Rivals and Borrowers

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein podcast from last week was devoted to a somewhat panicky discussion of an allegedly impending "China Shock 2.0." 

As Klein and his guest describe it, China is poised to overtake the rest of the world not only in the manufacturing of cheap consumer goods of the sort we associate with the first "China Shock"—but in the industrial production of just about everything else—including the most important "technologies of the future"—EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels—maybe AI and humanoid robots too, to give the more headline-grabbing examples? 

Debt Crisis

 The New York Times ran an opinion piece today hinting at an outside-the-box solution to the problem of our swelling national debt (which notoriously passed the $40 trillion mark this past week): namely, simply cancel it. Refuse to pay. 

The piece points out that ancient civilizations did this all the time. In fact, many of them built some sort of periodic debt jubilee into their calendars. 

Who Cares? It is French!

 There is much that is baffling about Trump's needless unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, and quondam ally Canada. But perhaps the strangest point yet to emerge is the specific issue over which trade negotiations apparently broke down. 

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared yesterday that he was walking away from trade talks, he said that U.S. negotiators were insisting on concessions that were simply too extreme to be considered, and would implicate fundamental principles of sovereignty. 

A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

17,000 Bombs

 The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran. 

But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year. 

Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

Bloodline Punishment

 The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.

And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.