Elon Musk and the 80/20 Split

by

Eight weeks in to Trump 47 and the Left is in complete disarray.

As Insty and some others have pointed out, it seems that on every issue where the country is split 80/20 – like, say, trans-identifying men in women’s sports, or deporting illegal immigrant gang bangers – the Left unerringly picks the 20% side of the equation. That tells me as a group that they have lost their collective external framework of reality and are now acting reflexively. It’s like poking a drunken hobo with a stick, the hobo’s reaction is as predictable as it is mindless. The fact that it’s Trump holding the stick just makes it more amusing.

James Carville’s suggestion that the Democrats should just sit back a bit and let the Trump 47 Offensive run out of momentum is not only smart politics (never get in the way of a train), but it would force everyone on the Left to take a badly needed mental timeout. No such luck.

The fact that they have basically exiled Carville and now look to do the same with Schumer, the man who is the Left’s only elected power base left in DC, is just further validation that they are nuts.

Read more

Ouroboro-ed

by

The ouroboros was an ancient iconographic depicting a snake or a dragon biting on its own tail, and used to symbolize a mad variety of concepts in different cultures: birth, death, the continuity of life, disorder, yin and yang, infinity, circular reasoning, elements of alchemy … basically, a handy and interesting picture of some kind of circular concept. The notion of an organism busily munching down on its own substance also occurred to me on contemplating the likely movie disaster that will be the live-action version (with CGI-generated dwarves, so exactly how live-action is it, really?) of Disney’s Snow White. Which hotly-anticipated disaster is finally lumbering into the port of general release this week, where it is expected to crash into the dock and immolate. Not only may it likely crash and burn itself, but also the future career of Rachael Zegler … who might be able to sing and dance, but otherwise off-screen seems to have all the charm and tempting appeal of a liverwurst sandwich forgotten in the back of the employees’ break room refrigerator for a month or so.

Read more

This is Bad

by

As almost everyone knows, the Navajo Code Talkers were a group of WWII Marines who provided secure communications by the simple expedient of transmitting and receiving orders in their own language. This procedure was much faster than conventional encryption / decryption methods, and the Navajo language was apparently so little-known and so complex that the Japanese were never able to read such messages.

Someone at the Department of Defense (or more likely some set of someones) apparently interpreted President Trump’s executive order on DEI as meaning that it would be improper to refer to the Navajo Code Talkers as…Navajos, and at least 10 articles mentioning the Code Talkers have been removed from DoD websites.

There have been many other questionable deletions made on counter-DEI grounds, such as the deletion of items about Ira Hayes of Iwo Jima fame.  The Navajo Code Talkers deletions I find particularly bad because their being Navajo–specifically, being speakers of the Navajo language–was an inherent enabler of the work that they did.  To refer to their accomplishments without reference to their language (and hence, their tribal background) would be as silly as banning a post on codemakers and codebreakers of the more conventional sort from disclosing that many of them had mathematical or linguistic backgrounds.

I don’t know if this is malicious compliance, or arrant stupidity, or just robotic bureaucratic behavior, but I think it is really, really bad.  It reminds me of the Left’s destruction of statues.  It’s harmful to the country and also harmful to the political future of Republicans/MAGA. It’s not at all consistent with an intelligent narrative of American patriotism and identity.

Free Speech, Natural Rights and Mahmoud Khalil

by

Some thoughts regarding Mahmoud Khalil, the Green Card holder who is currently being held in detention by the Trump administration pending deportation.

First, Laughing Wolf wrote about Khalil being a planned op. I have similar thoughts that this was fishy given the way the various pieces fit together, and will note my suspicions at the end.

Given that the Khalil affair deals with free speech and citizenship, it applies pressure across several points within not only Trump’s coalition but his larger base of support in the country. Trump drew on a lot of defections from Democrats, Tech, and others regarding threats to civil liberties. Now you sense a hesitancy among some of his supporters.

Khalil’s case actually has two dimensions, freedom of speech and the status of citizenship in a society with accordant rights and responsibilities.

The American concept of “freedom of speech” is held to be a sacred right, though mostly in a confused way since it is viewed mostly as a constitutional right and almost exclusively as a process.

Read more

Manufacturing versus ‘High-Tech’….Really?

by

In yesterday’s WSJ, Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux predictably argue for free trade and against tariffs and say:

We are today taking actions to protect manufacturing jobs the same way we did with agriculture a century ago. In the process, we are imperiling our access to the world market in high-tech and AI, which are the economic future.

I have often seen this assertion of a polarity between manufacturing (old, boring, low growth and low margin) and ‘high tech’ (new, cool, high growth and super-profitable) and wonder what the writers think ‘high-tech’ exactly IS.

Would they consider Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (market capitalization $758B) as high-tech? It is certainly a manufacturing company!

How about ASML Holding NV (market cap $274B)?…this is the only company in the world that manufactures the Extreme Ultra Violet machines which are essential for making the highest-performance semiconductors.

Consider GE Aerospace, now trading as a separate company with a market cap of $206B. It may lack the Cool factor of the above two companies, but anyone who thinks that making jet engines doesn’t count as ‘high-tech’ should read this article: Why it’s so hard to build a jet engine at the Construction Physics substack.

The above examples are companies that sell business-to-business rather than to consumers.  For a business that sells to consumers, look at Tesla–there are many articles and videos available about this company’s innovations in manufacturing. (Here, for instance)

What, exactly, do Gramm and Boudreaux, and similar writers,  think ‘high-tech’ actually means?

Personally, I’m not particularly fond of the term, nor even of just ‘technology’ when used in a narrow and restrictive sense–I think it’s pretty odd to consider a company that sells some garden variety consumer product online (with sparkly AI algorithms!) as being ‘technology’ while excluding the making of jet engines (or power turbines) from that category.

One point that is not well enough understood: process innovation is as important as product innovation.  The manufacturing innovations of Matthew Boulton and John Wilkinson were as important for the success of the steam engine as were James Watt’s design innovations. In the case of the Model T Ford, the process innovations which allowed production at low and continuously-declining cost were perhaps even more important than the design of the car itself.

The idea of a polarity between ‘High-Tech’ and Manufacturing is unhelpful to clear thinking about policy.