Happy Friday, folks.
It’s a somber Friday for me and a lot of my friends. We lost a classmate this week, apparently from complications arising from the flu, and that is not an easy thing. I didn’t know Jimmy particularly well, and it feels like a real shame because he was obviously a great guy. Many, many of the memorials from those close to him have mentioned his ready sense of humor and easy smile. Those things can be rare commodities in the daily grind at West Point, and sometimes, they are the only things that help you stay sane. Guys like that are often the most important people in your class. The guys who can make you laugh amidst all that stress, those are the guys that you never forget.
Jimmy was a former Army Football defensive back, a doting father, and a successful grad in everyday life. He was clearly in excellent physical condition as well, so his passing will have hit his family completely out of nowhere. I hate that. I feel it like a physical blow. His family noted in their announcement that he had chosen to be an organ donor, so someone else will live because of Jimmy. That is cold comfort, but it speaks to the man’s character.
Well done, Jimmy. Be thou at peace.
My friend Joe ran a beautiful tribute to Jimmy over on A Hoosier on the Potomac. He decided to run that as his only post this week. I get why he did it, but writing for me has always been about clarifying my own feelings. I write because I enjoy writing. So, as I have done after other tragedies, I decided to run a regular week’s worth of posts, and if you’re looking for something to take your mind off of stuff, hopefully you’ve found that here.
If not, well, I apologize. It's been a tough week for all of us.
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1. Has Trumphoria Finally Hit a Wall? (NY Times)
Again, this is all good news. But it does mean that future U.S. growth can’t come from putting the unemployed back to work. It has to come either from growth in the pool of potential workers or from rising productivity, that is, more output per worker.
Krugman goes on to talk quite a bit about capital asset valuations, and he’s right that they may very well be too high. With interest rates low, taxes nonexistent, and inflation serving as little more than a figment of the imagination for the past three decades, there has been a lot of money out there chasing very little in the way of returns over a very long period of time. That’s rarely good.
But where Krugman sees a bubble, I personally think what we’re seeing is a good old-fashioned return to the norm. Which is to say that we’veseen inflation, but it’s been capital asset inflation1 and therefore not inflation that can be measured by traditional metrics. Now, however, wages are rising—at exactly the same time that immigration has curtailed and a would-be trade war looms—so the floodgates are open to allow traditionalconsumer price inflation back into the domestic economy.
Granted, a return to basically normal consumer price inflation is not necessarily a disaster. This is especially true if it means that wage growth continues. Hopefully it will also drain some of the stupidity out of the capital asset markets. Nevertheless, the event itself shows how dumb it was overall to pass massive tax cuts in the midst of a strongly growing economy. Not only does this actually spur consumer price inflation by putting more money onto the street at exactly the wrong time, it also—once again—leaves monetary policy as the last and only tool with which we can attempt to manage the current economy in the event of future bad news.
Better tax policy could have moderated growth, thereby holding inflation in check while funding at least part of a rebuild of our basic national infrastructure. Instead, we hit the accelerator--and perhaps drove the capital markets off a cliff. Alas, that’s par for the course from a party that prides itself on ignoring education, facts, and any sort of legitimate specialized expertise.
Kim Yo Jong's inclusion in the North Korean delegation is likely to irritate the United States, which has sent its own delegation led by Vice President Mike Pence to counter North Korea's charm offensive.
Last year, the US Treasury Department included Kim Yo Jong on its list of blacklisted officials. As the vice director of the Workers' Party Propaganda and Agitation Department, she has been targeted by US sanctions…
"We're traveling to the Olympics to make sure that North Korea doesn't use the powerful symbolism and the backdrop of the Winter Olympics to paper over the truth about their regime," Pence said.
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| I feel like this might be a job for Dennis Rodman. No? |
Seriously, though, this is a potentially fascinating test of basic diplomatic competence for our sitting VP. If he can’t win the world over against Kim’s baby sister, he will have an awful lot to answer for once he gets back home.
[A] live-action TV series was in development and would debut on Disney's upcoming digital streaming service. No other details – like which talents might be involved or what the plot might be – have been unveiled so far.
But we did get an intriguing update in February 2018, when Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors that they were working on not one, but "a few" different shows. There's still no word on who's on board or what any of them about, though Iger promised they were "close" to making a reveal.
This is in addition to the announced Rian Johnson trilogy and the new series—for an unknown number of films—from the guys behind the HBO adaptationGame of Thrones.
My prediction is that at least half of this stuff falls through. If not, it seems very likely that the Star Wars TV universe will get watered down in much the same way that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has been great on the big screen but a decidedly mixed bag in terms of television. I can live with that, but I also think that at least part of the allure of Star Wars has been its live-action rarity in popular culture. Flooding the market with even marginally inferior product strikes me as a decidedly risky gambit.
The truth is, McDaniels, 41, has been vacillating on this decision throughout the interview process, ever since meeting with the Colts on wild-card weekend. It is the reason a second meeting with Colts officials and team owner Jim Irsay was held. McDaniels was trying to get comfortable with the idea of taking his family out of New England and moving to Indianapolis, sources said...
McDaniels had emphasized to the Colts that he would need time to mull the decision and discuss it with his family. The more [he] reflected on potentially having the opportunity to coach the Colts, the more it did not feel right... McDaniels still would like to become a head coach again, but this time, in this instance, he was not comfortable.
Schadenfreude for Titans fans, I suppose, but I hate it for the Colts. Ouch!
5. 2018 Signing Day (Army Football Insider)
Monken said if Army targeted one area in this class more than any other, “it was probably receiver. Our lines are a little bit shorter at receiver. I think we have some good young guys in the program but we wanted to make sure we took care of our numbers and hopefully, we got some guys that can help us. We’ll find out here in a couple years as they go through and develop.”
It’s long been the policy of this blog not to discuss recruits by name until after they finish Beast Barracks, but in general, this looks to be a bigger class than some others we’ve seen in recent years, and there are more 2- and 3-star players than I remember seeing in previous years.
That said, some of Army’s better players in the past few years have come in unheralded and succeeded through sheer force of effort. So yeah, y’know, you can’t teach size. However, I still think effort counts more at the collegiate level, and Army’s lucky in that respect in that they can afford to give a lot of guys a chance to compete and play the ones who put in the work, regardless of where or how they were recruited.
1. i.e. Stock and housing prices.
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