According to a story from Взгляд:

С начала 2010 года в Москве зарегистрировано рождений детей почти на 10% больше, чем в первом полугодии 2009 года.

«По итогам первого полугодия в Москве зарегистрировано 60 050 рождений, что на 4 576 больше по сравнению с тем же периодом прошлого года», – сообщила Муравьева…

Кроме того, она сообщила, что в первом полугодии 2010 года в столице зарегистрировано 59 тыс. 133 акта о смерти, что на 2 тыс. меньше, чем за аналогичный период прошлого года.

From the begnning 0f 2010, the number of registered births in Moscow is almost 10% greater than in the first half of 2010.

“Over the course of the first half of the year in Moscow 60,050 births were registered, which is 4,576 more in comparison with the same period last year” said Muravyeva.

Moreover she said that in the first half of 2010 59,133 deaths were registered in the capital, which is 2,000 less than in the same period of last year.

Now obviously Russia is very large country and many sections of it are still in the grips of what one can only call demographic free fall. I am not arguing that simply because Moscow’s population has started to grow (at a glacial pace) that everything is AOK in Russia. But doesn’t the fact that the capital city has achieved population stabilization seem noteworthy? Isn’t it good news that Muscovites feel confident enough about the future that they are willing to have increasing number of children? Isn’t it also good news that they are dying less frequently and living longer? And might these generally positive tendencies (people are more confident and optimistic, fewer people are dying, and people are living longer)  also explain some of the popularity of the current regime?

Any bets for when The Economist or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty produces a special report on the rapid improvement in Russian demographic indicators? Anyone? Bueller?

From his piece today in the Wall Street Journal

Until JournoList came along, liberal journalists were rarely part of a team. Neither are conservative journalists today, so far as I know. If there’s a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I’ve never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.

If you believe that, if you believe that the co-editor of The Weekly Standard, one of the most unrelentingly partisan outlets in existence, has “never” been part of any discussions about how to help the Republican party, then you deserve to have a political class that is as lying, corrupt, venal, and degenerate as our own.

Fred Barnes should have been laughed out the door when he tried to sneak in such a ridiculous and totally implausible lie. That its editors allowed such a sentence to appear in an op-ed tells you everything you need to know about the Wall Street Journal and its (non-existent) journalistic standards.

Our current print media cannot die fast enough.

I just finished reading a preposterous little article by Dan Blumenthal of the always-wrong AEI that purports to explain how China’s soft power has ”passed from the scene in short order.” Ignoring, for a moment, that Blumenthal’s contention is farcical and totally unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, I want to focus on one small part of his “article” that I found particularly entertaining. Blumenthal plaintively asks his readers:

Why are the Chinese coming out swinging now?

What evidence does Blumental provide that the Chinese are “coming out swinging?” I’m glad you asked! Well um, apparently the Chinese didn’t invite Robert Gates to come Beijing. That stinks, man, I heard all of the cool secretaries of defense are going to Beijing for a giant keg party. Anatoly Serdyukov told me he’s going to drink everyone under the table, and then, once everyone is good and ripped, he’s going to call Robert Gates and ask him when he’s coming and he’ll say “but I wasn’t invited was I?” and they’ll respond “Oh that’s right the Chinese wanted me to tell you that they didn’t invite you because you’re a l-o-s-e-r.”

Blumenthal’s second piece of evidence is the fact that the Chinese have officially designated the South China sea a “core interest,” which is totally crazy because, as anyone who has studied China knows, the South China see is not in the slightest bit relevant to core Chinese security and economic interests. In fact we shouldn’t even call it the South China Sea, since that’s just appeasing Chinese chauvinism and militarism! I’m going to start calling it “Freedom Ocean” and I invite all right-thinking people to join me. Luckily, though, and finally taking advice from their American friends, the Chinese have decided that South African weapons of mass destruction are a clear and present danger and are right this second preparing an invasion. I predict their total victory in 5-6 Friedman units.

Thirdly, in Blumentha’s telling of their rank aggression, the Chinese have also refused ”to so much as condemn the North Koreans for killing 46 South Koreans sailors in cold blood.” I would say that refusing to do something is an entirely passive, not active, response, but then I suppose my understanding of activity/inactivity is different than Mr. Blumenthals. Before continuing further I’m going to need to catch my breath, as the strenuous activity of sitting at my desk is really wearing me out today!

So, to summarize, Blumenthal’s “proof” that the Chinese have “come out swinging” against the Obama administration is an inconsequential diplomatic snub, something completely banal, and inactivity. Doesn’t exactly compare to invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, does it?

The complete and utter inability of neocons to place themselves in another person’s or country’s shoes is endlessly entertaining, and laid quite bare in this particular instance because of Blumentha’s unusually transparent hackishness. Can you imagine what Blumenthal would say if, like America, China led a globe-straddling military alliance? If it had over 700 military bases worldwide? If it had invaded and occupied two countries in the past 10 years, and had threatened to go to war with numerous others? If it had declared that its military forces had the right to target “terrorists” with lethal military force in any place, at any time? If its military budget exceeded the military budgets of all other countries (including a huge number of allies) put together.

What sort of verbiage would have to be employed then? If not doing anything can be portrayed as “coming out swinging” and “acting like a schoolyard bully” how does one describe aggressive warfare?

He probably didn't fight for freedom and he DEFINITELY didn't know how to run a bureaucracy

I’m generally a pretty cynical and sarcastic person who understands that humans are capable of essentially limitless mendacity, stupidity, and  cruelty: it takes quite a lot to shock me. One of the few things in graduate school that I really had a hard time comprehending, in fact something that I might still not truly comprehend, came up in my class on Soviet defense when we were talking about the military spending burden: the Soviet leadership did not know how much the country spent on national defense.

 Oh sure the Politburo had a rough idea of military spending (“a lot!!!”) and, yes, somewhere there was a “budget” that had some notional (and ludicrously inaccurate) number of rubles assigned to it, but due to pervasive secrecy, the needless over-compartmentalization of information, and, more than anything else, the distorting effects of non-market price signals* it was literally impossible to work out the exact budget of the Soviet armed forces. The greatest deal of specificity that anyone has ever been able to arrive at are estimates within a range of +/- 3% of GDP which, when you stop to think about it, is not very specific at all (as a hackish example imagine if, in the United States, the government could only say ”Federal spending is somewhere between 34 and 40% of GDP). For comparison’s sake the entire Soviet healthcare budget was roughly 2.5% of GDP, which means that the margin of error for defense spending was greater than the entire budget spent caring for the health of Soviet citizens; that is what it means to be a “low priority” sector in a command economy.

What got me started on this rant was Glenn Greenwald’s typically excellent analysis of an atypically excellent Washington Post report on the terrifying expansion of the national security apparatus, particularly the massive and unprecedented use of contractors for core national security functions. Greenwald highlighted a passage from the Post  that should have any genuinley patriotic and/or freedom loving Americans quivering in fear or making plans to move to Canada (emphasis added):

Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal employees: The government doesn’t know how many are on the federal payroll. Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13 percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he’s having a hard time even getting a basic head count.

“This is a terrible confession,” he said. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” referring to the department’s civilian leadership.

 Just take a step back and think about that for a second. Since 9/11 the US Federal government has spent trillions of dollars and fought numerous wars that have killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people all in order to “keep Americans safe.” Yet that same government literally cannot say how many people it is employing in this effort (which is very clearly its highest-priority): it does not actually know how many people are being given taxpayer dollars to find and destroy terrorists.

The problem cuts far deeper than a simple failure in human resources management which could, presumably, be rectified by some deck-chair reshuffling and investment in IT infrastructure.  As part one of the Post series noted (emphasis, as always, added):

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Now as I tried to make clear in my brief, superficial, and utterly hackish overview of the problems associated with the Soviet economic system, the United States cannot be straightforwardly compared to the Soviet Union because, at the end of the day, its costs (while massive) can actually be accounted for: since the Federal government purchases goods and services in the confines of a market economy, and since prices are more or less freely determined by participants in the market, one can say with a fair degree of precision how much it is spending.** 

That being said, the parallels between the bloated Soviet defense sector and the bloated US national security state are obvious, striking, and terrifying. Note the overabundance of information, the massive resource expenditure, the pervasive secrecy (even people who had been through the most rigorous and extensive security screening the government can muster were not allowed to take notes during briefings, which reminds me of how during negotiations over the original START treaty the Soviet military delegation made the Soviet diplomatic delegation leave the room because they ”weren’t allowed” to hear any of the technical specifications of Soviet missiles ), the extreme redundancy, and the remorseless compartmentalization of vital data. As Matthew Yglesias, among others, has noted this is a pretty horrific way to run an organization and the only sure way to reform the damned thing is through the one avenue that it will absolutely never accept: by limiting secrecy and opening up information flows.  

 One can always overdo historical comparisons, people probably started making inflated comparisons to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire while the ashes of the forum were still smouldering, but it is, to say the least, very dismaying to see large parts of the US government become every bit as inefficient, compartmentalized, and opaque as the Soviet Union. Now since the US is a vastly wealthier, more democratic, and more liberal society than the Soviet Union, and since it spends a significantly smaller portion of its national income on the military, there are reasons to hope that things can be salvaged before they truly get out of hand. However the utter indifference of the American public to the sweeping expansions in state power seen over the past decade, and the complete lack of public protest at the fact that the defense budget will continue to grow as virtually all other sectors are subject to freezes and or cuts, suggest that it will take quite a lot to rouse them from their slumber.  

*Since the Soviet economy was command-administrative in nature there were no market prices. Thus it was practically impossible to work out what things “really” cost because resources were allocated by government fiat. “Rubles” were simply accounting devices, not a real currency, because they could only buy goods approved and distributed by the state planning authorities. Thus, because it enjoyed high priority, a defense industrial enterprise could use, say, 1,000 rubles to “buy” 2 tonnes of steel, but a construction firm building a, low-priority, hospital might have to pay 2,000, 3,000, or even 7,000 rubles to buy the exact same steel or, more likely, and in the unlikely event that there was actually any steel left after all the defense and heavy industries had taken their share ,  to buy steel of a noticeably inferior and defective quality. Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but market prices are an absolute prerequisite if a society is to avoid massive and potentially catostrophic misallocations of capital.

** Another major difference between the United States and the Soviet Union, one that I cannot hope to cover in any sort of depth within the confines of a single blog post, is the role played by Communist Party organs which were constructed in parallel with state organs and expressly tasked with “monitoring” (controlling) their work. Thankfully the United States has no equivalent to these (we don’t have a Republican or Democratic Party-run intelligence agency whose only job is to monitor the CIA) though give the absurd redundancies of the intelligence community our system probably isn’t a great deal more efficient.

The other day at the Corner Jonah Goldberg wrote:

The Soviet Union was deeply racist. If memory serves, white Russian women received “Hero of the Motherland” awards — and subsidies — or some such if they bore enough children. They didn’t give such prizes to the more Asiatic races in the supposedly race-blind Soviet Union.

Except that they did. They definitely did. Without any shadow of a doubt they did (pg 9). That took me 3 minutes worth of Googling, so it’s not exactly like I had to plumb the depths of the Kremlin archives, or that I fancy myself particularly intelligent, though I was surely assisted in my efforts due to the fact that I distinctly remembered having once seen a big picture of a Turkmen “hero mother,” one who was certainly “Asiatic,” in one of my undergraduate history textbooks.

There’s a reason that the party leaderships of the various Central Asian states didn’t initially support the breakup of the USSR, and it wasn’t because the Politburo and Central Commitee could be easily confused for the KKK. Now of course Soviet society, or to be particular the Slavic parts of it (the Central Asians weren’t very racist against themselves!), was, in many ways, deeply, disgustingly, and primitively racist, and Russian society, like most East European societies, remains very racist to this day. I suspect that this is almost entirely explained not by communist ideology but by the Soviet Union’s largely closed borders and the almost total lack of external immigration, but that’s a debate for another day.

The point is that pretending that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a straightforwardly and cartoonishly racist outfit, one that felt perfectly comfortable explicitly discriminating in favor of  “whites” is, quite simply, a lie.* What’s more its a lie that is easily disproven and one that would be instantly recognized by someone who knows anything about Soviet history.

I’m not going to get too long-winded here, few people really care, but anyone familiar with the breakup of the Soviet Union will know that  korenizatsia, a word which derives from the Russian word for “root” and which denotes a process by which members of a republic’s titular nationality (i.e. Kazakhs in Kazakhstan) were systematically groomed for advancement and leadership in the party organs, was absolutely vital, and maybe even the most important single factor. In fact one of the major (and accurate!) complaints of anti-Soviet Russian nationalists was that the Soviet government constantly discriminated against ethnic Russians living in the other Union Republics, who were usually much better educated and qualified than local population, obsessed as it was with promoting Kazakhs, Kirgiz, Turkmen, and others. This is why a non-trivial percentage (I remember professor Martin saying it was something like 50%, but I fully admit this may be way off) of ethnic Russians born in Union Republics chose, as was their right, to have the titular nationality placed on their passport: as a general rule it was far easier to get a spot in a good university, or a plum job in the state administration, as an Uzbek than it was as an ethnic Russian living in Uzbekistan.

In fact what my dear friend Jonah should be attacking is the Soviet Union’s embrace of affirmative action on behalf of Central Asian minorities. Yes, you read that right folks, the Soviets backed affirmative action! In fact, they were the first to do so, all the way back in the 1920s! This issue certainly isn’t my wheelhouse (though I know that Terry Martin, whose brilliance was surely wasted on your humble author, has done some good work on it if anyone cares enough to want to read more) but the Soviet state’s explicit embrace of positive discrimination surely presents a far jucier target for a movement conservative than it’s (non-existant)  crusade on behalf of white fertility.