumably more lethal platforms.

China, meanwhile, is aggressively expanding its naval footprint and is estimated to have the largest fleet in the world. Leading voices simultaneously recognize the rising China threat while also arguing that the United States must shrink its present fleet in order to modernize. Adm. Philip Davidson, who led U.S. Indo-Pacific Command until he retired this spring, observed in March that China could invade Taiwan in the next six years--presumably setting the stage for a major military showdown with the United States--while Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, has argued that the Navy needs to accelerate the decommissioning of its older cruisers and littoral combat ships to free up money for vessels and weapons that will be critical in the future.

Taken together, these views add up to strategic confusion and an obliviousness to history.

CENTURIES OF GLOBAL RIVALRY SHOW how a country's power--and its decline--is directly related to the size and capability of its naval and maritime forces. The ability to ship goods in bulk from places where they are produced to places where they are scarce has long represented an expression of national power. Athens had a robust navy as well as a large merchant fleet. Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the 13th and 14th centuries, and the Dutch republic in the 16th and 17th centuries also fielded merchant and naval fleets to pursue and protect their interests. In this way, they were able to transform their small- and medium-sized nations into great powers.

Following the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, a large Royal Navy effectively knitted together the British Empire upon which "the sun never set." By the latter half of that century, the British maintained a "two-power standard," whereby the size of the Royal Navy had to meet or exceed the next two navies combined. That ultimately proved unsustainable. It was the doubling of the U.S. Navy battle force under President Theodore Roosevelt that catapulted the United States to global power and prominence. Most historians view the 14-month world cruise of new U.S. battleships--Roosevelt's Great White Fleet--as the birth of what would come to be known as the American Century.

The dramatic expansion of the U.S. fleet through two world wars--finishing the later conflict with more than 6,000 vessels, by far the largest navy ever afloat--set the country on its superpower path. Finally, Ronald Reagan's 600-ship Navy, as much a public relations campaign as it was a shipbuilding plan, helped convince the Soviet Union that it would not win the Cold War.

Throughout history, large naval and merchant fleets represented not just a power multiplier but an exponential growth factor in terms of national influence. All historical sea powers recognized this--until they didn't.

IN OCTOBER 1904, ADM. JOHN "JACKIE" FISHER Was appointed first sea lord of the Royal Navy. He arrived in office certain who the enemy was--Germany--but also with clear direction from civilian leadership to tighten his belt and accept declining naval budgets. Fisher's solution to this strategic dilemma was to dramatically shrink the fleet in order to pay for modernization while also concentrating the remaining ships closer to Great Britain. His investments in modernization were breathtaking--most notably the introduction of a steam-turbine, all-big-gun battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, which would lend its name to all subsequent battleships that followed, transforming global naval competition.

But Fisher paid for his modernized vessels by massively culling the 600-ship Royal Navy he inherited from his predecessor. "With one courageous stroke of the pen," then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour approvingly stated, Fisher slashed 154 ships from the Royal Navy's active list. Fisher classified some of these ships as "sheep," which were sent to the slaughter in the breakers' yards; others as "llamas," downgraded but retained in the reserves; and still others as "goats," which retained their guns with the stipulation that no further maintenance funds would be allocated to them.

The cull, however, wasn't cost-free. Most of the cuts were taken from gunboats and cruisers assigned to nine distant stations where Britain had national interests, such as in Asia or Africa. The cuts generated great criticism not only from within the Royal Navy, which was manned by officers with long experience and strong views regarding the importance of a naval presence overseas, but also from the British Colonial and Foreign Offices, which instantly recognized that they would no longer be able to call on readily available Royal Navy ships to support the nation's diplomatic interests.

Ultimately, Fisher did modernize his fleet in the short term. Both the Dreadnought class battleships as well as their consorts, the smaller Invincible-class battle cruisers, rendered all previous designs instantly obsolete. What Fisher did not anticipate was that his contraction and modernization of the Royal Navy would create two simultaneous effects: It destabilized the international environment, and it triggered a global naval arms race.

Britain had already been under pressure in the Far East and had asked Japan for assistance protecting its interests there, but now it found itself without a fleet of sufficient size to defend its interests in other geostrategic locations like the Caribbean and Africa. It had to trust a new partner, the United States, to take on that job. The only alternative would have been for Britain to simply forgo its colonial interests in order to focus on what it viewed as the preponderant German threat in the Baltic, North Sea, and northern Atlantic Ocean.

There were other knock-on effects. Flaving surrendered its dominant lead in overall ship numbers, Britain found itself in a new naval arms race in which its previous, sunkcost investments in older ships offered no benefit. To its dismay, Britain began this new arms race from nearly the same position as its geostrategic rivals. Soon every European power, as well as the United States and Japan, was building modern dreadnoughts, and Fisher and his navy were unable to maintain or reestablish their previous two-power standard.

Today, Fisher's strategy would be recognized as a divest-to-invest modernization plan. And the lesson is clear: Britain found that it was unable to preserve even the facade of being a global power; it was quickly reduced to being a regional maritime power on the periphery of Europe. The ensuing conditions of international instability, shifting alliance structures, and the global arms race contributed to the outbreak of World War I and the end of empires, including Britain's.

THE UNITED STATES CURRENTLY FACES many of the same strategic challenges that Britain confronted just over a century ago. Much as the Balfour ministry faced strategic strain from the distant Boer War--as well as expanding domestic social instability and the rise of Germany--the United States is dealing with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, domestic civil unrest, and a rising China. Additionally, the White House Office of Management and Budget has attempted to impose on the Defense Department similar fiscal strictures to those that Balfour levied on Fisher's Admiralty: flat to declining budgets and demands to be more efficient. As a result, the Pentagon has made the decision to cut back on its shipbuilding plans, starting construction of only eight new ships in the next year, half of them auxiliaries, while accelerating the decommissioning of seven cruisers, dropping the fleet to an estimated 294 ships. Congress has indicated that it will seek to expand these numbers, but the future is increasingly murky.

Given that even the most capable ship can only be in one place at a time and that the world's oceans are vast, the fleet as planned will not meet the demand for a naval presence detailed by the various four-star regional combatant commanders around the world. On average, their requests equate to approximately 130 ships at sea on any given day, nearly half of the present fleet. Today the Navy deploys, on average, fewer than 90 ships per day, creating gaps in key regions where America's interests are not being upheld. The Navy previously sought efficiencies that would allow it to "do more with less," by curbing training or the time ships spent in maintenance. The result, however, was an uptick in serious accidents at sea and a decline in the material readiness of the battle fleet.

Still, the overarching U.S. naval strategy, stated repeatedly by defense leaders during this spring's round of congressional hearings, is to "divest" of older platforms in order to "invest" in newer platforms that, although fewer in number, would possess a qualitative edge over those fielded by competitors. As history reveals, this strategy will produce a fleet too small to protect the United States' global interests or win its wars. Ultimately, the U.S. shipbuilding base and repair yards will atrophy to a point where they will not be able to meet the demand for new ships nor provide repairs when war almost inevitably comes.

TO AVOID THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST, Congress Should follow its constitutional charge in Article 1 and allocate funds sufficient to both provide for a newer, more modern fleet in the long run and to maintain the Navy that it has today as a hedge against the real and proximate threat from China. Such an allocation requires a 3 to 5 percent annual increase in the Navy's budget for the foreseeable future, as was recommended by the bipartisan 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission.

Both steps are crucial. Weapons like hypersonic missiles and directed energy mounts like the much-hyped railgun are changing the face of warfare, although not its nature, and the United States must invest to keep up with its competitors in China and Russia, which are already fielding some of these systems in large numbers. However, the Navy, as the day-to-day patroller facing these two rival great powers, cannot shrink the size of its battle force. As both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and later Ronald Reagan all understood:

Great powers possess large, robust, and resilient navies. Conversely, shrinking fleets historically suggest nations that are overstretched, overtasked, and in retreat. Such revelations invite expansion and challenge from would-be rivals. To meet the demands of the current strategic environment, the U.S. Navy must grow--and quickly.

Not even a fleet of355 ships, the number advanced by the Obama administration in its closing days, will be sufficient to reestablish conventional deterrence on the high seas. Instead, the United States should seek a fleet of456 ships, comprising a balance between high-end, high-tech ships such as nuclear attack submarines and low-end, cheaper small surface combatants that can be added to numbers quickly. It should also seek to extend the lives of the ships it has now in its inventory to cover the short-term threat. The United States can do this by scheduling these ships for service life extensions of their hulls and power plants and for modernization of their combat systems and associated sensors within the constellation of the nation's civilian ship repair yards...

Labor Day Morning Rant: Principled Free Traders™ and the Imaginary World of 'Econ 101'

It's Buck Throckmorton, at AoSHQ, "It is no secret that I have extreme animus toward the Principled Free Traders™ who sought to offshore every last American manufacturing job out of fealty to a utopian economic system that doesn’t exist in the real world. (And let’s be honest, those so-called “free traders” had no interest in there even being reciprocal free trade of American-manufactured goods. They are globalists who dislike American sovereignty and detest working-class Americans. Denying a living wage to blue collar Americans was a feature, not a bug of our elites’ actions.)."

Nicole Hemmer, Partisans

At Amazon, Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

Olivia

In London, on Instagram.

President Biden's Primetime 'Soul of the Nation' Address Demonizes Tens of Millions of Americans (VIDEO)

If you're going to attack "MAGA Republicans" in a primetime address to the nation on the Donald Trump GOP's threats to democracy, just know that you're literally attacking millions upon millions of voters who pulled the lever for the Donald in 2020 (not to mention 2016). 

No, not everyone who voted for Trump was MAGA, and Old Joe (Stalin?) duly slides that in as an afterthought. No, he attacked the movement for America First principes as the most dangerous threat to our nation today. Really? That movement includes untold red-blooded patriotic Americans who have nothing to do with any of the "violence" the president decries. Biden makes no clear distinction. I mean, shoot, you don't need to put "MAGA" in front of "Republicans." They're all evil for leftist totalitarians. 

Anyone with a brain knows this is all politics, not abouit saving the union from incipient fascist tyranny. Biden's screed was a pre-midterm salvo to demonize the opposition, MAGA or not. That's it. The media's the bullhorn: You know, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" and all the other bullshit posituring by our elite betters in America's newsrooms. It's disgusting and should be repudiated, and with luck it will be in November. Don't trust the polls. Sure, leftists have been mobilized by the pro-life Dobbs ruling in June, but it's not the poor and down and out, who are destitute, homeless, mentally ill, drug-addled, and on Medicaid, public assistance, and SSI. 

Nope, it's white, wealthy "progressive" women. They're the one's who're pissed off, and they're driving this so-called surge of pro-choice voter agitation. They don't give a shit about the poor. They're craven virtue-signalers who claim they're better than you (they're not). 

Biden? His speech? THIS IS WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS.

See, Roger Kimball, at the Spectator, "Biden Declares War on Half the Country":

The malignant and divisive spirit of his speech will not soon be quelled.

Joe Biden’s speech at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on Thursday was one of the most remarkable in living memory. By “remarkable,” I hasten to add that I do not mean “good.” On the contrary, it was a breathtaking act of what the psychoanalysts call “projection,” blaming others for the bad things you do yourself.

The speech itself was a malignant act of demagoguery that will have colonels and generalissimos everywhere catching their breath with envy. The neo-totalitarian stage set, replete with red lighting effects and military personal flanking the shouting, gesticulating Biden, was right out of central casting. Next time, perhaps Biden will wear epaulettes along with his signature aviators.

The speech was billed as a reflection on the “soul of the nation.” Remember, Biden was sold to the country as Mr. Normality, as someone who would bind up the nations’s wounds after four years of the bad, horrible, no good, unacceptable, supremely divisive Donald Trump.

It hasn’t worked out that way, notwithstanding Trump’s occasional zingers and rhetorical molotov cocktails that have kept the fires of outrage burning. In this respect, Biden’s speech typified the new Democratic dispensation, according to which the world is divided sharply in two. The good guys are those who espouse the Democratic agenda. The bad guys are anyone who dissents. What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. That heretical sect, named for a third-century A.D. Parthian seer called Mani, was an astringently dualistic creed that divided the world into light and dark, the saved and the damned. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose primary sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.

That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative”). As I note in a column on “Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America” for the October edition of the Speccie, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To the question “was the election fair,” what you need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.

In any event, Biden’s speech consisted of a series accusations directed at “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

Lest you think that attack on 74 million Trump supporters was an aberration, note that a week earlier at a Maryland fundraiser, Biden had insisted that the problem for those wishing to conserve the “soul of America” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the…semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.

The sweeping denunciation of half the country was perhaps the thing that caught the alarmed attention of most observers. Also important was that element of projection I mentioned. Biden’s brief against Trump and “the entire philosophy” of MAGA rested primarily on three accusations...

 Keep reading.

Moscow’s Struggle to Sustain Its War in Ukraine

At Foreign Affairs, "Is Russia’s Economy on the Brink?":

In April, just weeks after he launched the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin maintained that the West could never strangle Russia’s economy. The barrage of American and European sanctions had not succeeded and would not succeed in bringing his country to its knees. “We can already confidently say that this policy toward Russia has failed,” he told his officials. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”

Such defiant posturing can be expected of Putin and other Russian leaders. But now, six months after the beginning of the war and the imposition of sanctions, many observers are questioning whether Western sanctions have had the tough effects their architects promised. International observers such as the International Monetary Fund have revised their projections of Russian GDP upward from earlier this year. Compared with initial forecasts made right after the imposition of sanctions, Russia’s economy has done better than expected, partly because of deft technocratic Russian policymaking and partly because of tight global energy markets, which have kept the price of oil and gas high.

Russia’s economic overperformance must be placed in context, however. Few observers and policymakers expected sanctions to cause enough pain to force Russia out of the conflict in a matter of months, so Russia’s ongoing war shouldn’t be a surprise. Yet Russia’s economy is still hurting; it is suffering a steeper growth slowdown than was seen during the 2008 financial crisis and one that is unlikely to be followed by a postcrisis rebound. Living standards are being supported by social spending that will be difficult to sustain and that will likely force tough decisions about the government budget over the coming year. Thus far, Putin has promised Russians that he’s fighting a “special military operation,” not a war that could impose tough sacrifices on the population. As time passes, however, the cost of the war and the effects of sanctions on ordinary Russians will only grow.

BELTS TIGHTEN IN RUSSIA

For a health check on the Russian economy, start with some macroeconomic data. Russia’s GDP has shrunk by around five percent compared with last year, with the rate of decline increasing each month since the war began. Industrial production, which includes Russia’s oil and gas industries, has fallen by only about two percent compared with last year (a reflection of high energy prices), although the manufacturing segment of Russian industry has fallen by 4.5 percent. Inflation stands at just over 15 percent, down somewhat from the nearly 18 percent peak after the ruble slumped, then recovered, in March. Adjusted for inflation, monthly wages are down by about six percent compared with last year. (Some analysts have expressed skepticism about Russia’s official data, yet there is no evidence that the state statistics agency is engaged in large-scale manipulation.)

Russia’s inflation statistics may not fully capture the reality that buying certain products is now occasionally difficult (in the case of iPhones) or nearly impossible (in the case of Lexus automobiles). Similarly, inflation data struggle to quantify the impact of reduced quality. Russia’s government, for example, is changing regulations to allow the sale of vehicles without airbags or antilock brakes, which are now difficult to produce because of sanctions-induced supply chain problems. This degradation in quality won’t show up in inflation data, but it will eventually be felt by Russians, especially the urban, wealthier Russians who consume more of the imported goods that are now harder to access.

Even accounting for the inflation captured by government statistics, wages are trending sharply downward, around six percent lower compared with last year. Social welfare payments such as pensions, which are the primary income source for older Russians, have been eroded by inflation since the war began. The government increased pension payouts by over eight percent in June to compensate, but without more such expensive social spending increases in the coming months, the typical Russian’s income will decline in the second half of the year. The fact that retail sales are down by nearly ten percent suggests that consumers have already started saving in anticipation of tighter budgets to come.

THE OIL KEEPS FLOWING

Although households are only just beginning to feel the impact of lower living standards, some industries have already been hit hard. Rather than looking at aggregate industrial production data, which include both raw materials and manufacturing firms, it is more insightful to analyze each sector separately. The raw materials sector has been only slightly affected, which is no surprise given that prices are high and that Western sanctions have been designed to keep most commodities, thus far including oil, flowing freely.

The Russian economy owes much of its resilience to its trade in natural resources. With quiet diplomatic support from the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU have been watering down sanctions that were supposed to take effect against Russian oil exports later this year. To keep energy prices from spiking, the West has backed away from some efforts to stop Russia from redirecting oil exports to other customers, such as China and India. Now, under recent tweaks to sanctions, European firms will be allowed to ship Russian oil to third parties.

Because the West has implemented few significant sanctions on Russia’s oil and gas exports, and because the EU’s oil import ban doesn’t take effect until December, the volume of Russian oil exports is basically unchanged since sanctions were imposed. Sanctions are now forcing Russia to sell oil at around a $20 per barrel discount to global benchmark prices. Still, the latest monthly data that Russia’s government released on its revenue from taxing oil suggest the country is making roughly as much in export revenue as it did in January. By contrast, revenues from the export of natural gas—far less important to Russia than oil exports—have slumped after the Kremlin restricted its sale to Europe.

INDUSTRIAL WOES

Unlike Russia’s energy industry, the rest of Russia’s industrial sector has been hit hard. Among the worst affected sectors have been cars, trucks, locomotives, and fiber optic cables, each of which has seen production fall by over half. In other sectors less exposed to foreign ownership or complex supply chains, such as textiles or food processing, production is flat or in some cases has increased relative to last year.

One cause of this industrial disruption is the withdrawal of Japanese, U.S., and European firms that had factories in Russia. Some of these factories will reopen under new Russian ownership, but operating them independently may prove difficult. Manufacturers are also struggling to source necessary materials. Accessing components from abroad is now far trickier, because even products not under formal restrictions are harder to access, ship, and pay for. “I cannot say we’re facing a total blockade,” the CEO of Transmashholding, a Moscow-based railroad equipment firm, told Russian media, referring to the difficulties his firm has in shipping and paying for imported components. “But we face increased friction.”

A key question over the coming months is whether these industrial disruptions intensify or are resolved. On the one hand, Russia has now had nearly half a year to establish alternative payments and logistics networks, which should allow some crucial nonsanctioned imports to reach the country. On the other hand, Russian firms when surveyed say they are continuing to draw from existing inventories, implying that they are still struggling to source necessary components. Monthly data show that Russian imports of industrial goods and components remain far below prewar levels...

Still more.

 

Allahpundit Out at 'Hot Air'

I don't know as fact, but it sounds like he was forced out for not joining the cult of Trump.

See, "My Farewell to Hot Air Readers" (via Memeorandum):

My final post: Farewell to Hot Air and hello to the Dispatch https://t.co/0r4Tp0dMmm

Thank you to Townhall Media for supporting me for so many years. And thank you to @stephenfhayes and @JonahDispatch for the opportunity to join the wonderful site they’ve built (1/2)

— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) September 2, 2022

/p>

I want to say thanks.

First, to our readers. It’s been my privilege to write for you. Few are lucky enough to make a living filling up a screen with their mundane thoughts, fewer get to do so on any subject they like. On an average day here I could write about COVID, Ukraine, and the new Frankenfood from Taco Bell. Sixteen years into this job, I still can’t believe they paid me to do it. Your patronage made it possible. I can’t thank you enough.

Thank you to Jazz Shaw, John Sexton, and especially Ed Morrissey for making working at Hot Air such a pleasure. A dirty secret: I was quietly furious when Ed came aboard in 2008. What was he doing on my site? But then it became our site, and then Jazz and John joined, and now you’ll never find a more collegial team of writers. In our years together I can’t recall an instance of infighting or office politics. It borders on strange how little drama there was behind the scenes. The pain of separation is eased by knowing that this will remain in their hands.

Thank you to Michelle Malkin for having taken a chance on me when she started Hot Air so many years ago. She made my career possible. And above all, thank you to Jon Garthwaite and Townhall Media, who stuck with me even as the GOP changed and I declined to change with it. At this point I must be the only strident critic of Donald Trump serving a pro-Trump populist readership across all of conservative media. And that’s been true *for years.* Since 2020, at least.

It was possible only because of Townhall’s sufferance, a show of integrity for which they don’t get enough credit. But I think all of us knew it couldn’t last. When you hire someone to run your hot-dog stand and he starts telling the customers that hot dogs are bad for them, that relationship won’t endure. Even if he’s right about the hot dogs.

Thank you to my critics — the earnest ones, who weren’t just axe-grinding because I wouldn’t join a cult. I am not dishonest but am frequently stupid and you were right to call me on my moments of stupidity. Accountability is good. The right needs more of it from its own side, urgently. If the average populist slobberer had a few like you in their ear, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in.

Lastly, to those who spent the last seven years barking insults at me in the comments for not genuflecting to Trump, I’ll give you this: You’re not phonies. You believe what you say. We have that much in common. I respect honesty and paid you the respect of being honest. It would scandalize you to know how many of your heroes sound like you in public and like me in private. Audience capture has brought most of conservative media to ruin by making it predictable and shrill.

I hear Lincoln’s words in my head as I write that: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Let’s hope. But let’s also be real: To a certain sort of Very Online Trumpist weirdo, having the right enemies is what politics is all about. To any who insist upon having me as one, I’m okay with it. Few badges of honor shine as brightly as the scorn of authoritarians...

RTWT.

 

Matthew Rose, Philosophers of the Radical Right

At Amazon, Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91

One of the biggest, most important leaders of the second half of the 20th century. He wrought monumental change, literally bringing about the end of the post-WWII Cold War era.

At the New York Times, "Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.":

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose rise to power in the Soviet Union set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation, has died in Moscow. He was 91.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Russia’s state news agencies, citing the city’s central clinical hospital. The reports said he had died after an unspecified “long and grave illness.”

Few leaders in the 20th century, indeed in any century, have had such a profound effect on their time. In little more than six tumultuous years, Mr. Gorbachev lifted the Iron Curtain, decisively altering the political climate of the world.

At home he promised and delivered greater openness as he set out to restructure his country’s society and faltering economy. It was not his intention to liquidate the Soviet empire, but within five years of coming to power he had presided over the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He ended the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan and, in an extraordinary five months in 1989, stood by as the Communist system imploded from the Baltics to the Balkans in countries already weakened by widespread corruption and moribund economies.

For this he was hounded from office by hard-line Communist plotters and disappointed liberals alike, the first group fearing that he would destroy the old system and the other worried that he would not. It was abroad that he was hailed as heroic. To George F. Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat and Sovietologist, Mr. Gorbachev was “a miracle,” a man who saw the world as it was, unblinkered by Soviet ideology.

But to many inside Russia, the upheaval Mr. Gorbachev had wrought was a disaster. President Vladimir V. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” For Mr. Putin — and his fellow K.G.B. veterans who now form the inner circle of power in Russia — the end of the U.S.S.R. was a moment of shame and defeat that the invasion of Ukraine this year was meant to help undo.

“The paralysis of power and will is the first step toward complete degradation and oblivion,” Mr. Putin said on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of the invasion, referring to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mr. Gorbachev made no public statement of his own about the war in Ukraine, though his foundation on Feb. 26 called for a “speedy cessation of hostilities.” A friend of his, the radio journalist Aleksei A. Venediktov, said in a July interview that Mr. Gorbachev was “upset” about the war, viewing it as having undermined “his life’s work.”

When he came to power, Mr. Gorbachev was a loyal son of the Communist Party, but one who had come to see things with new eyes. “We cannot live this way any longer,” he told Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who would become his trusted foreign minister, in 1984. Within five years he had overturned much that the party held inviolable.

A man of openness, vision and great vitality, he looked at the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and saw official corruption, a labor force lacking motivation and discipline, factories that produced shoddy goods, and a distribution system that guaranteed consumers little but empty shelves — empty of just about everything but vodka.

The Soviet Union had become a major world power weighed down by a weak economy. As East-West détente permitted light into its closed society, the growing class of technological, scientific and cultural elites could no longer fail to measure their country against the West and find it wanting.

The problems were clear; the solutions, less so. Mr. Gorbachev had to feel his way toward his promised restructuring of the Soviet political and economic systems. He was caught between tremendous opposing forces: On one hand, the habits ingrained by 70 years of cradle-to-grave subsistence under Communism; on the other, the imperatives of moving quickly to change the old ways and to demonstrate that whatever dislocation resulted was temporary and worth the effort.

It was a task he was forced to hand over to others when he was removed from office, a consequence of his own ambivalence and a failed coup against him by hard-liners whom he himself had elevated to his inner circle.

The openness Mr. Gorbachev sought — what came to be known as glasnost — and his policy of perestroika, aimed at restructuring the very underpinnings of society, became a double-edged sword. In setting out to fill in the “blank spots” of Soviet history, as he put it, with frank discussion of the country’s errors, he freed his impatient allies to criticize him and the threatened Communist bureaucracy to attack him. Still, Mr. Gorbachev’s first five years in power were marked by significant, even extraordinary, accomplishments:

■ He presided over an arms agreement with the United States that eliminated for the first time an entire class of nuclear weapons, and began the withdrawal of most Soviet tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.

■ He withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a tacit admission that the invasion in 1979 and the nine-year occupation had been a failure.

■ While he equivocated at first, he eventually exposed the nuclear power-plant disaster at Chernobyl to public scrutiny, a display of candor unheard-of in the Soviet Union.

■ He sanctioned multiparty elections in Soviet cities, a democratic reform that in many places drove stunned Communist leaders out of office.

■ He permitted the release of the confined dissident Andrei D. Sakharov, the physicist who had been instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

■ He lifted restrictions on the media, allowing previously censored books to be published and previously banned movies to be shown.

■ In a stark departure from the Soviet history of official atheism, he established formal diplomatic contacts with the Vatican and helped promulgate a freedom-of-conscience law guaranteeing the right of the people to “satisfy their spiritual needs.”

But if Mr. Gorbachev was lionized abroad as having helped change the world — he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 — he was vilified at home as having failed to live up to the promise of economic change. It became widely said that in a free vote, Mr. Gorbachev could be elected president anywhere but the Soviet Union.

After five years of Mr. Gorbachev, store shelves remained empty while the union disintegrated. Mr. Shevardnadze, who had been his right hand in bringing a peaceful end to Soviet control in Eastern Europe, resigned in late 1990, warning that dictatorship was coming and that reactionaries in the Communist Party were about to cripple reform.

Peter Reddaway, an author and scholar of Russian history, said at the time: “We see the best side of Gorbachev. The Soviets see the other side, and hold him to blame.”

A Son of Peasants

There was little in his early life that would have led anyone to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev could become such a dynamic leader. His official biography, issued after he became the new party chief, traced the well-traveled path of a good, loyal Communist.

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931, in Privolnoye, a farming village in the Stavropol region of the Caucasus. His parents were genuine peasants, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows. During his infancy, the forced collectivization of the land turned a once-fertile region into “a famine disaster area,” the exiled writer and biologist Zhores A. Medvedev wrote in a biography of Mr. Gorbachev.

“The death from starvation was very high,” he added. “In some villages, all the children between the ages of 1 and 2 died.”

Misha, as Mikhail was known, was a bright-eyed youngster whose early photographs show him in a Cossack’s fur hat. He grew up in a house of straw held together with mud and manure and with no indoor plumbing. But his family was well respected among the Communist faithful. Mr. Gorbachev wrote in his book “Memoirs” that both his grandfathers had been arrested for crimes against the Czarist state.

Still, the family’s embrace of Soviet ideology was not all-encompassing; Mr. Gorbachev’s mother and grandmother had him baptized...

Still more.

 

Bed Bath & Beyond to Close 150 Stores, Cut Staff, Sell Shares to Raise Cash

Probably, the most poorly managed major corporation in the country right now. They're close to going out of business.

My wife worked there briefly, years ago, but quit just a few weeks into the job. My wife's got 30 years of retail sales and management experience, so if she quit that job so fast, something was totally fucked up. 

At WSJ, "Home-goods seller to lay off 20% of corporate, supply-chain workers":

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. BBBY -21.30%▼ said it would close roughly 20% of its namesake stores, cut its workforce and bring in fresh cash to stabilize the business through the holiday season as the retailer confronts plunging sales.

The home-goods seller is attempting to trim costs and raise money as it tries to correct recent operating missteps and navigate a challenging economic environment. It has been burning through its cash reserves for several quarters, and a shopper exodus has shaken investor and vendor confidence.

On Wednesday, executives and directors attempted to assuage its uneasy partners. In a business update, they said the company secured commitments for more than $500 million in financing and could potentially sell as many as 12 million shares of common stock to raise money. They also pledged to overhaul the assortment of goods in the company’s stores, focusing more on national brands after spending millions to develop private-label goods.

“While there is much work ahead, our road map is clear and we’re confident that the significant changes we’ve announced today will have a positive impact on our performance,” said Sue Gove, a board member who is serving as interim chief executive.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock fell 21% in Wednesday trading, as the plan to sell shares could dilute the holdings of existing shareholders. The stock, a favorite among meme investors, has lost more than half its value over the past two weeks.

As of Wednesday, the company’s market value was roughly $750 million. At its peak in June 2012, the company had a valuation of more than $17.3 billion, according to FactSet data.

Founded more than 50 years ago, the Union, N.J., company had several decades of rapid growth as it became known for its big-box stores stockpiled with merchandise and 20%-off coupons. In recent years, it has wrestled with falling sales and shifting strategies.

In 2019 activist investors ousted the chain’s founders and revamped the board, saying its leaders had failed to modernize the stores and capitalize on the rise of e-commerce. Mark Tritton, a former Target Corp. executive, joined the company in 2019 and sought to turn around the retailer by pushing deeper into private-label brands, among other initiatives. Those brands, however, weren’t well-received by shoppers and were hindered by pandemic-related supply-chain constraints.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s board ousted Mr. Tritton in June and installed Ms. Gove, a retail-restructuring consultant, as interim CEO. The company is working with search firm Russell Reynolds Associates to find a permanent CEO, and said Wednesday that the search process is continuing.

The retailer received another blow in August when billionaire activist Ryan Cohen sold his 10% stake in the company, about six months after acquiring his shares. The company’s stock, which had been rallying in previous weeks, slid after individuals followed Mr. Cohen’s selloff.

The business update came just days after the end of the company’s latest quarter, which showed the issues facing the retail chain. Comparable sales—reflecting sales at stores open at least a year—fell 26% in the quarter ended Aug. 27. The company’s operations also burned through about $325 million of its cash reserves during the period.

While the company plans to release its full second-quarter financial report on Sept. 29, preliminary results show that the money it is bringing in the door is leaving quickly. And the new financing only provides a short runway for the turnaround effort, analysts say.

The more than $500 million infusion, led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and asset manager Sixth Street Partners, includes $375 million from a new loan and the expansion of a credit line. The Wall Street Journal had previously reported the company was near a new loan deal.

The new arrangement will reduce the debt exposure of the JPMorgan credit line by more than half while Bed Bath & Beyond retains access to about $800 million in borrowing capacity. The company said it ended the latest quarter with about $200 million in cash and investments...

 

Biden Will Summon His Supporters to Wage a War For the 'Soul of the Nation' Against Republicans Who Are 'Semi-Fascists' and a 'Threat to Democracy'

At AoSHQ, "If someone starts talking about political violence, and you try to talk him down, he'll say 'This country was founded upon revolutionary violence' and something like 'The right of the people to rebel against a tyrant is written out in black and white in the Declaration of Independence'."

Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks & White Liberals

At Amazon, Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks & White Liberals.

U.S. Teacher Shortage: How Bad Is It?

Well, there seems to be no shortage of purple magenta-haired woke elementary school teachers grooming children across the country, but heh, I'm sure it's a problem. I mean, with the low pay, lousy benefits, anger at bureaucratic idiot bosses, the leftist ideological takeover of the schools, and everything else FUBAR with the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, who can blame them? 

At the New York Times, "How Bad Is the Teacher Shortage? Depends Where You Live":

Urgently needed: teachers in struggling districts, certified in math or special education. Perks: maybe a pay raise, or how about a four-day week?

The new fall semester has just begun in Mesa, Ariz., and Westwood High School is short on math teachers.

A public school that serves more than 3,000 students in the populous desert city east of Phoenix, Westwood still has three unfilled positions in that subject. The principal, Christopher Gilmore, has never started the year there with so many math positions open.

“It’s a little bit unnerving,” he said, “going into a school year knowing that we don’t have a full staff.”

Westwood, where most students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, is one of many public schools across the United States that are opening their doors with fewer teachers than they had hoped for. According to one national survey by Education Week, nearly three-fourths of principals and district officials said this summer that the number of teaching applicants was not enough to fill their open positions. Other surveys released this year have suggested that parents are deeply concerned about staffing and that many more teachers are eyeing the exits.

But while the pandemic has created an urgent search for teachers in some areas, not every district is suffering from shortages. The need for teachers is driven by a complicated interplay of demand and supply in a tight job market. Salary matters, and so does location: Well-paying suburban schools can usually attract more candidates.

If anything, experts say, the recent pandemic turmoil can be expected to worsen old inequities.

“It’s complex, and it does go back before the pandemic,” said Desiree Carver-Thomas, an analyst with the Learning Policy Institute. “Schools serving more students of color and students from low-income families bear the brunt of teacher shortages, oftentimes.”

For many years, it has also been particularly hard to find teachers for subjects like math and special education, or to fill spots at rural schools. And there has always been a dire need for more teachers of color in the United States. According to federal data collected during the school year ending in 2018, nearly 80 percent of public schoolteachers were white. Most of their students were not.

In Arizona, where starting salaries for teachers are lower than the national average, the shortages are “severe” across the board, said Justin Wing, an assistant superintendent of human resources for Mesa Public Schools, the district where Mr. Gilmore works.

“I feel like it’s been that way for probably at least 10 years,” said Mr. Wing, who is also an analyst for the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association. But this year, he added, seems even worse.

He attributes the problem in part to low pay, and he has watched districts in neighboring states, like Texas and Nevada, rub salt in the wound by advertising their teaching salaries on social media and on billboards along Arizona highways.

According to Mr. Wing’s data from the last school year, nearly four-fifths of teaching positions (measured in terms of full-time equivalencies) in Arizona schools had to be covered in less-than-ideal ways — by support staff, for example, or teachers in training.

And nearly one-third of positions remained vacant altogether, which often meant that existing teachers had to take on more classes.

The challenge for struggling districts is to cover positions in a way that not only fills seats but also serves students, said Tequilla Brownie, the chief executive of TNTP, a nonprofit that provides consulting services for districts on staffing and student achievement.

“Everybody right now is just talking about, frankly, warm bodies,” she said. “The quality of teachers still matters. You never will get to quality if you don’t get to quantity first.”

Over the past two years, several states including New Mexico, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi have tried to address or pre-empt shortages by raising teacher salaries.

Others have loosened certification requirements. In Arizona, a new law makes it easier for aspiring teachers without bachelor’s degrees to gain work experience in the classroom. In Florida, where state officials last year reported more than 4,000 teacher vacancies, some military veterans can be granted temporary teaching certificates.

And in some rural districts, where raises may be out of reach, school officials are putting entire school days on the chopping block.

In Missouri, where teachers receive among the lowest salaries on average in the country, John Downs, the superintendent of the rural Hallsville School District, said that the pool of qualified applicants has all but dried up in recent years. A few days before the start of the school year, positions in speech language pathology and math were still unfilled.

This year, Hallsville schools are trying to entice educators with a four-day workweek. “We’re competing against more affluent districts who can offer more lucrative salary benefit packages,” Mr. Downs said. “So we decided we needed to think outside of the box.”

Hallsville is not alone. In Missouri, 25 percent of all districts will be on a four-day schedule this fall. The condensed week is common in New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho and South Dakota, and is beginning to emerge in other states like Texas...

Still more.

Ukraine War Is Depleting U.S. Ammunition Stockpiles, Sparking Pentagon Concern

At WSJ, "The level of one type of combat rounds in storage is ‘uncomfortably low,’ says a defense official":

WASHINGTON—The war in Ukraine has depleted American stocks of some types of ammunition and the Pentagon has been slow to replenish its arsenal, sparking concerns among U.S. officials that American military readiness could be jeopardized by the shortage.

The U.S. has during the past six months supplied Ukraine with 16 U.S. rocket launchers, known as Himars, thousands of guns, drones, missiles and other equipment. Much of that, including ammunition, has come directly from U.S. inventory, depleting stockpiles intended for unexpected threats, defense officials say.

One of the most lethal weapons the Pentagon has sent are howitzers that fire high-explosive 155mm ammunition weighing about 100 pounds each and able to accurately hit targets dozens of miles away. As of Aug. 24, the U.S. military said it had provided Ukraine with up to 806,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition. The U.S. military has declined to say how many rounds it had at the start of the year.

In recent weeks, the level of 155mm combat rounds in U.S. military storage have become “uncomfortably low,” one defense official said. The levels aren’t yet critical because the U.S. isn’t engaged in any major military conflict, the official added. “It is not at the level we would like to go into combat,” the defense official said.

The U.S. military used a howitzer as recently as last week to strike at Iranian-backed groups in Syria, and the depletion of 155mm ammunition is increasingly concerning for a military that seeks to plan for any scenario.

The Army said the military is now conducting “an ammunitions industrial base deep dive” to determine how to support Ukraine while protecting “our own supply needs.” The Army said it also asked Capitol Hill for $500 million a year in upgrade efforts for the Army’s ammunition plants. Meanwhile, the service is relying on existing contracts to increase production of ammunition, but it hasn’t signed new contracts to account for the higher amounts it will need to replenish its stocks, according to Army officials.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has been conducting monthly reviews of the U.S. arsenal to determine whether the readiness levels are still appropriate given the needs for the ammunition in Ukraine, according to U.S. military officials. The U.S. last week provided Ukraine with a different size howitzer ammunition, 105mm, a reflection, in part, of the concern about its stocks of 155mm ammunition, the officials said.

The looming ammunition shortage isn’t for lack of funds, according to those familiar with the issue. The U.S. announced this week that it was setting aside nearly $3 billion for long-term aid intended to help Ukraine, bringing the total spent on weaponry for the country to $14 billion, and the Biden administration’s Pentagon budget request for next year is $773 billion.

“This was knowable. It was foreseeable. It was forewarned, including from industry leaders to the Pentagon. And it was easily fixable,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington.

What is needed, she said, is for the government to spend money to fix the problem.

“There are some problems you can buy your way out of,” she said. “This is one of them.”

The Pentagon’s buying process generally starts with the military determining its requirements, which are then reviewed and then bids solicited from the private sector. But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, industry officials have complained that the Pentagon hasn’t always communicated those requirements, which often change, creating delays, and leaving defense contractors unable to prepare for more production.

Dormant supply lines often can’t be switched on overnight, and surging production of active lines can take time. Companies are already producing 155mm ammunition, but not at the capacity yet that the Pentagon will need to replenish its stocks...

 

Jeremy W. Peters, Insurgency

At Amazon, Jeremy W. Peters, Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.

The Unmaking of American History by the Woke Mob

For the full background, see "Presentism, Race and Trolls," at Inside Higher Ed.

From Dominic Green, at WSJ, "Progressive scholars increasingly abandon the past to focus on present-day politics":

Academic historians are losing their sense of the past. In his August column for the American Historical Association’s journal, Perspectives on History, James H. Sweet warned that academic history has become so “presentist” that it is losing touch with its subject, the world before yesterday. Mr. Sweet, who is the association’s president and teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, observed that the “allure of political relevance” is drawing students away from pre-1800 history and toward “contemporary social justice issues” such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism.” When historians become activists, he wrote, the past becomes “an evidentiary grab bag to articulate their political positions.”

Mr. Sweet knows his audience, so he did his best to appease the crocodile of political correctness. He denounced Justice Clarence Thomas for a gun-rights decision that “cherry-picks historical data” and criticized Justice Samuel Alito for taking the word “history” in vain 67 times in his Dobbs abortion opinion. But Mr. Sweet also pointed out that Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project” isn’t accurate history, and that “bad history,” however good it makes us feel, yields bad politics. “If history is only those stories from the past that confirm current political positions, all manner of political hacks can claim historical expertise.”

History’s armies of nonacademic readers will find this obvious and undeniable. Mr. Sweet’s academic peers, however, tore him to pieces on Twitter, accusing him of sexism, racism, gratuitous maleness and excessive whiteness.

“Gaslight. Gatekeep. Goatee,” said Laura Miller of Brandeis University, detecting patriarchal privilege written on Mr. Sweet’s chin. Benjamin Siegel of Boston University, who thinks his politically correct profession is “leveraged towards racist ideologies,” called the essay “malpractice.” Dan Royles of Florida International University accused Mr. Sweet of “logical incoherence,” which is academic-speak for “idiot.” Kathryn Wilson of Georgia State detected an even more heinous error, “misrepresentation of how contemporary social justice concerns inform theory and methodology.”

Other users accused Mr. Sweet of using a rhetorical device called the “white we,” pitching for a guest slot on Tucker Carlson’s show, and writing “MAGA history.” Many called any questioning of the “1619 Project” racist. David Austin Walsh of the University of Virginia advised historians to support the project regardless of whether they thought it good history, because criticism would be “weaponized by the right.”

Mr. Sweet responded with the bravery that defines the modern academic. He apologized on the AHA’s website for the “harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association” that his “ham-fisted attempt at provocation” had caused, especially to his “Black colleagues and friends,” and begged that he be allowed to “redeem” himself.

The AHA, which had done nothing to stem the tide of insults from its members, prevented nonfollowers from commenting on its Twitter feed, because, it said, “trolls” and “bad-faith actors” had joined the debate. One of the bad-faith actors was a racist agitator, Richard Spencer. His contribution, alarmingly, was hardly trolling. Mr. Spencer pointed out that Mr. Sweet was merely repeating the advice of the eminent 19th-century historian Otto von Ranke, who told historians to go into the archives and tell history “as it really happened.” We know a profession is in trouble when it takes the worst kind of amateur to state the obvious.

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” Cicero once wrote. “For what is the worth of a human life if it is not woven into the life of our ancestors by the record of history?” Even Ms. Hannah-Jones would agree with that. The AHA’s activist wing, however, disagrees. Like Cicero, who was both a politician and a historian, they see history as a rhetorical resource. Unlike Cicero, they see nothing good in their people’s history and only wickedness in their ancestors.

When the purpose of history changes from knowledge of the past to political power in the present and future, historians become mere propagandists. Academics who succumb to the sugar rush of activism lose their sense of balance. Meanwhile, the AHA’s annual reports show that undergraduates and graduates are voting with their enrollments, with a related decline in job opportunities for holders of new doctorates. In 2016-17 alone, undergraduate enrollment fell by 7.7%. The number of new doctorates fell by about 15% between 2014 and 2019, and the number of job openings has halved since 2008. The latest AHA Jobs Report is a threnody of “program closures, enrollment declines, and faculty layoffs.” Signs of stabilization, it reckons, are a “false floor.” Why study history if all it equips you for is a nasty and crowded climb up the greasy pole of academic preferment? Much easier to pursue activism through the modish triad of sex, race and gender studies.

All of which tends to confirm Mr. Sweet’s observations about the perils of presentism and activism...

 

Student Debt Forgiveness Will Make the Problem Worse (VIDEO)

Here's the beautiful Inez Feltscher Stepman (currently my crush on Twitter), for Prager Univerity:

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