Saturday, June 04, 2022

4: Abortion, Ukraine, Inflation

Wonking Out: How Low Must Inflation Go? , the politics of inflation are dominated by concerns about gasoline and food prices — precisely the prices over which policymakers in general, and the president in particular, have the least influence. ...... underlying inflation is running at something like 3.5 to 4 percent. ........ By 1984, and for the rest of the 1980s, the Fed felt comfortable about inflation because it was running at around only 4 percent .....

during Ronald Reagan’s second term, America’s underlying inflation rate was roughly what it is now

........ in 2010 Olivier Blanchard, then the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, made the case for an inflation target as high as 4 percent. I made similar arguments to the European Central Bank a bit later. ........ right now we face a different question: How much are we prepared to pay to get back to 2 percent? ........ if the Fed were to apply the standards that prevailed in the 1980s, it would consider the current rate of inflation acceptable and declare victory. Instead, it’s putting a squeeze on credit markets and risking at least a mild recession to get us down to 2 percent from 4 percent. Why? It’s not because there’s a compelling economic case. ......... They fear that if they ease off at, say, 3 percent inflation, markets and the public will wonder whether they will eventually accept 4 percent, then 5 percent and so on. ...... What we’re seeing instead is monetary policy driven by softer, vaguer concerns about credibility. We live in peculiar times.

I Created the F.B.I.’s Active Shooter Program. The Officers in Uvalde Did Not Follow Their Training. Last Monday, the F.B.I. designated 61 shootings in 2021 as active shooter attacks, up from 40 in 2020 and 30 in 2019. We aren’t preventing the shootings ..........

the 78 minutes that the police in Uvalde waited before confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary

........... In the first few years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, the F.B.I. spent more than $30 million to send agents to police departments around the country. The goal was to train local officers how to handle active shooters so they would know how to go after a shooter with confidence and neutralize the threat. ......... In the past two years, the Uvalde school district has hosted at least two active shooter trainings .......... Current protocol and best practices say officers must persistently pursue efforts to neutralize a shooter when a shooting is underway. This is true even if only one officer is present. This is without question the right approach. .......... We need to understand why that protocol was not followed in Uvalde. ........ Last year, active shooters killed 103 people and injured 140 others in 30 states. Five of those attacks were in Texas. Most of our more than 800,000 law enforcement officers in the United States are in small departments. ......... After Sandy Hook the federal government adopted the run, hide, fight model, which instructs students and teachers to run first if they can, then hide if they must and, finally, fight to survive.



The Coming Rage of the Money Hawks

Inflation in the United States has probably peaked.

......... there is a substantial group of economic commentators who always believe the Fed is printing too much money. They believed this during the depths of the Great Depression; they believed this in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

No One Can Hide From This Weapon in the War in Ukraine All wars have their iconic weapons, from the AK-47 to the I.E.D. In Ukraine, it’s the drone. ........ Drone operators are the new snipers, even though they are often miles from the battlefield. ........ the video, which was shared on Twitter late last month by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian government. ......... In Ukraine, drones have brought international audiences right up to the front lines, documenting the destruction of cities and capturing footage of attacks against Russian ships and tanks, men and matériel. This mix of off-the-shelf drones and their larger military-grade brethren has experts watching the conflict closely and pondering what it means for future wars. .......... In Ukraine, winning and holding international support is as critical to the war effort as battlefield victories, which makes information operations vital. “These machines — in conjunction with social media and the internet — give a virtual panopticon of the conflict” ........... Drones are attractive to armies because they deliver one of the most costly and complex aspects of warfare — aerial operations — on the cheap. ........ Unmanned aerial vehicles have been used in Ukraine to surveil enemy troops and attack them with small explosives or in kamikaze attacks. They’ve been used to document the vast destruction that Russian artillery has inflicted on cities like Mariupol. They’ve captured what is said to be the execution of civilians. A drone may have been used to distract the Russian flagship Moskva while two missiles screamed in to sink it. ............. A wide range of drones has helped the Ukrainian Army punch above its weight on the battlefield, and the footage of attacks against ships and troops, tanks and helicopters has given Ukraine an easily shareable stream of videos for the global information war. ............... Drones carry their own moral hazards ....... “What a video surveillance can reveal is that a target was hit or not hit,” Dr. Kaag said. “What it can never reveal is the legitimacy of that particular target.” ............. drone operators are also vulnerable to the moral injury and post-traumatic stress that can affect troops on the ground. ............. It’s easy to cheer the destruction of yet another Russian tank and forget that the crew members being incinerated in the dramatic explosion are someone’s sons, possibly conscripted into a conflict beyond their control. ............... Misinformation is its own currency in war. .......... for a short time, the United States was essentially the world’s lone drone superpower. ........... rebels in Yemen launching attacks against Saudi infrastructure. ....... the clash between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, where Azerbaijani drones destroyed hundreds of Armenian tanks, munitions and armored vehicles. ......... a crowdfunding campaign by the Ukrainian government that solicited donations of commercial drones and sought people with skills to fly them. ........ Drone warfare is pushing human pilots to the side. Some next-generation military drones rely on artificial intelligence to circle over an area, pick out enemy units and destroy them. In the coming years, drone technology will improve, and the cost of drones will decline. As they do,

the frightening truth is that troops and civilians in future conflicts will find fewer and fewer places to hide from the gaze of both man and machine

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MATH 101: How to Get Better Introductions The best way to get that introduction? The forwardable email.





What Roe Did The question of abortion rights will re-enter the realm of electoral politics in a way it hasn’t for 50 years. ...... she argues for a “dignitarian feminism.” Bachiochi embraces women’s gains in professional and civic life but holds that techno-pharmacological birth control, the sexual revolution and the legalization of abortion have created a sexual and family culture that has ultimately been devastating to women’s well-being. ........ the post-Roe playbook for some Republicans: tighter abortion restrictions combined with a robust slate of family policies — some of which would be even bolder than the Biden administration’s proposals to date. ......... why the “gender revolution” has stalled; her belief that market logic has come to dominate our understandings of family, parenting, sex and feminism; her critique of modern “hookup” culture; and her pro-family economic agenda ........ whether it’s realistic to encourage the use of natural fertility regulation over hormonal contraception, how abortion relates to single motherhood and poverty, whether stricter abortion laws might benefit or hurt poor women, what role the law should play in teaching moral behavior, whether progressives have become too “Lockean” in their understanding of bodily autonomy, whether the sexual revolution gave people too much choice

6 Takeaways About Haiti’s Reparations to France How did the modern world’s most successful slave revolt give birth to a desperately poor nation? ......... A failed state. An aid trap. A land seemingly cursed by nature and human nature alike. When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement. ........

Haitians overthrew their notoriously brutal French slave masters and declared independence in 1804 — the modern world’s first nation born of a slave revolt.

......... two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war. .......... For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy. ...........

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