Who Is At Fault?

An interesting take on the failures that led to this mess. I would put Joe Biden lower. I would put assign some non-SCOTUS judges some blame. I would assign the Democratic Party some blame, although far down the list.

All I know is that the following people are responsible for where we are today. In ascending order of importance:

1. Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020 but due to a combination of hubris, age, and ego stayed in the 2024 race far too long, stacking the deck against anyone who challenged Donald Trump;
2. Merrick Garland, who took way too long to mobilize any serious Justice Department investigation into Trump’s myriad felonies;
3. The Supreme Court of the United States, who repeatedly, persistently evinced zero interest in applying any legal or constitutional constraint on Donald Trump. As a result, no future president will feel constrained in any way whatsoever by the Emoluments Clause, Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, or, as it turns out, pretty much any law that might otherwise restrict the President of the United States;
4. Mitch McConnell, who could have tipped the scales on Trump’s second impeachment (and made it pretty clear afterwards how he felt about Trump) but, in the end, did not vote to convict;
5. Congressional Republicans, who acted and sounded pretty goddamn terrified when the rioters attacked on January 6th. If they had all decided to jump at once and vote to impeach and then convict Trump, his political power would have evaporated. Instead, scared of their own partisans, they capitulated to Trump;
6. Donald J. Trump, who whipped his supporters into a frenzy, attempted to organize slates of alternate electors, refused to recognize the results of any election that he has lost, and has promised to pardon those who violated laws to serve his interests. And finally.
7. The American people, who had plenty of opportunities not to vote for Trump again. In early 2024, Republicans could have gone to the polls and selected a Trump clone who had not committed multiple felonies. In November 2024 voters could have gone to the polls and selected a different candidate who, to repeat a theme, had not committed multiple felonies. And yet, in the end, a plurality voted for the toddler.

From Dan Drezner.

U.S. Political Theory Musings

Federal Constitutional Law

Would state boundaries have been adjusted, and would state divisions and mergers, have been more common but for the state-centric structure of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate? As it is, splitting a state, or merging two states, changes the political balance. Perhaps the best guidance would be to look at how county boundaries within states have changed over time.

Would there have been less resistance to granting statehood to D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam, but for the state-centric structure of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate? This would still dilute the power of the existing states in Congress and (apart from D.C.) in Presidential elections, but only modestly.

Would a constitutional amendment to give D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam (and any subsequent new territories that are not U.S. states), the same representation in the U.S. House that they would have if they were U.S. states be politically viable? While giving territories that are not U.S. states seats in the U.S. Senate are barred from even being constitutional amendments, the same limitation does not apply to the U.S. House.

A constitutional amendment to directly elect the President would have wide support in every, or almost every state, even small states that benefits from the status quo.

A constitutional amendment weakening the U.S. Senate vis-a-vis the U.S. House would presumably be constitutional, since no state would be deprived of its equal representation in the U.S. Senate. For example, what if legislation that was passed in the U.S. House, but not passed in the U.S. Senate within eight months, could become law if it was readopted in the U.S. House with a 60% majority and signed by the President? What is approval of Presidential appointments and treaties was transferred from the U.S. Senate to the U.S. House? What if a Presidential veto could be overturned by voting to override the veto in both houses by majority vote?

Congress could, by statute, authorize or mandate proportional representation in elections for the U.S. House within each state, eliminating gerrymandering.

Why didn't the Founders have Congress, sitting in joint session, elect the President, rather than having a separate electoral college? It would have had the same political balance between U.S. states. It would have left voters with a single thing to vote on in federal elections prior to the direct election of Senators. It would have avoided national election recounts. It probably would have made the President more responsive to Congress. Better yet, what if the President could be replaced by a vote of a joint session of Congress at any time, in lieu of impeachment.

A constitutional amendment to reduce the number of Senators from 2 to 1 per state, or from 2 to 3 per state (with one elected every two years) would be constitutional, and either approach would make more sense, except that it would unbalance the electoral college (which an increase in the size of the U.S. House could fix).

Presidential Ballot Access

24 candidates were listed on the ballot in at least one state and over 100 candidates were registered as a write-in candidate in at least one state.

Third-party and independent candidates received 2.13% of the vote in the 2024 election, totaling over three million votes. This is slightly more than the 2020 United States presidential election, when third party candidates received 1.86%.

Green Party nominee Jill Stein received the most votes of any third-party candidate, receiving 868,945 votes (0.56%). She received 1.09% of the vote in Maryland, her best state by percentage. Stein also received over one percent of the vote in Maine and California. This was also the first election since 2000 that the Green Party finished third nationwide, and the first since 2008 that the Libertarian Party failed to.

Withdrawn independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received 757,371 votes (0.49%). Kennedy's 1.96% in Montana was the highest statewide vote share of any third-party candidate. Kennedy also received over one percent of the vote in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia.

Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver received 650,120 votes (0.42%). He was the only third-party candidate to be on the ballot or a registered write-in candidate in every state + D.C. Oliver received 1.69% in North Dakota, his best state by percentage. Oliver also received over one percent of the vote in Utah and Wyoming.

No other candidate reached one percent of the vote in any state. "None of these candidates" received 19,625 votes (1.32%) in Nevada.

Party for Socialism and Liberation nominee, Claudia De la Cruz received 167,772 votes (0.11%). 

From Wikipedia.

Trump's popular vote margin was 1.5 percentage points, which was less than the percentage of votes cast for third-party candidates. None of the third-party candidates came anywhere close to winning even a single electoral vote.

It would be possible to greatly shorten the Presidential ballot without unduly impacting the ability of any candidate with a meaningful chance of winning even a single electoral vote or influencing the ultimate outcome in any state, making ballots for voters simpler.

One plausible threshold for ballot access would be to require candidates for the Presidency to affiliate with a political party having at least one elected official in federal, state, or local elected office. Most of the candidates would be eliminated that way, but none of the viable candidates would be, nor would the Green Party or Libertarian party candidates who did best of all of the third-party candidates who were still running on election day.

Another plausible threshold for ballot access would be to require candidates to have previously held a statewide elective office (for state or federal office) or as Vice President, or a cabinet post, or to have served as a general in the U.S. military. Trump, when first elected, is the only President ever to have failed to meet this threshold.

Congress could pass legislation overcoming the SCOTUS nullification of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment's ban on insurrectionists holding political office in the U.S. (which was a horrible decision not supported by the language of the constitution or its structure or many past precedents).

It would make sense to have a uniform set of candidates for President nationally, although the mechanics could be tricky. The current Presidential primary system isn't optimal, is long, and deprives lots of people in lots of states of any meaningful say in the process.

State and Local Politics

State legislatures have been required as a matter of U.S. constitutional law to apportion seats in their state house and state senate in the same way since the 1960s. Why has only Nebraska shifted to a unicameral system?

Why hasn't even a single state deviated from the single member district system in any house of its state legislature? Some form of proportional representation could eliminate gerrymandering, isn't prohibited by the U.S. Constitution or federal law, and could be put in place by citizens initiative even if the two major political parties were opposed to it?

Why does essentially every U.S. state have the same political parties for federal office as it does for state and local offices? Only a handful of U.S. states have roughly a 50-50 balance between the two major political parties. But almost all of them would be close to 50-50 if each state had its own state political parties for state offices. This would give voters in states that lean strongly left or right from the national political balance much more meaningful choices. What would that look like in Utah or Wyoming or California or Massachusetts?

In theory, states have a lot more freedom to enact tax policies than the federal government does. For example, while there is reason to doubt that a federal wealth tax would be constitutional, a state wealth tax faces no obvious constitutional barrier.

Abortion Legality By Jurisdiction In 2025

A brief recap, since there has been a lot of change in the legality of abortion in the U.S. since the June 24, 2022 decision in Dobbs.

From Wikipedia.

It is also informative to place this in an international perspective.

From Wikipedia.

The Case For Borda Count Voting

Alex Tabarrok makes the case that "The Borda Count is the Best Method of Voting" at the Marginal Revolution blog.

The Borda Count has voter rank the n candidates from most to least preferred and assigns (n-1) points to the candidates. For example if there are 3 candidates a voter’s top-ranked candidate gets 2 points, the second ranked candidate gets 1 point and the last ranked candidate 0 points. The candidate with the most points overall wins.

This approach seems crude, but the proof is in the pudding. He notes that:

It’s well known that the voting methods we use are highly defective, as they fail to meet fundamental criteria like positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle, and stability. Positive responsiveness (monotonicity) means that if a candidate improves on some voters’ ballots, this should not reduce the candidate’s chances of winning. Yet, many voting methods, including runoffs and ranked-choice voting, fail positive responsiveness. In other words, candidates who became more preferred by voters can end up losing when they would have won when they were less preferred! It’s even more shocking that some voting systems can fail the Pareto principle, which simply says that if every voter prefers x to y then the voting system should not rank y above x. Everyone knows that in a democracy a candidate may be elected that the minority ranks below another possible candidate but how many know that there are democratic voting procedures where a candidate may be elected that the majority ranks below another possible candidate or even that democratic voting procedures may elect a candidate that everyone ranks below another possible candidate! That is the failure of the Pareto principle and the chaos results of McKelvey–Schofield show that this kind of outcome should be expected.

Almost all researchers in social choice understand the defects of common voting systems and indeed tend to agree that the most common system, first past the post voting, is probably the most defective! But, as no system is perfect, there has been less consensus on which methods are best. Ranked choice voting, approval voting and the Borda Count all have their proponents. In recent years, however, there has been a swing towards the Borda Count.

Don Saari, for example, whose work on voting has been a revelation, has made strong arguments in favor of the Borda Count. . . .

The Borda Count satisfies positive responsiveness, the Pareto principle and stability. In addition, Saari points out that the Borda Count is the only positional voting system to always rank a Condorcet winner (a candidate who beats every other candidate in pairwise voting) above a Condorcet loser (a candidate who loses to every other candidate in pairwise voting.) In addition, all voting systems are gameable, but Saari shows that the Borda Count is by some reasonable measures the least or among the least gameable systems.

The Borda Count also has the arguable virtue of resolving elections in a single vote and in being relatively simple to implement.

A say "arguable" because the problem with any system that considers second or greater choices in a single round is that it places a greater burden on voters to be familiar enough with all of the candidates to rank them, as opposed to permitting them to only know which one is their favorite. Multi-round voting systems allow voters whose first choice is eliminated in the first round to gather more information about the remaining contenders allowing voters to make a more informed choice about second and subsequent choices. More generally, demanding more research from voters reduces voter turnout.

Comments to the post also note that the name is just horrible from a marketing perspective, and that it greatly inflates the votes of voters who rank more candidates in total. Unlike majority rule, adding irrelevant alternatives can change society's choice. Apart from being a problem in its own right, this opens the door to gaming the set of policies on the ballot. Although the Borda count captures some sort of preference intensity, it still does so in a very crude way. Multiple commentators disagree that it isn't easy to game.

Another comment argues that:

Voting should be an error minimization. We want to minimize the total difference between people's preferences and what happens.

Approval voting will do this. The candidate that will minimize the sum error (that is the number of people that approved of him - those that didn't approve) will be the the candidate that has the most approval votes. Approval voting can also be used for parliaments where people vote for parties.

Also, Borda count focuses on the winner of an individual race, but may or may not bring a proper balance of political parties in a multi-body legislature. Another comment notes that: "until we get rid of the electoral college and the ability of state governments to gerrymander congressional districts, any voting system will just be nibbling at the corners."

How Stable Is The Wealth Elite?

The ranks of very most wealthy people in the U.S. show considerable churn, but remain highly biased in favor of the descendants of previous members of its ranks.

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.

From a new NBER working paper by Priti Kalsi and Zachary Ward.

U.S. Income Tax Rates On Billionaires

Billionaires do pay taxes, but at a lower rate than typical working class and middle class families. This estimate, made in 2021, doesn't include the full effects of Trump's tax cuts for corporations and the rich which took effect in 2018.

In this analysis, we used publicly available data to estimate the average Federal individual income tax rate paid by America’s wealthiest 400 families, using a relatively comprehensive measure of their income that includes income from unsold stock. In our primary analysis, we estimated an average tax rate of 8.2 percent for the period 2010–2018. We also present sensitivity analyses that yield estimates in the 6–12 percent range.

From Whitehouse.gov.

Too Awful

The political news is so bad, I don't know where to begin. One horror after another sparking up and in the works.

State Attempts To Ban Online Porn Associated With Backwardness

Attempts to limit access to online porn are exclusively found in states that are morally, economically, and politically backward (via CNN).

Americans Aren't Geniuses But They Aren't As Illiterate As Claimed

This meme is floating around on Facebook:

These kinds of dubious statistic are thrown out there to unjustly discredit public education and push for things like vouchers and home schooling, and to attack K-12 educators, by creating a "moral panic."

The ranking is, as noted, grossly inaccurate - there is a huge difference between 36th place and 125th place in a world with 195 countries. This flaw should undermine the credibility of the entire meme.

The definition used is also problematic.

What is the "6th grade level"? The 54% read below the 6th grade level figure is surely not referring to the reading level of the median 6th grader, which would be 50% in 6th grade, as the term would naively imply without a definition.

The high school graduation rate is 87% and 61% of adults over age 25 have some college. While many people don't improve a whole lot in reading ability between 6th grade and 12th grade, or after graduating from high school and then going to college but not graduating, more than 4% of people, for example, people who were slightly below average in 6th grade but ultimately graduate from high school and then go to college for a year or so, improve at least beyond the level of the median 6th grader in their next six to nine years of formal education after the 6th grade.

The statistics claiming that 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level also can't be squared with other data showing that 20% of adults read below the 5th grade level uncritically quoted by some advocated in the same breath (which is about the reading level at which general public oriented regional newspapers like the Denver Post are written). The literacy acquisition curve is not a mesa that gets super steep for one year and then almost completely flattens out. Other studies claim that the average American reads at the 8th or 9th grade level, a statistic which shares the same definition issues but less acutely.

The 54% read at the 6th grade level statistic must really based on measuring what some overoptimistic education researcher believes a 6th grader should be able to read that is divorced from reality. It is probably closer to the median reading level of 9th graders which is commonly used as a benchmark for functional literacy.

Also, the true literacy rate in the U.S. is well over 90%. Almost all adults (even those who are legally developmentally disabled) know the alphabet and can read street signs, children's books, etc. in their native language. "Functional literacy" set at a level needed to function reading things like medicine labels and tax forms and instructions for purchases that adults sometimes need to know is shared at a lower rate (and is about the reading level of the median 9th grader).

Yes, the average person is less functionally literate than the average functionally literate person believes, and yes, it would be better if more people had a higher level of literacy. But we aren't nearly as far gone as this meme implies.

Gridlock

This is the biggest problem with the U.S. political system. 

It takes nine out of ten Americans to agree on a policy in order for it to have a 50% chance of being approved. (Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America)

- From here. 

New Year's Eve Hopes

The new year will bring some big changes in my personal life. After thirteen and a half years, I'm parting ways with the law firm where I have been office sharing and providing services on an "of counsel" basis as a substantial part of my case load (in my situation, I'm basically an independent contractor as opposed to being in an employee or partner relationship).

My core solo practice remains, at least for now, but with a collection of cases and clients that is mostly new. I'm at a minimum looking at a very different business model. I will probably get certified as a mediator. But I've been continuously employed since I graduated from law school thirty years ago, and I have both valuable legal skills, and valuable soft skills not specific to a profession. So, I'm not overly worried about landing on my feet.

In the next little bit there are nuts and bolts to work out. My old office needs to be emptied, and I swear that my law books and banker's boxes full of files are twice as heavy as they were when I put them in my office in the first place. At a certain point, age does not improve your strength or stamina. Filings will need to be made in all of my active cases to alert the courts and the other parties to the new arrangements. A couple of outstanding financial relationships will have to be closed out. Clients will need to be told how this will affect them. A TBD venue (probably some sort of virtual office arrangement based someplace closer to my home than my current office) will need to be put in place. One or two new vendor arrangements for things like legal research accounts will have to be worked out.

This big change is both sudden and a long time coming. It has been clear for a long time that a major shift was overdue. But thinking it is one thing, and doing it is another. The daily rhythm of my life will change more than it has for a long time.

It certainly helps to be at a place in my life where I have a cushion. The mortgage used to buy our home twenty-five years ago has steadily gotten smaller, and with re-financings to a 3.65% interest rate, the payment, even with taxes and insurance, it is smaller than my Denver based daughter's one bedroom apartment rent in a less pricey neighborhood than Washington Park. I have enough cash in the bank to cover at least ten months of expenses, more if I'm careful. Other than the mortgage, I have no debt. I pay off my credit cards in full every month. I have no student loans. I'll pay off my $54 parking ticket from the City of Manitou Springs a couple of years ago, as soon as I can talk to a human being to resolve a glitch in their collection agency's computer system (which will probably take several hours or more of my time). I suspect that their computer system can't handle hyphenated names or something like that.

My children are grown adults who have finished college, have good jobs, have apartments of their own, have their own serious romantic partners, and no longer need meaningful financial support. My health insurance covers two people instead of four. My household will soon have only one fully paid off fuel efficient car with myself as the sole driver that I've driven 6,000 miles a year on average and will probably drive less in the coming year with less of a commute. There is no deferred maintenance on the car, only one modest project (a 25 year old swamp cooler to replace) for the house, and no deferred dental work or health care.  I don't have any pets at the moment. 

I've avoided taking on golden handcuffs. My home and car are modest. My most expensive hobby is buying books with Amazon rewards credits. I don't ski or have a boat or a plane or have a vacation house or play golf or belong to an athletic or country club with high monthly dues. I don't get season tickets to pro sports. I'm price conscious when I buy things. I don't even have cable or satellite TV. Aside from business trips and family visits, I only go on a real major vacation every five years or so and just finished the most recent one, a 30th anniversary trip to the Bahamas.

This isn't to say that my life isn't comfortable. I don't keep the thermostat at 65º. I have a couple of video streaming services and a Spotify account and high speed internet access. I have a smart phone, although not the latest and greatest one. I have a decent laptop that I use all day long for both business and pleasure. I live in a good neighborhood in a house that is tastefully well finished on the inside without being over the top. I got a lawn service when my kids were no longer available to mow it for free. I shop for deals when I get groceries, but get ample amounts of good quality food. I don't drink bottom shelf wine and liquor any more. I don't have to make choices between buying medicine or getting health care and buying food or paying utilities. Now and then, I go out to eat someplace nice, or see a play or opera or concert, or plan a weekend getaway. I buy art now and then, although nothing super expensive. I've had a few pieces of heirloom jewelry custom made for my wife over two and a half decades. I have a decent work-life balance. 

But the bottom line is that my "monthly nut" is modest, and I'm healthy enough to work as much as I need to in order to cover it. My life style choices and tastes and attitudes are closer to upper middle class than middle class, but my budget is not. So, I don't have to make a huge amount from self-employment to continue to grow rather than to drain my savings, and I can get away with shifts to new business models that are base hits rather than home runs economically without breaking the bank. I could probably break even at twenty fully collected billable hours a month. 

I am optimistic that I'll be able to shift the way that I make a living in a way which will be a positive change and work out economically over the course of the next year and beyond, even though, as someone in the business of warning my clients about worst case scenarios, I know that nothing is promised.

Meta Note 

Between this blog and its sister blog, I've made 450 blog posts in this 366 day long year, despite a hiatus for my anniversary trip, and more than six weeks combined of being sick successively with a "generic" but serious respiratory infection, and then with COVID.

New Year's Eve Fears

I don't have high hopes for 2025.

* Trump.

* H5N1. Trump makes this a much, much more serious and more likely to be lethal risk. This is one mutation away from mass pandemic status and may be much more deadly than COVID-19.

* The war in Ukraine continues. It will be three years old in two months. Trump is eager to abandon Ukraine and please Russia. The rest of NATO will continue to support Ukraine. Russia's capacity to fight a conventional ground war has been dramatically degraded and its conventional naval forces have been revealed to be more vulnerable than widely believed beforehand. While Russia is incrementally gaining territory, longer range Ukrainian strikes and covert operations have put targets deep inside Russia's borders at risk. Russia continues to lose soldiers and hard to replace military equipment on a daily basis. Russia's economy is straining. It's secrets about how to conduct a war and its weaknesses have been broadcast to the world. Troops sent by North Korea to support it are getting slaughtered by the thousands.

* We will see what kind of regime emerges in Syria with the fall of Assad's regime.

* Israel's multi-front war with Iran and its proxies continues and it has indefinitely occupied some Syrian territory on its border in the wake of the fall of Assad's regime there.

* Gaza has been leveled.

Millions of Palestinians are still in Gaza because they have no way to go anywhere else. But this is unsustainable. It is basically impossible to make this a place that can sustain life for millions of people without mass deaths before this is done, and no one has the will and money to make that happen anyway.

At this point there are really only two possibilities: Either the number of deaths surges from a few tens of thousand to many hundreds of thousands or more, or many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are exiled indefinitely from Gaza, a burden that no one has been willing to accept in the necessary numbers. Still, my assumption is that sooner or later, hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza will be relocated, willingly or unwillingly. The West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan would be the most obvious places to move them, but there are endless possibilities. Iran, which created this problem by encouraging the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas is the country that should take in the people of Gaza, but it probably won't.

* The civil war in Sudan continues to be a shit show. Nobody even has more than a rough estimate of how many have died or been injured in the conflict. Neither side is good, but the side that is backed by the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide is worse and backed by Arab monarchies. There are no signs of short term improvement in this catastrophic war.

* Because Trump took office, a massive global trade war is imminent. It will drive up prices in the U.S. at the expense of U.S. consumers, and destroy the economy. It will do almost nothing to help U.S. companies.

* Trump's promise of mass deportations promises to destroy the U.S. economy (especially agriculture, construction, and hospitality), to be a humanitarian nightmare, and to test once again the rule of law in the U.S.

* Trump's threats of conquest directed at our allies poses a risk of war.

* Trump's extreme weakness, stupidity, and hostility towards China could encourage more warlike action by China against Taiwan and the Philippines. 

* Trump's promise to pardon the thousand plus people convicted or facing charged from January 6 will lead to a surge in right-wing terrorism in the U.S. and undermine democracy.

* Maybe, if we are lucky, Trump won't live to complete his term. He isn't young, he isn't healthy, he isn't careful, all of which could lead to his death from natural causes, and he seems to have advancing dementia as well. Also, lots of people would like to assassinate him and there were two serious attempts to do so in 2024 already. If Trump died from natural causes before January 20, 2025, this could save the United States as a country.

* We can expect a surplus of serious natural disasters and extreme weather in 2025 that will probably surpass 2024, due to global warming.

* We are close to the internal combustion engine/electric vehicle tipping point. If it isn't in 2025, it will happen soon, even though Trump's policies may delay it in the U.S.

* While the left and the middle of the American political spectrum agrees that health care in the U.S. needs sweeping reforms, if anything, the Trump administration will only make things worse.

* The political right in the U.S. is increasingly opposed to education and libraries at all levels. We've seen a preview with book banning efforts, anti-intellectual Florida mandates for educators, and the effective ruin of New College in Florida already. An all out attack on academia and education, which is particularly intense in red states, is likely to get worse during the Trump administration.

* It isn't at all clear what the future looks like for reproductive rights. Dobbs was a catastrophe, but referenda and courts in many states have clawed back some of the losses. Other states, like Texas, for example, are absolutely horrible, with the quality of women's healthcare generally destroyed.

* MAGA's efforts to scapegoat transgender people continues and is gaining ground. Fleeing red states and conservative controlled institutions look like the only options for now.

* MAGA has rekindled racism in the U.S. and made it more strident. This seems likely to continue.

* Right wing Christianity's hate and sexism seem likely to continue the exodus from Christianity which came to a brief pause.

* Tax cuts are likely to undermine infrastructure in the U.S.

* If the right's battle against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other public benefit programs is successful, we are going to see tens of millions of new poor people struggling for survival (and sometimes failing). The Trump recession will make it even worse.

U.K. To Regulate Many Online Forums Out Of Existence

I don't like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and this is worse.

This, from Techcrunch, seems like a good summary of a bad situation facing this blog: Death Of A Forum: How The UK's Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities.

This blog is just that: my personal blog, with comments.

Over the past two decades a lively community has evolved in the discussion threads. However, the Online Safety Act threatens to impose impossible hurdles on the continuation of open fora in the UK. The intent is officially to protect adults and children from illegal content, but ... there's no lower threshold on scale. A blog with comments is subject to exactly as much regulatory oversight as Facebook. It applies to all fora that enable people in the UK (that would be me) to communicate with other people in the UK (that's a whole bunch of you), so I can't avoid the restrictions by moving to a hosting provider in the US. Nor am I terribly keen on filing the huge amounts of paperwork necessary to identify myself as the Trust and Safety officer of an organization and arrange for commercial age verification services (that I can't in any event integrate with this ancient blogging platform). And the penalties for infractions are the same—fines of up to £18M (which is a gigantic multiple of my gross worth).

And it comes into effect on March 15th.

Accordingly ...

The blog will continue to exist.

However the comment threads may be closed for good after March 14th.

(I don't know for sure yet. It's very late in the day but the ICO may see sanity and provide some sort of sanity clause for hobbyist sites.) 

. . . 

Update: According to this in-depth article about the Act there appears to be a limited exemption for "limited functionality services" that covers blog comments—"but it may not include them if users can reply to each other - this is unclear". Ofcom are expected to clarify their regulations in January, so we can live in hope for a little longer. 

Also: "The OSA puts obligations on the service provider, so if you host a community on a platform such as Discord or WhatsApp, the OSA doesn't directly affect you." (So I may be able to open a forum on Discord instead.) 

Also: my quick first pass risk assessment per Ofcom guidelines is that this blog is, to put it mildly, at low risk for priority illegal content, if only because it doesn't provide most of the types of communication channel Ofcom is concerned with (eg. generating and hosting video and images, enabling direct 1:1 private communication between users).

From Sci-Fi author Charlie Stross's blog.

Most Viewed Posts Of 2024

Most of my most viewed posts this year are from prior years, but the four most viewed posts at this blog from this year were:

4. Statistics About This Blog And Its Sister Blog (June 5, 2024),

3. Hamas, The Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran, And ISIS-K (April 2, 2024),

2. Active Defenses Are The Future Of Warfare (October 15, 2024), and

1. It Wasn't About The Price Of Eggs (November 8, 2024).

Quote Of The Day

I love the ocean, but I'm not trying to be a fish.

- Echo Wu, "Jentry Chau vs. the Underworld" (Episode 5).

TFR In The EU

The replacement "total fertility rate" which is what is being described below, is 2.1 children per woman per lifetime. So far, the demographic transition towards fewer children that comes with economic development, knows no bounds.

Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.

Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.

With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago.

…Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.

Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies. In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.

France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.

From the Financial Times.

Impeachment in South Korea And Political Prosecutions In Spain

In South Korea, the impeachments are tried not by an upper house of a legislature, but by the Constitutional Court, which must convicted by a six votes out of nine in the case of the President (it currently has three vacancies, so a unanimous vote is required) and by five votes out of nine in other cases. Specifically:

For passage, the [impeachment] motion must receive the support of a two-thirds majority if it concerns the president and a simple majority for any other office. Once the impeachment motion passes the National Assembly, the Constitutional Court adjudicates the impeachment, and until the Constitutional Court renders a decision, the impeached official is suspended from office and unable to exercise power.

The person facing impeachment is suspended from office once the National Assembly votes to impeach.

According to Article 65 Clause 1, if the President, Prime Minister, or other state council members violate the Constitution or other laws of official duty, the National Assembly can impeach them.

Clause 2 states the impeachment bill must be proposed by one third and approved by a majority of members of the National Assembly for passage.

By the Constitutional Court Act, the Constitutional Court must make a final decision within 180 days after it receives any case for adjudication, including impeachment cases.

From here.

While this system potentially has its own problems, it is better than the partisan vote in the Senate that is used in the U.S.

This is why many countries follow this practice:

Constitutions in 9 democracies give a court—often the country's constitutional court—the power to begin an impeachment; another 61 constitutions place the court at the end of the process.

Indeed, while bicameral national legislatures aren't uncommon, in many countries, unlike the U.S., they aren't co-equal. The lower house can overrule objections of the upper house, for example, in the case of the U.K. House of Lords, and in the case of the Canadian Senate. 

Meanwhile, "in Spain, possible criminal cases against protected people (aforados) are sent immediately to a higher tribunal (Tribunal Suprempo) in order to minimize rogue judges moving baseless cases forward. If that tribunal does actually charge the aforado, then it asks the Parliament to remove the immunity, and the affected person has the opportunity to make his case before the Parliament and try to convince it that immunity should not be lifted because the case is just a political witch hunt."

I'm not a huge fan of Spain's approach, but it does at least, insure that a politician's immunity is not absolute.

What To Abolish?

Republicans want to abolish the Department of Education and the IRS. Both are horrible ideas. 

What should be abolished?

1. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

2. The Office of National Drug Control Policy.

3. The Alcohol And Tobacco Tax And Trade Bureau.

4. The Alcohol and Tobacco parts of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

5. The Article I Immigration Court system (transfer this duty to Article III courts).

6. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) (as opposed to the separate border control agency).

7. The Employment and Training Administration in the Labor Department.

8. The Export-Import Bank of the U.S.

9. The National Indian Gaming Commission.

10. Criminal and civil forfeiture enforcement of copyright and trademark violations (a similar statutory stand alone crimes).

11. Federal pornography possession enforcement.

12. Diversity jurisdiction in the federal courts.

13. Federal question jurisdiction in the federal courts in most cases involving private parties. 

14. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (merge into the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit)

15. The Federal Arbitration Act.

16. Federal grand juries (would require a constitutional amendment).

17. Criminal punishment of illegal entry into the United States.

18. Federal enforcement of bank robbery laws.

19. Federal enforcement of intrastate controlled substance violations.

20.  Most federal agency law enforcement agencies.

21.  Merge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission into the SEC.

22. Slow speed, long haul passenger rail lines at AMTRAK.

23. Door to door rural mail delivery (replace it with P.O. boxes).

24. The Jones Act.

25. Grants to for profit colleges and universities.

26. Federal civil forfeitures.

27. For profit federal prisons and detention centers.

28. The Medicaid Estate Recovery program.

29.  FEMA grants to people suffering disaster losses after rebuilding in stupid zones.

30. The Office of the Director Of National Intelligence.

31. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (enforce the laws in regular Article III courts).

32. The Selective Service System.

33. Most tanks in the U.S. Army (transfer them to allies who want them like Ukraine and Taiwan).

34. New destroyers (of existing designs) for the U.S. Navy.

35. The U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay.

36. Bomber aircraft in the Air National Guard.

37. Canon artillery in the Army National Guard.

38. The Space Force (which should be merged into the Air Force).

39. The Air Force (which should be merged into the Army).

40. Stealth fighters in the Air National Guard.

41. The Next-Generation Intratheater Airlift (NGIA) program in the Air Force (it duplicates a more advanced Army Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft program).

42. Foreign aid to Saudi Arabia.

43. The amphibious assault mission of the U.S. Marine Corps.

44. The U.S. Navy's nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) program.

45. Most U.S. military VIP transport aircraft.

46. The Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV) procurement of 522 M1283 General Purpose Vehicles, 993 M1286 Mission Command Vehicles, and 386 M1287 Mortar Carrier Vehicles. This would leave the AMPV program with 790 M1284 Medical Evacuation Vehicles and 216 M1285 Medical Treatment Vehicles.

47. The M10 Booker Mobile Protected Firepower program.

48. Retire the B1-B bomber (or transfer it to the U.S. Navy as a patrol aircraft).

49. The ban on travel by Americans to Cuba.

50. The U.S. Army Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), which is a high school pre-ROTC program.

Military Quick Hits

* The Navy has put the Light Amphibious Warship a.k.a. Landing Ship Medium program to build a new class of Marine transport ship on hold because the initial bids were far more costly than the Navy had expected. 

“We had a bulletproof – or what we thought – cost estimate, pretty well wrung out design in terms of requirements, independent cost estimates,” Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition Nickolas Guertin said at an American Society of Naval Engineers symposium last week.

“We put it out for bid and it came back with a much higher price tag,” he added. “We simply weren’t able to pull it off. So we had to pull that solicitation back and drop back and punt.” . . .

The idea was for the Navy to buy a smaller, less expensive amphibious ship that could shuttle Marines around islands as they set up ad-hoc bases on islands and fire weaponry like anti-ship missiles in a potential conflict and quickly move to new locations. The Marines Corps has converted two of three planned Marine Littoral Regiments that would rely on the LSMs to move across the Pacific.

At a lower price point, the Navy could buy more ships, and current requirements call for 18 to 35 LSMs. The Congressional Budget Office projected the lead ship in the class costing anywhere from $460 to $560 million, according to an April report. If the Navy buys the 18 to 35 ships according to current plans, each hull could cost $340 to $430 million. Initial plans in 2020 called for each ship to cost $100 to $150 million. . . .

Last fall, the Navy put out a request for proposals to the shipbuilders after finalizing requirements for the Landing Ship Medium earlier in 2023, USNI News reported at the time. Those requirements called for a platform that could haul 75 Marines and 600 tons of equipment, and have a cargo area of about 8,000 square feet, a helicopter pad, a 70-person crew, spots for six .50-caliber guns and two 30mm guns.

“Specific configuration details will be determined during the detailed design phase, but generally the ship will be less than 400 feet long, have a draft of less than 12 feet, an endurance speed of 14 knots, and roll on/roll off beaching capability,” Naval Sea Systems Command told USNI News at the time.

* One of the main driver's of new weapons developments in the U.S. military is the termination of the Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2019. This has driven a host of intermediate range missile programs.

* It would be interesting to see what could be done for aircraft and drones that rather than primarily having a low radar threshold, would be quiet and hard to see in visible light (perhaps with a so called "invisibility shield"), possibly with a fairly slow moving, small drone that with only modest attention to reducing a radar signature would blend in with the bird background. Locating targets stealthily is increasingly key.

* A key issue in drone warfare is jamming of GPS signals and of control signals. High quality inertial guidance, AI driven multi-domain sensors (radar, sound, heat, visual), satellite mediated rather than ground sourced communications (possibly with lasers), and AI driven controls to reduce the need for communication, as well as interference hardened shells for drone avionics and electronics, could all play a part in these developments.

* Active defenses for ground vehicles, ships, and point defense seem to have made a lot of progress, but active defenses for warplanes from anti-aircraft missiles and shells, less so. This seems like an area where there is room for technological progress. One step further - imagine a suicide drone, basically a cruise missile, with active defenses against missile defense interceptors.

* What is the smallest ship that could be sea worthy in high seas and travel blue sea distances? Could it get smaller than the roughly 3,000 tons of a frigate? Could it be smaller if it were unmanned? Could it be as small as say a 100-500 ton missile boat?

* Should the Navy switch to bidgets to reduce the need to resupply with TP? Likewise, should it use air flow based hand dryers instead of paper towels to dry hands?

* One plausible way to reorganize the U.S. military would be based upon the anticipated capabilities of the opposition. One component of the force could be optimized to deal with low end counterinsurgency type conflicts efficiently, while another could be optimized to deal with so-called "near peer" conflicts. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you can deal with the "near peer" conflicts that you are equipped to handle anything, but that encourages asymmetric warfare tactics in which inexpensive opposition forces drive our force to spend extreme amounts of money to counter them resulting in a losing war of attrition.

U.S. Military Spending Since 1900

U.S. military spending in 2024 was at or very near its lowest percentage of GDP since 1940 (an 84 year low). It declined incrementally during the Biden administration.

 From here.

In 2022 it was 3.45% of GDP. The all time low on this chart was 3.09% in 1999. The percentage is probably a lower in 2023 and 2024 with a projected 3.3% in 2023, and 3.0% in 2024.

From here.

From here.

The number of active duty U.S. military personnel is also at or near a record low since 1940 (without adjusting for population which has grown 2.54 times since then). There are currently 1,288,549 active duty U.S. military personnel.

The Army at 443,444 is at the lowest level since 1940. 

The Navy is at 328,774, and was lower in 2012-2015 and in 2017-2018, when it fell to as little as 321,300 in 2013, but is close to the bottom.

The Air Force is 326,065, and was lower in 2015-2018, when it fell to as little as 312,195 in 2015 (it was also lower in 1941 as part of the Army), but is still close to the bottom.

The Marine Corp was 168,032. It was lower for some period between 1945 and 1955, with a force of 74,279 in 1950.

Adjusting for population, the current number of U.S. active duty personnel is equivalent to 507,303 in 1940, when the actual number of active duty military personnel was 508,274.