Marriage Has Grown Less Popular In England And Wales

Seeking Out Good Ideas

One of the things that made Japan great was its intentional effort in the late Meiji era to scour the world for good ideas and to bring them back and incorporate those ideas in a culturally appropriate way into their own society. 

This is something that the U.S. should do as well if it really wants to be great. Some minor gadgets and ideas are no big deal, but countless little ideas add up to big quality of life improvements. And, while private enterprises can do some of that, some ideas are specific to governments and government policies.

For example, Japan has stickers for the vehicles of older drivers, and labels for some kinds of food that change color when the contents are spoiled. New Zealand has "no fault" insurance for all accidents, not just car accidents or work related accidents. Finland sends newborns home from the hospital with a package of useful items for the baby and has regular home nurse visits when the baby is an infant.

Impeachable Offenses

Many grounds already exist for impeachment or a post-term prosecution.

Pre-election high crimes and misdemeanors:

1. His 34 state court felony convictions.

2. His election interference in Georgia in 2020.

3. His classified documents hoarding and refusal to turn over.

4. His January 6 infractions.

5. His role in having fake electors appointed.

6. His running for office when he participated in an insurrection.

7. Multiple rapes.

8. Trump University fraud.

Second term high crimes and misdemeanors:

1. His violation of the Impoundment Act with executive orders.

2. His violation of privacy laws by sharing Social Security data with Musk.

3. His violation of privacy laws by sharing tax data with immigration enforcement.

4. His violation of civil rights including free speech by deporting legal immigrants for expressing their opinions.

5. His violation of civil rights in his anti-DEI campaign including destruction of minority and LGBT and female websites, censoring books, and threatening colleges and schools that fail to follow suit.

6. Extortion of law firms, colleges, and businesses in a campaign of vengeance for acts that weren't legal wrongs.

7. Violation of civil rights to individuals targeted for vengeance.

8. Disregard for court orders constituting contempt of court and creating a constitutional crisis.

9. The war crime of aggression for threatening invasions of Greenland and the Panama Canal for no legally cognizable reason.

10. Violation of civil rights for wrongfully invoking the Alien Enemies Act and not providing the due process to which people are entitled even then.

11. Violation of civil rights by sending people to a torture prison without due process.

12. Violation of civil rights by detaining people who were lawful tourists for no legitimate reason.

13. Conspiracy to commit insider trading.

14. Violation of federal law by marketing Tesla.

15. Inducing his doctor to give false reports to the public about his health.

Not high crimes and misdemeanors but troubling:

1. Starting a trade war when neither statutes nor the constitution nor treaties authorized it (although possibly extortion).

2. Attempting to create and remove regulations without Administrative Procedural Act approval.

3.  J6 pardons.

4. NATO treaty violation in threatening Denmark-Greenland.

5.  Improperly turning tables on Ukraine.

6. Incessant fraud on the American people with a constant stream of lies.

7. Breaching union-labor agreements with federal civil servants.

8. Violating federal law re firing inspector generals and JAG officers with an intent to facilitate more violations of the law.

9. Violation of government contracting laws related to Musk benefits.

10. Receiving illegal emoluments in private vacations.

11. Threatening federal judges without a basis for doing so.

12. Threatening to unconstitutionally run for a third term. 

13. Attempting to abolish birthright citizenship.

14. Threatening to deport U.S. citizens.

15. Endorsing and praising dictators and fascists.

16. Threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act without good cause.

17. Eliminating the Office of Legal Counsel to screen legislation for legality.

18. In general, breaching his duty to faithfully execute the laws.

Bingo Cards

What unusual or exceptional events could happen in this administration (i.e. "what's on my Bingo Card")?

1. The Trump Administration could decide to deliberately default on the federal debt (perhaps only if owed to selective perceived enemies).

2. The U.S. Supreme Court could adopt the President's fringe unitary executive theory.

3. The U.S. Supreme Court could affirm the validity of the President's Alien Enemy Act declaration, perhaps by holding that it is non-justiciable.

4. The U.S. Supreme Court could affirm a contemplated Insurrection Act declaration, perhaps by holding that it is non-justiciable.

5. The U.S. Supreme Court could hold that the impoundment act in unconstitutional.

6. Congress could repeal Trump's authority to impose tariffs.

7. Trump could die of natural causes.

8. Trump could be assassinated.

9. Other leading Trump administration officials could be assassinated.

10. The U.S. Supreme Court could declare Trump's tariffs to be illegal or invalid under a variety of legal theories.

11. The Republican Party could suffer a crushing defeat in the 2026 elections.

12. The 2026 elections could be cancelled or postponed.

13. Elon Musk could lose his billionaire status after having been the richest man in the world this year.

14. China could invade Taiwan.

15. China could start providing arms to Russia (it already seems to have provided 150 mercenaries).

16. Volcanos and earthquakes could enter a sustained period of high activity.

17. Martial law could be declared.

18. There could be a military coup attempt in the U.S.

19. There could be an unprecedented wave of farm bankruptcies.

20. A trade war with China and/or an invasion of Taiwan could bankrupt Apple.

21. A serious Ebola-class foreign pathogen could lead to a U.S. outbreak.

22. There is a Kent State-like incident of anti-Trump protesters being killed.

23. The U.S. Supreme Court upholds state laws making it illegal to be transgender.

24. Southern Florida experiences Hurricane Katrina-class flooding that leads to permanent large population reductions in some areas.

25. The U.S. invades Mexico militarily over Mexican objections leading to military clashes with Mexico.

26. The U.S. invades Greenland triggering a NATO response.

27. There is a terrorist attack on Trump's proposed military parade in D.C.

28. Marsupial tigers are revived.

29. Insider trading in Trump's inner circle is definitively established and not prosecuted.

30. Trump gets divorced again.

31. Trump declares (falsely) on national TV that aliens are real and that the U.S. government has been in contact with them.

32. The Smithsonian Museum is mostly shut down and its collections are destroyed.

33. Trump sponsors new Confederate monuments in Washington D.C.

34. The U.S. leaves NATO.

35. The 2028 election is cancelled.

Neither The Space Force Nor The Air Force Should Exist

Military space resources are necessary. A separate Space Force bureaucracy is just a very expensive and wasteful PR stunt. The Space Force shouldn't exist, and honestly, we'd be better off if the Air Force were merged back into the Army again as well.

If the Air Force weren't separate from the Army, the Army wouldn't be trying to build helicopters to do jobs that fixed wing aircraft jobs would do better, and the Air Force fighter mafia wouldn't be neglecting CAS and logistics, and joint air-land cooperation would be handled in the same lower level command and control unit in the same way that this is done in the U.S. Marine Corps. 

The Space Force just adds insult to injury and makes coordination between troops on the ground and space resources, and supporting Air Force resources, even more poor. And, it also creates stupid unnecessary bureaucratic empires that cost money and don't add value.

Simple Solutions To Big Problems

I'm a "Fox" and not a "Hedgehog". I know many things and focus on details rather than "one big thing" that solves every problem. 

But, I'm going to try to put on my hedgehog hat and come up with ways to address some of the biggest problems facing the U.S. today if forced to suggest just three solutions to each of them. The point of this exercise is partially to force prioritization of lists of proposals that can get bogged down with good ideas to solve small problems or to make lower priority reforms to big problems.

Affordable Housing and Homelessness

Housing prices in major metropolitan areas are high. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Eliminate virtually all zoning regulations of residential density, parking requirements,  minimum lot sizes, and regulation of the purposes for which buildings can be used. This primarily reduces the land value part of housing costs which is the main factor that makes housing in big cities so much more expensive. 

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

End all property tax funding of public schools and replace the lost revenue, dollar for dollar, with increased state income taxes. This will typically reduce property taxes by more than 50% freeing up income for making principal and interest payments. It would also reduce inequities in school funding and would be more progressive as a tax source.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Spend whatever it takes to provide basic housing first, immediately, to every single homeless person in the United States. Housing first is cheaper than letting people live on the street and paying the costs of that. This is less burdensome on the health care system, reduces crime, and improves quality of life for both the people who would be homeless and the people that their being homeless in their neighborhoods would impact.

Health Care

The U.S. pays far more per person for healthcare than any other country on the planet and gets poor results for its money, while inflicting great financial hardship on people. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Adopt "Medicare for All" financed with a higher Medicare payroll tax and a higher Obamacare tax on investment income. Roll in long term care coverage currently paid for, for many people, with the Medicaid long term care program. 

End Medicaid. End the Medicaid Estate Recovery System (i.e. the poor man's death tax). End private health insurance. End worker's compensation coverage of medical expenses. End the separate veteran's healthcare programs. End Obamacare insurance premium subsidies. End health insurance tax deductions and employer health insurance mandates and private health insurance mandates. End lawsuits by private individuals to pay for medical expenses. End casualty insurance policies designed to cover liability for medical expenses in lawsuits. This would greatly reduce administrative cost waste, bad debt, denial of care, linkage of health care to employment, would reduce health insurance and worker's compensation and CGL insurance expenses for businesses, would simplify tax returns for individuals, and would facilitate more effective cost control on provider payments. It would also increase use of preventative care thereby reducing more expensive acute care and would shift expensive ER care for the currently uninsured to more appropriate lower cost providers. This would especially help working class people who are mostly likely to have inadequate health insurance and to struggle with paying medical bills.

What is another big thing we can do to address that?

Legalize "recreational" drugs in a highly regulated and controlled manner similar to Colorado's marijuana legalization to reduce harm, while providing strong support for substance abuse treatment including drug based therapies and inpatient treatment funded with Medicaid for All resources. This would dramatically reduce the overdose epidemic, and would improve recovery rates for alcoholics and drug addicts, something that takes a particular toll on the poor and working class. This would also dramatically reduce gang crime and organized crime and would cripple cartels, and would reduce crime by addicts and would reduce incarceration costs associated with controlled substance users and jail deaths from drug withdrawal. The reduced demand would also dramatically reduce crime abroad from Columbia to Mexico, which would reduce the flow of refugees and migrants to the U.S. and would reduce corruption in the affected governments.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Double the number of medical student slots for educating physicians by expanding medical school capacity and building new medical schools. We shouldn't have the same number of MD education slots as we did fifty years ago, with twice the population, and there is no shortage of highly qualified premed graduates to fill those slots. Limited supply also drives ups provider costs. Ending student loans for medical students and Medicaid for All ending bad debt issues and administrative costs for self-employed doctors and lowering malpractice insurance coverage due to not having to pay for malpractice related medical bill compensation would also allow reduced MD charges without undue hardship for MDs.

Higher Education

It is very expensive to go to college and many people leave college with large student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Many kids who are ready for college don't go, but many kids who aren't ready for college go at great expense in public funds and for themselves. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Provide 100% grant based funding for tuition, room, board, and books to students pursuing higher education whose grades and test scores and other factors show that they have at least a 50% chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. Do not fund higher education for people who have a low chance of completing the higher educational program that they are enrolled in. End government sponsored or guaranteed student loans. This would much better utilize our nation's supply of academically competent students while reducing dropouts and failures by people who aren't currently ready for college at great expense and undermining personal self-worth. The status quo of indiscriminate state subsidies to in state students and very low admission thresholds that insure that huge percentages of students admitted at public and for profit colleges drop out without degrees is wasteful while still excluding poor and working class students at high levels from the system. Some of the political alienation towards higher education also comes from people who tried and had bad experiences since they weren't ready and dropped out and from people who were shut out of the system when they were prepared and take a sour grapes attitude towards it.

What is another thing we can do to address that?

Improve apprenticeship systems and vocational education programs, both for high school aged students whose academic performance indicates that traditional liberal education programs in a four year program don't make sense for them, and through community colleges. Adopt occupational specialty identification and training approaches used by the U.S. military for enlisted recruits for civilians. This would provide a path to missing middle occupations and recognize that not going to college doesn't have to mean that there is no path to the American dream.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Forgive all existing federally guaranteed or federally provided student loans, and end the prohibition on discharging student loans in bankruptcy for all other student loans ten years after the repayment period begins if a degree is earned and professional certification is obtained in a pre-professional program, and after five years in all other cases. This would provide intergenerational justice to struggling Millenials and Gen Xers and Gen Z. These students could then better afford the American dream and could better afford to get married and have kids.

Poverty

Lots of people, especially children and single parents, but also many older adults with little education or skills, are poor and struggling. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Make the large, per child tax credit, that was available during the pandemic, permanent, and replace the complicated and audit prone earned income tax credit with a simple income tax credit equal to Social Security taxes (for both employers and employees) up to the minimum wage times thirty hours a week (or an equivalent amount of credit against self-employment taxes - reflected in not having those taxes withheld. The usefulness of the child tax credit in reducing child poverty in a simple way was demonstrated in the pandemic, and the EITC is far too complicated and has bad incentives for people trying to climb out of low income jobs and is too expensive to administer. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

What is another big thing that we can do to address that?

Reduce the regular Social Security retirement age to 55 years to people who do not have college degrees, without a reduction in benefits, and pay for any shortfalls in social security from existing obligations or new coverage, by increasing the payroll tax cap by however much is necessary to pay for it. Consider this payback for not imposing higher education costs on the public, and well as a rough justice categorical recognition that jobs that require less education are frequently more physically demanding and harder to continue to perform in late middle age. This would particularly help the Trump demographic. Many people in this demographic are already voting with their feet by leaving the work force and often applying for disability benefits which wouldn't be necessary with this categorical benefit that is much cheaper to administer and has better incentives.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Provide paid maternity leave, at public expense, from six months of pregnancy to fifteen months after birth, as a short form, temporary, Social Security disability benefit. Add an additional six months to this time period for twins. Pay for this as well with an increased payroll tax cap. This greatly reduces the need for infant daycare, and increase the health of mothers and babies especially for working class families without unduly burdening employers. The pandemic proved that not being at work in late pregnancy out of economic necessity increases maternal and infant health. This would make it more affordable for Millennials and Gen Z to marry, have kids, and achieve the American Dream.

Transportation

Internal combustion engines are polluting and make up dependent upon oil. What is the single biggest thing we can do to address that?

Reduce trade barriers to importing foreign EVs and batteries, and subsidize high speed charging networks. There are lots of good EVs out there that aren't being exported to the U.S. due to trade barriers, especially from China. EVs reduce pollution and reduce fossil fuel dependency with petroleum dependency creating national security issues.

What is the second biggest thing we can do to address that?

Build dedicated high speed rail in interstate highway corridors where there is high traffic volume on medium distance routes (and upgrade medium speed rail corridors that already exist like the one in the Northeast Corridor), and use that high speed rail not only for passengers but for mail and package delivery by the USPS. Pay for this, in part, by shutting down low speed AMTRAK routes with the heaviest subsidies per passenger-mile. This could reduce pressure to expand highways, is environmentally sound, reduces highway maintenance costs, and provides mutual support between the rail system and the postal system. It would improve speed on these routes relative to both cars and to commercial flights. But it only makes sense where it makes some sort of economic sense based upon cost and demand. Medium distance, high volume routes are the sweet spot for high speed rail. Reducing petroleum dependency in addition to being environmentally and climate sound would increase national security and economic stability by reducing exposure to global oil production shocks.

What is a third big thing we can do to address that?

Convert short haul government fleet vehicles like garbage trucks, intracity and school buses, and urban postal delivery vehicles to EVs. This is a perfect niche for EVs even before charging networks are built out, reducing pollution and reducing oil demand with the benefits described above.

Things That Could Happen

 * China could invade Taiwan. One reason that they had to refrain was that they need the trade relationship with the U.S., that reason has been burned down. Another reason to strike now is that the U.S. President is weak and that the U.S. national security establishment is incompetent (and hasn't had time to learn how to do its jobs as it is busy tearing apart the federal government).

If a response isn't decisive, it could be a fait accompli before the U.S. could act. And, the U.S. may have alienated allies like Japan and South Korea in that fight with its trade war.

Suppose it happened like that. It wouldn't be at all good for Western values or the global or U.S. economy. But, it would pretty much deflate all justifications for the immense amount of the U.S. defense budget, especially of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, that is devoted to defending Taiwan.

* The U.S. trade war with China also undermines any incentive for China to refrain from providing military support to Russia. This could decisively shift the state of the Ukraine War, where attrition is eating away at Russia.

* On the other hand, the imminent global recession that Trump has triggered has already caused oil prices to fall from $80 a barrel to $63. This undermines oil autocrats all over the world, and brings U.S. oil producers, who are high cost producers, close to shutting down their wells, and dramatically reduces their profits. In the case of Russia, which receives the lion's share of its foreign exchange from oil sales, this squeezes their economy and their ability to finance the Ukraine War going forward, greatly.

* Trump has gone so far afield on areas like the Ukraine War and tariffs from what Republican elected officials and his base supports, that, Congress might rein him in, or members of Congress might decide not to run for re-election since they are undermining their own policy objectives, much of Ken Buck from CO-4 did in advance of the 2024 election, creating open seats that could help flip Congress.

* It doesn't take much of a shift in public opinion between now and November 2026 for the GOP to be absolutely crushed in the mid-term elections, and giving Democrats the power of the purse to undermine him. Single handedly destroying the economy, creating immense inflation and unemployment, alienating every ally that the United States has in the world, spurring mass bankruptcies from individuals and businesses, and destroying the U.S. tourism industry is the kind of thing that just might do that. 

Trump votes are people whose views are heavily shaped by their personal experiences rather than by abstract ideas or predicted outcomes, and they are likely to have a lot of highly negative personal experiences between now and November 2026.

Political defeats for Republicans in a Pennsylvania vacancy election and Wisconsin, and greatly reduced margins of GOP victory in two Florida Congressional seat vacancy elections at least suggest that this could happen. Trump's tariffs are not polling well and voters are blaming him for them. Trump was already in the negative zone in his approval ratings before the wildly unpopular tariffs. Post-tariffs he's already taken a several percentage point hit in his approval rating even though most people haven't experienced the price increases that they will cause first hand yet. A perception that Trump is no longer Teflon could also embolden GOP rebels in Congress.

* The trade war may cause quite a few contracts from our allies to buy F-35s from Lockheed to be canceled, doing immense harm to this major U.S. defense contractor.

* I don't see any way that Elon Musk and Tesla escape the death spiral that they have brought upon themselves by producing the Cybertruck riddled with quality control problems and design flaws, by overpromising investors, and by destroying the brand with the environmentally conscious consumers who want to buy EVs with his pro-Nazi positions and role in DOGE. If Tesla stock falls another 42%, which is well within the range of possibility, Musk loses his entire stock in the company to a margin call. His political activity has also undermined Starlink. He's playing related party transactions with Twitter, whose value he's already destroyed. SpaceX might survive, but it doesn't take many high profile rocket explosions for that company to be undermined too. 

If Musk's mismanagement and connection to Trump are his undoing, that could prove a cautionary tale to other billionaires about the costs of buying into MAGA. Must has already seen his personal net worth decline more than $120 billion so far this year.

* Trump's shock and awe strategy may have worked at first, but as court orders finding his Executive Orders to be illegal accumulate, even if SCOTUS reverses some of them, and he runs out of new proposals to push, he may lose steam. Also, he is fighting on so many fronts. The tariffs undermine business interests. He has basically declared war on every college, university, and K-12 school in the country. He has attacked basically the entire federal civil service and all of its unions and is weakening the very bureaucracies that are the source of his power in the process. He has attacked a large share of Big Law law firms. He has tried to bully every country in the world with tariffs. He has taken on everyone who supports medical research. He has tried to rattle big businesses to become racist and anti-women and anti-gay and anti-trans and anti-science. He has put the federal judiciary in his sights. At some point, all of these powerful interests may decide that they're sick of being afraid and turn on him, even if he tries to dangle tax cuts in front of them. Tax cuts only have value in an economic climate where you can actually make a profit.

Trump is fighting those battles with a group of political appointees hand picked to be bad at governing who are charged with undermining their respective departments and agencies. Nothing he has done has encouraged the rank and file civil servants who would have to implement his policies to be loyal to him as opposed to deliberately undermining him at every turn.

Trump will get no back up or support from state and local government officials in blue states and blue cities.

Politics is a team sport, and if you alienate every potential ally you might have, at some point, people aren't going to be afraid of you anymore. He's trying to bolster his clout now with claims that he can run for a third term, but his legal argument isn't very credible and none of that matters if his approval ratings continue to sink with independent voters. When he's a lame duck with undermined departments and agencies to implement his objectives, at some point, disgruntled factions in the GOP may turn on him and break ranks.

In an extreme scenario, one could imagine the GOP splintering entirely, leaving us with an interim three party system, and if the GOP vote in Congress and in the 2026 election were to be divided, the Democrats could gain supermajorities and actually impeach him and convict on the third round of impeachment charges. It's a non-linear function. We start with very close to a 50-50 status quo. But if the GOP side of that 50-50 split splinters to say a 35-15-50 split, then the comparatively united Democrats could sweep at lot of moderately safe Republican seats, for at least one two year session of Congress.

And, I would think that if Democrats seized that power for even one term, they would be much more ruthless than they have been in the past about measures that would tip the balance, like packing the U.S. Supreme Court (which has never been more unpopular), granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico (at least), ending the filibuster (although with Trump in office, that is less of a priority), and tightening up election laws and laws on judicial review of executive branch actions. Even if the Democrats can't manage that, they could at least shut down the tariffs, tear away a huge amount of Trump's power over spending, and might even impeach some lesser egregiously bad officials like RFK, Jr.

What will happen? 

I don't know. I'm not making predictions. I'm simply considering possibilities in a time of immense uncertainty. But we could see the Trump Administration implode politically.

An Imaginary Passover 2025

This weekend is the Jewish holiday of Passover, which is based upon an event described in Chapters 11 and 12 of the book of Exodus in the Torah in which God kills all first born males, human and animal, in Egypt on an appointed night, except in homes where the lintel is marked with a lamb's blood as the members of the Jewish community were instructed by their leaders to do.

Benchmarking the date of this event in the Biblical story in a manner consistent with the appearance of the Philistines in the Levant (which historically happened around 1200 BCE at the time of the Bronze Age collapse), this story would be taking place something like 3200 to 3300 years ago.

Imagine the impossible scenario that another miracle is called for now, in the United States, to smite the wicked and protect those who are less wicked. Suppose that this time around, on Passover evening starting after sundown on April 12, all 77.3 million people who voted for Trump, who are still living, died, a bit more than 20% of the population of the United States, so an event of similar magnitude.

Image how that would change the world. Almost all of the Republican elected officials and judges would die. Children would be almost completely spared. Some states, like West Virginia, Wyoming, and Utah would take particularly hard hits, as would most rural areas and small towns outside New England and Hawaii and college towns. Very few people would be left in predominantly white Evangelical Christian churches and Mormon temples the next morning. Predominantly white Protestant churches and Catholic parishes would likewise take strong hits. Jews celebrating Passover and predominantly black churches would barely notice a difference. The old, men, and people without college educations would be disproportionately hit, as would blue collar small business owners and farmers. The impact in big cities would be quite modest. The U.S. military office corps would be very hard hit, and the enlisted ranks would experience a milder impact. The LGBTQ community would be almost all spared. Schools, colleges, and universities would have only modest impacts. Non-religious people and non-Christians generally would see a quite modest toll. Many billionaires would be no more.

There would still be a crunch. Prompt arrangements would have to be made for many children left without parents. Figuring out how to keep farms running would be particularly challenging. But it would probably set the country back only a few years as the people who were passed over returned to the path of decency and responsibility and competence.

The hostile stance of the U.S. towards the rest of the world would promptly fade away. Those remaining wouldn't have a single set of political views, but the crazy and mean spirited elements would be gone.

The victims wouldn't all be horrible, horrible people, but they would be much more personally culpable than the victims of the Biblical Passover, who just had the bad luck to be non-Jewish subjects to the Pharaoh, and were often innocent children or animals. 

Russia Is Still Dangerous But No Longer A Superpower

 

Transport Planes As Bombers

The technology to use ordinary transport planes, like the C-130, as cruise missile launchers, basically as bombers, is no longer vaporware. 

This could vastly increase the capacity of the Air Force to deliver missiles and bombs, for example, in a hypothetical conflict like trying to sink ships invading Taiwan from mainland China, or in the early days of the Iraq War.

After The Honeymoon

So, we are a little more than ten weeks into Trump 2.0 and Trump's "honeymoon period" is pretty much over.

It was definitely a "shock and awe" approach that involved a manic frenzy of efforts to shut down already approved Congressional funds, shut down Congressionally established government agencies, lay off employees without a right to do so, unilaterally disavow collective bargaining agreements with unions that are already in place, to invoke wartime immigration laws when we aren't in a war, to use a law that his sister as a federal judge declared unconstitutional to revoke the visas of legal immigrants, to unconstitutionally claim that birthright citizenship doesn't apply to children of illegal immigrants, to give illegal access to government protected confidential data to Elon Musk who is illegally leading a department not authorized by Congress without Senate approval, and more and more and more.

He's basically declared war on Greenland (and by extension Denmark and NATO), Canada, and Panama. He's stupidly tried to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali mountain in Alaska. He's banned the Associated Press from White House press events.

Trump is trying to ban "DEI" in absurd ways not authorized by law in the federal government, among every school and college in the U.S., and by bullying private companies and law firms. He's stripped references to women and minorities from government websites. He is engaged in personal vendettas with large law firms that he has no right to launch. He has pardoned the January 6 criminals, many of whom have promptly gone out and committed more crimes or gotten themselves killed. He has taken Russia's side, to a great extent, in the Ukraine War (including a U.N. vote on the legality of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). He has launched a trade war with the entire world, violating a trade treaty with Mexico and Canada that he himself negotiated. He has disregarded at least two court orders pushing us into a constitutional crisis and is trying to invoke the "state secrets doctrine" where it does not apply to cover up one of those cases.

He has created havoc and greatly degraded the functioning of almost every federal government agency. His national security team has inadvertently leaked confidential attack plans to a journalist and one other person who wasn't supposed to have access.

Thirteen countries have issued travel advisories for the U.S., and interruptions of university grants and scientific grants and illegal revocation of student visas is irrevocably destroying long term scientific research projects, undermining a generation of scientists, and undermining the status of the U.S. as a leading provider of quality higher education.

Tesla, a major recipient of government funds, has seen its sales tank worldwide because Musk endorses Nazis and his Cybertruck's quality is awful, so bad that almost all of them have been recalled (the 8th recall so far for them) and its deaths per passenger mile are greater than the Ford Pinto. All of the world, Teslas and their dealers are the subject to protests and vandalism. Insurance companies won't insure Cybertrucks anymore. Musk himself has lost hundreds of billions of dollars of personal wealth as a result. Countries across the world are also ending contracts with his Starlink system. And, Musk's SpaceX company has had high profile exploding rocket failures. Trump made an illegal Tesla ad in front of the White House to bail out his "co-President."

The stock market is crashing. Lockheed Martin may be losing large numbers of F-35 sales now that Trump has changed geopolitical sides (over the opposition over even about 70% of Republicans as well as everyone else). American liquor companies are laying off workers because Canada has boycotted them. Farmers across the nation are in crisis as Trump's anti-immigrant efforts make headlines keeping people away from work and as funds for programs for them are frozen and tariffs are destroying their export sales and making things that they import more expensive.

While he had to withdraw a handful of appointments, almost all of his executive branch appointees who have faced Senate confirmation have been approved, including a great many who are patently unqualified to do their jobs and actively want to undermine the laws of the United States government that they are charged with carrying out.

Scores of lawsuits have been filed to enjoin his Executive Orders which are frequently unconstitutional or unauthorized by the relevant laws or contrary to existing laws. Many of those lawsuits have been successful at the preliminary stage.

Congress has been pretty passive. Republicans are mostly silent even though many do not like what Trump is doing, and Democrats have been largely ineffectual.

Trump's approval rates have fallen and are net negative and lower than any President other than himself in his first term at this point in his term of office. While Republicans still approve strongly of him, 46% of independents strongly disapprove of him and another 8-11% or so disapprove, but not "strongly." Democrats, of course, almost unanimously strongly disapprove.

One Democrat in a Pennsylvania special election won a seat that has been held by Republicans for decades by large margins. Two vacancy elections in Florida for Congressional seats saw the GOP margin of victory dramatically reduced. Despite dumping more than $20 million of Musk's personal funds and money from Musk companies into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, much of its for outright bribes to vote his way, his candidate lost to a liberal by about ten percentage points.

Needless to say, Trump, his press secretary, and his cabinet members are spewing absurd and outrageous lies with no foundation in the truth at all many times a day as justification for policies that make no sense.

At this point the questions are whether and to what extent the wildly destructive actions of Trump 2.0 can be stopped, and if so how, whether democratic government will continue in the United States, and if this eventually ends, what will it take to recover from and deal with all of the damage that Trump has done.

Trump has gone much farther than many of his supporters believed that he would. If free and fair Congressional elections are held in 2026, there is a good chance that the GOP could lose its thin majorities in the House and in the Senate, and its coalitions there are already starting to fray.

The Trouble With Tanks (Part 321)

The longest distance at which a tank has ever taken out another tank, in all of history is less than 3 miles (about 5 km), during the 1991 Gulf War by a British Challenger 1 tank.

The trouble is, that even in this cakewalk conflict, when anti-tank missiles were a lot less sophisticated, most tanks were destroyed by military resources other than tanks (like Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles, A-10 close air support aircraft, attack helicopters, ordinary fighter jets, and dismounted infantry with anti-tank weapons). Tanks are destroyed by weapons other than tanks about 95% or more in more recent conflicts. 

And, three miles is just not that long. The primary weapon of the main U.S. main battle tank, the M1 Abrams' M256 120-millimeter smoothbore gun, has a maximum effective range of between 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) and 4 kilometers (2.48 miles).

It is not difficult to make an anti-tank missile, or armed drone, or artillery system, however, with a range of much more than three miles, allowing the tank to be destroyed before the anti-tank force is within range of the tank's main gun.

But, if the tank's main gun is not the main way to address enemy tanks, what is it for?

The claim that it is necessary for bunker busting is unconvincing. 

It might be useful against ground vehicles other than tanks that don't have any anti-tank weapons of their own. But often, those vehicles are so much faster than a tank that it doesn't take long for the enemy ground vehicle to escape the range of the tank's main gun, and tanks aren't known for their superior stealth, allowing them to take an adversary within range by surprise.

Deaths of Despair

A March 23, 2017 post about the surging rate of death among non-Hispanic white men with no college education, goes a long way towards explaining what drove the political shift towards Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 in this voting block.

Another source from a 2020 paper notes that:

From 1992–94 to 2016–18, age-adjusted mortality for whites in the least educated 10% has risen by 69–112% for women and 47–67% for men (2.2–3.2% and 1.6–2.2% per year, respectively).

A published version of what seems to be the same article in 2022 states in its abstract that:

Measurements of mortality change among less educated Americans can be biased because the least educated groups (e.g., dropouts) become smaller and more negatively selected over time. We show that mortality changes at constant education percentiles can be bounded with minimal assumptions. Middle-age mortality increases among non-Hispanic Whites from 1992 to 2018 are driven almost entirely by the bottom 10 percent of the education distribution. Drivers of mortality change differ substantially across groups. Deaths of despair explain most of the mortality change among young non-Hispanic Whites, but less among older Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks. Our bounds are applicable in many other contexts. 

A 2022 NBER report looking at COVID deaths comes to basically the same conclusion. 

A 2024 NBER report expanded on this conclusion noting the importance of different smoking and obesity rates in less educated and more educated areas:

Equally educated people are healthier if they live in more educated places. Every 10 percent point increase in an area’s share of adults with a college degree is associated with a decline in all-cause mortality by 7%, controlling for individual education, demographics, and area characteristics. Area human capital is also associated with lower disease prevalence and improvements in self-reported health. The association between area education and health increased greatly between 1990 and 2010. Spatial sorting does not drive these externalities; there is little evidence that sicker people move disproportionately into less educated areas. Differences in health-related amenities, ranging from hospital quality to pollution, explain no more than 17% of the area human capital spillovers on health. 

Over half of the correlation between area human capital and health is a result of the correlation between area human capital and smoking and obesity. More educated areas have stricter regulations regarding smoking and more negative beliefs about smoking. These have translated over time into a population that smokes noticeably less and that is less obese, leading to increasing divergence in health outcomes by area education.

An October 14, 2024 report notes that:

We find mortality improvement has slowed across the population, with substantial heterogeneity across socio-demographic groups. Notably, working age mortality among high-school graduates rose by around 16% from 1996 to 2019 while working age White mortality had almost no net improvement over the period and rose by a little under 10% from 2010 to 2019. Meanwhile, working age Black and Hispanic mortality fell by nearly 25% and 20%, respectively, from 1996 to 2010, before stagnating.

We estimate that the COVID-19 pandemic increased overall mortality by around 20 percent in 2020 and 2021, with around a 40% increase in mortality among Hispanics adults and an over 25% increase in mortality among working age adults without any college education.

The reductions in black and Hispanic deaths coincide with falling crime rates, which disproportionately impacted black and Hispanic communities.

Ironically, reduced crime rates may have hurt the economic well-being of white men with no college education in relative terms now that they faced more competition from black and Hispanic men without college educations who were no longer in prison or gangs, and were instead part of the less skilled work force (even if they weren't worse off in absolute real income and unemployment rate terms).

Opioid overdose deaths finally leveled off during the Biden Administration (see also here) But this is still a demographic in crisis and Trump is responding to what they believe (mostly wrongly) is the source of their woes.

Life After Death

Belief in life after death is an interesting choice to compare religiosity. 

It is a belief shared by all of the widely adhered to religions in the region without being strictly tied to any one of them, and also captures residual metaphysical beliefs in contrast to metaphysical naturalism among people who are nominally non-religious and may have a problem with particular denominational or institutional religious structures but not with a somewhat religious worldview at a broad level.

The percentage of people believe in life after death considerably exceeds the percentage of people who regularly attend religious services or pray regularly. But it is below 50% in most of the historically predominantly Christian countries  of Europe, and just barely above 50% in several of the remaining ones in the face of a long term trend towards declining belief in an afterlife. Most of Europe is majority secular, or very nearly so. In the homelands of most of my ancestors, belief in an afterlife is less than 40%.

Related from a May 12, 2016 post:

* For the first time in Norwegian history, there are more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. 

* For the first time in British history, there are now more atheists and agnostics than believers in God. And church attendance rates in the UK are at an all-time low, with less than 2% of British men and women attending church on any given Sunday. 

* A recent survey found that 0% of Icelanders believe that God created the Earth. That’s correct: 0%. And whereas 20 years ago, 90% of Icelanders claimed to be religious, today less than 50% claim to be.

* Nearly 70% of the Dutch are not affiliated with any religion, and approximately 700 Protestant churches and over 1,000 Catholic churches are expected to close within the next few years throughout the Netherlands, due to low attendance.

* According to a recent Eurobarometer Poll, 19% of Spaniards, 24% of Danes, 26% of Slovenians, 27% of Germans and Belgians, 34% of Swedes, and 40% of the French, claim to not believe in “any sort of spirit, God, or life-force.” 

The Data

Belgium, Moldova, Ireland and Kosovo are omitted, presumably for a lack of statistically significant amounts of data. Vatican City is almost omitted but one presumes that this belief is near 100% among its couple thousand permanent residents.

Poland, Bosnia, and Turkey are the only countries on the map over 60%. 

The lowest rates are in Bulgaria (25%) and Albania (22.7%), presumably as legacies of communism in places where religious institutions didn't play a large role in their emergence as non-communist states, and where the juxtaposition of these states against their Muslim neighbors, made an emphasis on state imposed atheism more salient.

In Turkey this is due to an overwhelmingly Muslim population. In Bosnia, the 51% of the population that is Muslim brings up the average. Predominantly Muslim Kosovo is probably higher than the 65.9% of Bosnia, but due to its long membership of nominally secular communist Yugoslavia and a somewhat larger non-Muslim minority, is probably less than teh 91.8% of Turkey. 

Poland is predominantly Catholic and the only predominantly Christian country on the map over 60%. This makes sense as Catholicism played an important and recent role in its departure from its former Communist regime, less than half a century ago.

Below Poland, but above 50% are Iceland, Lithuania, Romania, Croatia, Switzerland, Austria, and Macedonia, with a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox adherents and a range of economic development and historical ties to the Western and Eastern economic blocks of the Cold War. And, more generally, there doesn't seem to be a strong Protestant, Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox skew to the likelihood of believing in life after death among Europeans in predominantly Christian countries. 

Belgium probably splits the difference between France (41.2%) and the Netherlands (34%) and is probably under 40%. 

Moldova probably splits the difference between Romania and Ukraine, which are also former Eastern block countries that were historically Eastern Orthodox, and is probably close to Romania than Ukraine and may be a bit over 50%.

I don't have a great intuition regarding where Ireland falls. It is probably under 60%, but probably higher than the U.K. (41.7%), as it is one of the more religious observant Christian countries in Europe, and Catholicism played a major role in sustaining Irish culture in the face of centuries of English rule in 1921 (now more than a century ago). It is probably in the high 40s or low 50s, percentage-wise.

Muslim v. Christian Approaches To Heresy

The very high rates in belief in life after death among Muslims is notable in light of a big difference in how Christianity and Islam have historically approached heresy at the individual level.

Christianity conceptualized heresy as an internal and subjective matter - not believing in the doctrinal truths of the established church.

Islam, in contrast, has focused on insisting that people outwardly comply with religious edicts concerning prayer, fasting, etc., without trying to punish or even really condemn people who are outwardly compliant with its demands even though subjectively, deep down, they have doubts or even outright don't believe in Islamic doctrines.

Yet, modern Islam has much higher rates of belief in the afterlife than modern European Christianity does, where the median rate of belief in the afterlife is probably half what it is among Muslims, if not a little lower.

Paces On The Path To Secular Humanism

Another possibility is that predominantly Islamic countries are simply on the same path towards secular humanism induced by modern scientific thinking and modern societal conditions as predominantly Christian countries, but are just less far along that path.

Many of the Islam driven doctrines and practices that are striking to us today in historically Christian countries, were once present in Christianity.

Witchcraft

Saudi Arabia is executing people for witchcraft now. Christians in Europe and North America were doing this into the 18th century. 

The last known execution for witchcraft in Europe was that of Anna Göldi in 1782 in Glarus, Switzerland, while in the British Isles, Janet Horne was the last person executed for witchcraft in 1727. The last known witchcraft trial in North America was held in Virginia in 1730, where a woman named Mary was convicted of using witchcraft to find lost items and sentenced to be whipped 39 times. There are still witchcraft persecutions (and lots of focus on fighting demons and exorcisms) among African Christians and animists.

Witchcraft prosecutions died, in part, because nobody believed that witchcraft was real any more.

Charging Interest

Islam prohibits the charging of interest now (although work around doctrines exist in Islamic finance to allow the equivalent of simple interest but not compound interest).

Interest was condemned not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also in the New Testament, in writings of the fathers of the Roman Catholic church during the Roman Empire, and by Luther and Calvin at least as late as the 16th century, although usury came to be redefined in Western Christianity as a bar only unfairly high interest rates and not charging interest at all, and became a minor issue for Christian clergy, with the established or formerly established Christian churches now relying on interest on their endowments to operate.

The gap in the focus on barring the charging of interest in the period between the Roman era and the Reformation, moreover, was as much due to the lack of banking activity entirely during the Middle Ages in Christendom, where feudalism prevailed, as it was due to a change in Christian religious doctrine in that time period, per se. 

Modesty

The Islamic world is known today for its greater expectations of modesty in how women dress, and its less equal treatment of women than in the modern Western world. But this too was recently a part of the Christian world, often with religious justification.

Certainly, there is a range of how this manifests within the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban impose absurdly strict modestly standards. American Muslims and Muslims in Southeast Asia, in contrast, are still more strict than modern Americans and Western Europeans, but are far less extreme than Saudi Arabians.

European and American styles of dress for women were common in Afghanistan and Iran in the 1970s, but this shift was rolled back in Islamic revolutions.

Still, Victorian England, and most predominantly Christian countries in that era, were similar in standards of female modesty to many Islamic countries today. In the early 19th century, women were still wearing swim wear that looked suspiciously similar to "burkinis" in Europe and the U.S. Women were still getting arrested and held in contempt of court for wearing pants in the United States, in the early 1900s. 

Not wearing a skirt or dress to school, even at the collegiate level, was something that women got in trouble for doing up to the early 1960s in the U.S., and skirts are still part of mandatory school uniforms for girls in Japan, much of Asia, and some places in the British Commonwealth.

Marriage

Polygamy and cousin marriage ended much sooner in countries that became Christian than it did in the Islamic world where it is still common in much of the Middle East, West Asia, South Asia, and Africa, although polygamy is banned in both Turkey and Tunisia as a matter of secular law and is quite rare in most Islamic countries. And, cousin marriage is not common in much of the Islamic world.

Polygamy has been very rare, outside the early Mormons in the 19th century and some small splinter Mormon sects after that, in places that have been predominantly Christian at the time, although tolerance for mistresses and concubines who are not Christian wives, instead of, or in addition to, Christian wives, has varied in European and Latin American history, and to a lesser extent until the early 19th century especially in places where slavery was permitted in North America and the Caribbean. Polygamy was at least as common as it is in modern polygamist countries in the Mediterranean world and Europe in the pagan era, and remains common today among animists in Africa.

In one exception to the trend, divorce has been allowed in Islam from the outset, while it was banned entirely until the 16th century, and was virtually non-existent in most Christian countries until the 19th century (with divorces generally only available from the legislature). Complete divorce bans for Christians existed in Ireland and Italy until a quite late date, and this is still the case in the Philippines.

Women's Rights

Mary Wollstonecraft was famously battling for women's rights in the U.K. and Europe in the 18th century. The Married Women's Property Acts that formally gave married women many private law rights and ended coverture law that absorbed women's private law personalities into their husbands were mostly passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is close to where women's rights in private law are today in many Islamic countries. Shi'ite Islamic communities have tended to be afford women greater rights than Sunni Islamic countries, although this may be more a matter of coincidence and local cultures and conditions than it is a matter of the doctrines of the religious sects, both of which vastly predate widespread democratic government.

Political Rights

The United States, at its independence in 1776, was one of the earliest and largest Republics since the fall of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire (although the Swiss, Iceland, and some city states had it earlier). 

Constitutional monarchies afforded considerable democratic rights to a fairly narrow franchise of middle aged property owning white men in the U.K., but the British monarch had real power into the 19th century as the franchise was expanded by fits and starts there.

The French Revolution in 1789 was another early experiment in democratic government without a monarch, but this revolution was not stable with some form on monarchy persisting intermittently until 1870.

Most European and Latin American constitutional monarchies and republics arose in the late 19th century. The modal year at which European colonies with mostly non-European residents gained their independence in Africa and Asia was 1960, in most cases with Western style Republican government followed not many years after by military coups and dictatorships and multiple false starts before stable democratic government was established.

Much of the Islamic world was subject to European colonial rule for a long time. But outright strong monarchies now persist predominantly in the oil rich states of the Islamic world, mostly in the Middle East and North Africa. Morocco and Jordan are fairly close to where the British constitutional monarchy was at the time of the American Revolution. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have shed their monarchs for a while, but still struggle to make those republics stable multi-party democracies. The Middle East, generally, is still playing out the final acts of the fall of the Ottoman Empire which was formally dissolved with country lines redrawn after World War I, at a time when most of Europe and Latin America has republics. But World War II hit the reset button on democratic government in almost all of continental Europe, leading to the organization of new democratic regimes with the demise of most of them under fascism during World War II.

Eastern Europe and much of Africa and some of Latin America has Soviet style communist regimes until the fall end of the Cold War around 1989, and in some cases beyond, with holdouts like Cuba and Venezuela, and the post-communist era in these countries have only sometimes yielded multi-party democratic republics, and those that did persist still often have a political culture marked by authoritarian tendencies.

Women's Right To Vote

In the U.S. women's right to vote came late. The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's right to vote at the national level was adopted only in 1920. Unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.

The U.S. was neither first nor last in the women's right to vote. New Zealand was the first country to allow a wide cross-section of women to vote in national elections in 1893, followed by Australia in 1902, Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913, and Denmark (including Iceland) in 1915. Many European countries followed in 1917 and 1918. But women in Switzerland obtained the right to vote at federal level in 1971, and at local cantonal level between 1959 and 1972, except for Appenzell in 1989/1990.

Women has the right to vote in national elections in Afghanistan's constitutional monarchy, a predominantly Islamic country then and now, from 1919 to 1929.

Relative to the time that Islamic countries have become democratic republics, in the places where they have, women have gained the right to vote, if anything, sooner than they did in predominantly Christian countries, often from the outset.

Some Favorite Aphorisms

Salad kills!

Saudi Arabia is not our friend.

People who think that demons are real are dangerous.

Dogs are for soup.

Christianity is what Christians believe and do.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

The best is the enemy of the good.

There is always sky above the sky.

Light a candle, don't curse the darkness.

We have the Microsoft of constitutions.

Religion thrives when it is tied to a threatened culture.

The smaller the government, the more incompetent it is.

Men in suits are more dangerous than muggers.

The March 2025 Threat Assessment

The U.S. intelligence community has come out with its Trump 2.0 threat assessment:

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) is the Intelligence Community’s (IC) official, coordinated evaluation of an array of threats to U.S. citizens, the Homeland, and U.S. interests in the world. A diverse set of foreign actors are targeting U.S. health and safety, critical infrastructure, industries, wealth, and government. State adversaries and their proxies are also trying to weaken and displace U.S. economic and military power in their regions and across the globe.

Both state and nonstate actors pose multiple immediate threats to the Homeland and U.S. national interests. Terrorist and transnational criminal organizations are directly threatening our citizens. Cartels are largely responsible for the more than 52,000 U.S. deaths from synthetic opioids in the 12 months ending in October 2024 and helped facilitate the nearly three million illegal migrant arrivals in 2024, straining resources and putting U.S. communities at risk. A range of cyber and intelligence actors are targeting our wealth, critical infrastructure, telecom, and media. 

Nonstate groups are often enabled, both directly and indirectly, by state actors, such as China and India as sources of precursors and equipment for drug traffickers. State adversaries have weapons that can strike U.S. territory, or disable vital U.S. systems in space, for coercive aims or actual war. These threats reinforce each other, creating a vastly more complex and dangerous security environment.

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security. They seek to challenge the United States and other countries through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, while also trying to avoid direct war. Growing cooperation between and among these adversaries is increasing their fortitude against the United States, the potential for hostilities with any one of them to draw in another, and pressure on other global actors to choose sides.

Naturally, it omits the biggest threat of all, which is the threat posed by the Trump Administration from within. Surprisingly, it manages to still keep Russia and North Korea on the threat list, despite Trump's inclination to join their side. The mention of cyber is notable given that the administration has tried to stand down U.S. defenses on that front. The inclusion of India on the threat list is concerning and probably unwarranted.