Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 492

More Syrians Try to Flee as Aleppo Fight Looms

A wave of Russian bombing attacks on the outskirts of Aleppo allowed the Syrian regime to start to encircle the city—the last major rebel stronghold in Syria—and sent tens of thousands of Syrians streaming to the Turkish border this weekend. But the way out was shut: Under the terms of the Turkish-EU refugee agreement, Turkey is now only admitting Syrians who have a visa to enter.

But there’s a limit to how long the Turkish government will tolerate a humanitarian disaster among Sunni Muslims to pile up at its doorstep. As the AFP reports:

“Turkey has reached the limit of its capacity to absorb the refugees,” Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told CNN Turk television.

“But in the end, these people have nowhere else to go. Either they will die beneath the bombings… or we will open our borders.”[. . .]

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan [. . .] has warned that Turkey is “under threat” from the refugee tide but said that “if necessary, we have to, and will, let our brothers in”.

And there are limits, too, to Europe’s leverage—as German Chancellor Angela Merkel found out on a “last ditch” trip to Ankara on Monday, from which she returned empty-handed. The optics of having unnamed EU diplomats saying that this particular crisis is a “litmus test” for Turkey’s seriousness about the migrant deal are terrible; so too is the option of continuing to let refugees and migrants stream unchecked into a continent and country whose people, increasingly, are just not having it anymore. And, as we have been saying all along, the elephant in the room is that even if Turkey wanted to hold up its end of the bargain, it doesn’t control enough of its borders with Syria and with the Mediterranean to do so. Those Syrians fleeing the latest developments might not be able to get over easily, but in general, Turkey can’t stop the migrant flow.

So Merkel has been reaching for increasingly either ridiculous options—such as a proposal that “echoes” a plan to ferry Syrians who land in Greece back to Turkey, process them, and then fly a small number directly to Germany and other European nations—or muscular but difficult ones, such as asking NATO, on short notice, to assist in policing the Greek border. Meanwhile, Mrs. Merkel makes statements that she’s “not only shocked, but horrified” and pleads with the Russians to respect UN resolutions concerning Syrian civilians. All of which ultimately underlines the reality that, as Germany has no plans to change the facts on the ground in Syria, Berlin is ultimately holding the short end of the stick.The two big winners of this crisis are Bashar Assad and Vladmir Putin. From Assad’s point of view, the mass flight of Sunni Syrians would be a good thing, making it easier for him to reestablish his rule in Syria if he takes Aleppo. And Putin is no fool: He can see how the refugee crisis is destabilizing Europe in general, and the authority of Mrs. Merkel in particular. This morning, the head of the Bundestag’s Committee on Foreign Relations speculated openly that Mr. Putin was inflaming the refugee crisis in Aleppo deliberately to topple the Chancellor. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds: Certainly, the Kremlin’s disinformation programs have been riling up Germany’s domestic debate (not that it needs much help there, after Cologne), and Putin must have been aware of the strategic value of the refugees since he first entered Syria.The what-ifs here are tantalizing. Chief among them: What if the United States, or our European allies, had recognized sooner how serious the repercussions of leaving Syria to burn and letting Russia get involved would be? But in the real world, Mrs. Merkel and the West as a whole are now faced with a series of unpleasant choices going forward. Likely, clear leadership from Washington will be needed under the next Administration to resolve this crisis.

Flint’s Not the Only City with a Water Problem

Turns out Flint is not alone; other cities are delivering hazardous amounts of lead to those who use city water systems. The NYT reports:

Unsafe levels of lead have turned up in tap water in city after city — in Durham and Greenville, N.C., in 2006; in Columbia, S.C., in 2005; and last July in Jackson, Miss., where officials waited six months to disclose the contamination — as well as in scores of other places in recent years.

Federal officials and many scientists agree that most of the nation’s 53,000 community water systems provide safe drinking water. But such episodes are unsettling reminders of what experts say are holes in the safety net of rules and procedures intended to keep water not just lead-free, but free of all poisons.

It’s not rocket science to know whether your water supply is safe, and it’s not rocket science to fix old and unsafe pipes. So why are there U.S. cities and towns that are flubbing one of their most basic, obvious responsibilities in such a catastrophic fashion? There are several reasons.

One: bad spending priorities. Nobody wants to spend money on unglamorous things like water pipes. Teacher unions, sanitation worker unions, fire fighters, and police all want raises — or, failing that, big pensions. Politicians who offer huge tax subsidies and rebates to lure companies into town or to build a sports stadium get headlines; politicians who say no to all these glamorous headline-creating opportunities because they insist on getting the real work done first have a way of not getting re-elected.Two: bad governance. In many cities, government is still run by political machines, most of which happen to be Democratic machines. Entrenched local political establishments, however, reward loyalty, not competence. They see city jobs as a way to pay back favors and to keep the patronage system running rather than as a means of giving critical, life-and-death responsibilities to the most qualified people they can find.There’s also an attitude problem when it comes to poor governance. A lot of people are just plain slothful and don’t think hard or seriously about whether the basic services on which their city depends are in any way at risk. And in declining cities like Flint and Detroit, a sense of inevitable doom and failure can take hold. This attitude says that nothing is going to work, the problems can’t be solved, and there is no way to afford all the things the city really needs. So why not coast along as smoothly as possible for as long as possible? You can’t fix the problem, so you kick the can down the road. . . until, one day, you can’t.Three: a bailout mentality. This mentality holds that when things go wrong, some other “they” will take care of things — the state, the federal government. Feeling that there is a backstop in place should a crisis materialize has clearly encouraged and enabled reckless behavior on the part of municipal officials all over this country.Four: what C.S. Lewis’s character Screwtape called “the horror and neglect of the obvious.” People love innovation and new ideas. City officials are constantly talking about exciting new projects and about taking on new responsibilities—even though they have yet to master the really important responsibilities they already have. When the water pipes aren’t safe, you probably shouldn’t be launching some kind of complicated zero-carbon initiative. When the public schools are failing and you’ve got near-unemployable, semi-literate teens pouring out of your schools, this may not be time to make an Olympic bid that will chew up the city’s resources and disposable income for years to come.Many of these fancy and attractive new missions have real logic behind them and address real human needs. The advocates of various cool and glitzy schemes always make the argument that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. But in many cities, when it comes to many of the basic necessities of urban life, we can’t walk—or at least we aren’t. The principle needs to be: Walk first, then think about whether it’s time to chew gum. Get the water safe, fix the bridges, get the pension program on a long-term sustainable path, get the schools into shape, train the police: Then go for the shiny, dazzling, cool new projects. Any other approach manifests cold indifference to the needs of the poor, those who have no choice but to drink city water and go to city schools.The Baby Boom generation has let the country down in many ways; the systematic neglect of the basic and necessary services of national life in the pursuit of visionary goals is turning out to be one of the most costly.

High Rents Squeeze the Young

The always-interesting Joel Kotkin is out with a new essay exploring the implications of skyrocketing housing costs—especially in coastal blue cities—for America’s politics and settlement patterns:

There’s little argument that inequality, and the depressed prospects for the middle class, will be a dominant issue this year’s election. Yet the most powerful force shaping this reality—the rising cost of housing—has barely emerged as political issue. [. . .]

Driven in part by potential buyers being forced into the apartment market, rents have risen to a point that they now compose the largest share of income in modern U.S. history. Since 1990, renters’ income has been stagnant, while inflation-adjusted rents have soared 14.7 percent.

As Kotkin emphasizes, this is a middle-class issue. But it’s also a generational issue: Rising rents and housing costs hit young people, whose incomes are lower than the incomes of older Americans, especially hard. The ability to buy a home or afford a decent apartment is a major element of achieving adulthood, of being able to support oneself, and being able to start a family. Making home ownership attainable is essential to making young people feel that the American economic system can work for them.

As we’ve said before, prohibitive housing costs are at least in some ways a policy choice made by constituencies with political power in America’s big blue cities. Upper-middle class professionals tend to prefer restrictive land-use regulations because of their cultural preference for Manhattan-style “density.” Union monopolies on construction drive up housing costs. And rent control and other policies meant to help subsidize the poor often end up favoring wealthy property owners while squeezing upwardly mobile young people.Getting housing policy right is one of the most important things a country can do for itself—and getting it right means making it work for young people.

Regenerating Congress

There is no doubt that of the three branches of government, it is the legislature that has fallen farthest short in recent years of the role that the Founders expected and wanted it to play. So it’s encouraging that some lawmakers are thinking about a reform agenda to help invigorate Congress, as the New York Times reports:

“This is of our own making,” said Mr. Lee, pointing his finger directly at Congress for a steady ceding of power from Capitol Hill to the executive branch. “Congress has recast itself as a back-seat driver in American politics.” [. . .]

Through a new movement called the Article I Project, Mr. Lee, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas and other congressional Republicans are joining the effort to find a way for Congress to take back some of the power. [. . .]

The agenda calls for changing budget laws to give Congress more direct control over spending, eliminating the risk of default that has led to years of fiscal brinkmanship, bringing regulatory agencies under stricter congressional review and more clearly spelling out how much latitude executive agencies have in interpreting federal laws.

One of the reasons that both the judiciary and the executive branch have become so hyperactive—and, therefore, so controversial and polarizing—is that Congress is falling down on the job when it comes to the things that in our system of government only the Congress can really do: write good laws, pass responsible budgets, oversee government operations, advise and consult with the executive on law and policy. Most of the big laws Congress has passed in recent years, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have been clunkers: the Homeland Security Act, No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act, the Affordable Care Act. Add sequestration to the mix, and you have a cavalcade of legislative failure.

There are many things wrong with the way Congress does business. It has done less to reorganize itself, to streamline and staff up for the 21st—or even the 20th—century than either of the other branches. And as Sen. Lee and his colleagues suggest in the Times article, there are increasingly strong political incentives for members to avoid making tough decisions at all costs.Regenerating congress should be a bipartisan goal, although naturally liberals and conservatives will have different strategies and visions for what that would look like. But they should be able to agree that Congress—and Congressional debate—is meant to be the center of the political life of the United States. This is where the big questions were meant to be decided, and until Congress gets its act together, the American system will continue to underperform.

Australia’s Conservatives Eye Privatization

Australia’s conservative government is looking to privatize parts of a number of costly agencies, the Wall Street Journal reports:

In a move that would be risky in a charged election year, due to the popularity among voters of the country’s generous health and welfare system, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Tuesday the conservatives were looking at outsourcing a range of government payments worth up to 50 billion Australian dollars (US$35.43 billion).

“The government is as always totally committed to Medicare,” Mr. Turnbull told Parliament. “What we are looking at…is improving the delivery of government services, looking at ways to take the health and aged care payment systems into the 21st century.”Treasurer Scott Morrison may test market appetite for a deal soon after the next national budget statement in May, which could clarify the future of several privatization offers being looked at by the conservatives.Australia is struggling to adjust to a fading resources boom that is shrinking government coffers. A sharp slowdown in mining investment has forced the government to look harder for ways to trim a budget deficit that grew markedly under the previous Labor administration.

While some things that governments do can or should really only be done by government workers, a very large proportion of government activities could actually be carried out by private contractors—administering government benefit programs like Social Security, disability payments and so on. This is routine clerical work, and governments have been unable to get the efficiencies that private companies can—through automation, for instance. Civil service-protected government employees for many (not all) tasks are more expensive and less efficient.

American politicians should watch what happens in Australia closely. Will the reforms set off a huge reaction that sinks the party that suggested the idea at the next election? Will the idea actually be tried, and if so, does it succeed (presumably after a bit of a shakedown cruise) in actually saving money while maintaining or even improving the level of service? This is a work in progress and shifting functions out of government into the private sector where appropriate is something that all governments are going to have to do sooner or later.We’re lucky in the U.S. in that we can experiment with different approaches at the state level and see what works. And we already contract out more government services than many Americans realize (parts of the food stamp program, notably). But there’s probably much more that can be done.One idea for the next administration: set up rules at the federal level that allow and encourage states to experiment with innovative methods of delivering services to see if there are ways of reducing costs.

The Simultaneity Trap

There are the traps you suspect are out there and try to avoid, and then there are the traps that you have no choice but to walk into. So it will be with the next President, no matter who he or she may be. He or she will confront not just specific strategic problems such as what to do next in Syria, but a more generic set of challenges. These four strategy traps are inevitable. They can be managed but not avoided.

The first of these is the simultaneity trap, and it goes like this. In any government, be it in Luxembourg, Angola, the People’s Republic of China, or the United States, and on any given large national security issue, somewhere between five and fifty people really count. The number is usually closer to five than to fifty. We have one President, one Secretary of State, one Secretary of Defense, one Director of Central Intelligence, and one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.But the United States is not Angola. More than any other power in history—even the British Empire at its height—the U.S. government has global concerns and global interests. Even a decision not to act requires a conscious effort of will, in the awareness that real consequences flow from U.S. inaction as well as action. The daily briefings and meetings with top aides of a Cabinet Secretary are a dizzying tour of the world, and even after a large and intelligent bureaucracy (which the United States actually has) digests the issues, the principal still has to decide. If it’s a serious effort, the Cabinet Secretaries and some other senior officials will spend time meeting in the Situation Room, and then engaging the President. As Peter Drucker once pointed out, the only inelastic commodity in any organization is executive time—and the time (and energy levels) of the big players in government is no greater than that of kindergarten teachers.The range of their international responsibilities would overwhelm any President and his or her subordinates. As the ultimate decider, the President bears the greatest burden, on top of all the pressing domestic issues that come his way. But it is not much easier for his key subordinates. As the country’s chief diplomat, the Secretary of State travels incessantly; indeed, recent Secretaries have engaged in an unhealthy competition with their predecessors to see who can spend the most time abroad in inconclusive talks with foreign leaders, all the while courting deep vein thrombosis from endless hours on official airplanes. The Secretary of Defense has to manage the government’s most complicated bureaucracy. The National Security Adviser has to be on top of everything, and keep the President staffed in a way no other official in the world has to be—all the while thinking months if not years ahead, monitoring the implementation of decisions, and being ready to manage a sudden crisis.The problem of simultaneity is worsened by the four geopolitical challenges we face. The first is the rise of China, a great power whose economy is, or will be, roughly the size of ours. The chronic war with jihadis throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond—including at home—is the second; hostile states like Russia and Iran with regional ambitions and the willingness to use force to achieve them are a third. Lastly, ungoverned space, including some in our own hemisphere, poses a different kind of threat, one that can also exacerbate the other three.These four different threats require different weapons, different organizations, different time horizons, and different strategic approaches. But the same small group of decision-makers has to decide them all, individually and collectively. The upshot is a more complex, if not always a more dangerous, set of international conditions than any during the Cold War, when we faced one main enemy and other lesser foes aligned with it.How to cope with so much to do and so little time? The simultaneity trap cannot be avoided, because ultimately the hard choices get bounced to the top. It can only be managed. When the Republican and Democratic transition-planning teams begin to assemble late this spring or early this summer, one hopes the candidates will direct them to spend as much time thinking about the processes and staffing of a new administration as about the substantive problems it will face.There is nothing particularly exciting about making the trains run on time: having regular meetings; keeping them on topic and on schedule (meetings longer than two hours can be assumed to be a waste of effort); preparing conclusions and directives; monitoring bureaucratic implementation; and ensuring that the President and his or her advisers get enough of the details to make decisions, but not so much that they are overwhelmed. In practice, however, orderly administration is very hard. The White House Chief of Staff may usurp the authority of a National Security Advisor; meetings may be long, inconclusive, and repetitive; the NSC staff may either overstep their role and begin acting as a mini-State Department or Office of the Secretary of Defense, or, conversely, fail to do their proper job of highlighting departmental differences for the President; an intemperate, egotistical, or servile National Security Advisor can prevent real differences of opinion from being aired and debated.It is all humdrum stuff, conducted (one hopes) by people with level tempers, checked egos, a collegial spirit, a distaste for publicity, and an awareness that campaigning is one thing, governing another. It has on occasion been done very well, as under Brent Scowcroft in the George H. W. Bush Administration. Most of the time, however, it is not, and the simultaneity trap begins to yield foreign policy disasters of exponentially increasing severity.None of this matters just yet. For the next nine months foreign and defense policy will be subjects of the broadest possible debate. No voter will make a decision based on whether they think a candidate will realize that an NSC staff of 500 is too large to be effective, or order issues to get sorted out in interagency meetings below the level of the Deputies Committee. But before too long it will matter. The next President will face the most difficult international environment in more than half a century, but without the economic and military edge that we can see—only in retrospect, admittedly—Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy could take for granted. He or she will need a machine that works.

Threats Rise But Intel Spending Going Down

As the world grows more dangerous, we’re asking our intelligence community to do more and more with less and less. Defense One reports:

Since a peak funding level of $80.1 billion in 2010, the 17 agencies within the intelligence community have been forced to operate with declining dollars, down to some $66 billion in fiscal 2015.

According to a new report from market researcher Deltek, the IC’s overall budget may be on the uptick, but its spending on information technology won’t be.That means the IC will have to meet growing threats on land and in cyberspace – particularly from China and Russia, the report notes – without the added benefit of extra tech spending.Because the IC does not publish a public line-item budget for its IT expenditures, much of the data in Deltek’s report are based on estimates from entities like the Federal Procurement Data System.Using this data and other sources, Deltek estimated there was about $9.8 billion in “total addressable” intelligence tech spending in fiscal 2015. The report suggests IT spending will essentially stagnate through 2020, with estimated IT spending at $9.5 billion by then — a 0.4 percent decrease from today’s levels.

Intelligence spending is a complicated issue: there is lots of waste and inefficiency in a vast and secretive bureaucracy, Congressional and press scrutiny is of limited use even with bureaucracies subject to open investigation, and classification makes oversight harder and allows problems to fester. So, the operating assumption needs to be that the intel community’s spending is probably at least as dysfunctional as what one can see in more visible areas of government.

But while getting rid of the famous “waste, mismanagement and fraud” costs are important, the fact remains that the threats to the United States and our allies are growing by every measure: jihadis are far more active and better organized than in 2010 (when intel budgets began to be curtailed), and rival powers like Russia and China are steadily increasing their capabilities and confirming their intention to challenge U.S. power. It’s also the case that the situation in the Middle East is becoming more complicated and more dangerous, and its impact—even beyond the actions of jihadi groups—on American interests is growing.So we need more and better intel, not less. And getting good intel while observing various restrictions on privacy and the sensitivity of allies is more expensive than just going out there and taking a brute force approach to collection.President Obama has recently begun to respond to the deteriorating situation of American security on his watch by reversing earlier cuts to the Pentagon budget. One of the consequences of diplomatic failure and strategic error is that the world becomes more dangerous and therefore defense becomes more expensive. The intel budgets need to be seen as part of this picture.The world is uglier than it was in 2009, the bad guys are better armed, better organized and more aggressive than they used to be. In much of the world our alliances aren’t as strong and effective as they used to be, and the bad guys are taking advantage of that. Unfortunately, that means we’ve got to spend more money preparing against more contingencies, and devote more resources to understanding and coping with emerging threats.

Adjuncts Rising, Rising, Rising

Preston Cooper of Economics 21 points us to a new NBER paper that confirms and quantifies in detail what higher education watchers have been saying for some time: Colleges can’t afford to hire enough full-time faculty to educate their growing student populations, and are increasingly turning to low paid, disposable adjuncts to make up for it. From the abstract:

The share of part-time faculty among total faculty has continued to grow over the last two decades, while the share of full-time lecturers and instructors has been relatively stable. Meanwhile, the share of non-tenure track faculty among faculty with professorial ranks has been growing. Dynamic panel data models suggest that employment levels of different types of faculty respond to a variety of economic and institutional factors. Colleges and universities have increasingly employed faculty whose salaries and benefits are relatively inexpensive; the slowly deteriorating financial situations at most colleges and universities have led to an increasing reliance on a contingent academic workforce.

Cooper suggests one reason for the adjunct explosion is the free-flowing federal student loan spigot, which is pushing more students into the university system and therefore incentivizing schools to increase their teaching capacity at the lowest possible cost. We would also add that the tenure-for-life model demanded by the professors’ guild probably limits the ability of universities to move resources around and slows down turnover among the professoriate. The federal monopoly on college accreditation props up this system by stifling competition, even as the proliferation of obscure fields of study (especially in the social sciences) creates a constant supply of newly minted PhD’s desperate for academic jobs.

The ultimate result of all of this is inequality and exploitation: Administrator salaries go up, adjuncts face increasingly alarming economic insecurity, and the quality of education at lower-tier schools continues to be undermined even as the top colleges have access to almost unlimited resources. In other words, even the most leftwing institutions in the country can’t afford to put egalitarian, blue-model ideals into practice. Like all decaying blue institutions, the university still serves insiders (college presidents, professors with tenure, students at Yale) quite well, even as outsiders (adjunct faculty, students who took out loans to go to lower-tiered schools) struggle.What’s causing this higher education crisis is not evil conservatives. It’s the fact that the blue model of higher education, complete with regulation, subsidies, and professional guilds, is simply no longer workable or affordable. That’s one reason we are seeing free college proposals and other wheezes to get more federal money into the system. Needless to say, this is the wrong approach. Higher education needs to be rethought and reorganized for the twenty-first century. Doubling down on the system we set up in the post-World War II period will expose new problems and make the existing system even worse.

Behind the Tinsel

Joel and Ethan Coen are subversive filmmakers. Even when their gaze seems wide-eyed, there is always a gimlet chaser. The movies have a tangy bite. So their abiding affection for Hollywood, as depicted in their newest film, “Hail, Caesar,” is both surprising and endearing.

The first of those attributes is expected of any Coen brothers’ work. The other, not so much. But their image of the dream factory in the 1950s is a candy-colored ice-cream cone of a picture. You want to gobble it down. The intellectual iciness that is a key component of their charm is here made creamy and delicious.“Hail, Caesar” swirls together real people and Coen creations. There was indeed an Eddie Mannix, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio executive, all sharp elbows and thuggish deal-making. But the Eddie Mannix around whom “Oh, Caesar” pinwheels (embodied by Josh Brolin in a delightfully deadpan performance) is sincerely devoted to his studio and his family—in that order. When his boss, Nick Schenck, phones from New York, Mannix stands up to take the call. He goes to confession every day, though his major sin is usually sneaking a cigarette, since he promised his wife he’d quit. His worst transgression over the course of the movie is when he feels required to slap some sense into a movie star. The sound of that slap reverberates in your ears.Mannix is facing a crisis of confidence—and so is Hollywood. Technological advances are sending a shiver down the spine of the movie industry. Movie moguls are increasingly fearful that television will destroy their audience.He is also suddenly full of doubt that his work isn’t serious, just child’s play in a grown-up world. Wooing him with this argument is an executive from Lockheed Martin—the real future of Southern California. The aerospace industry fueled the region’s prosperous middle class, which paved the orange and lemon groves to build endlessly sprawling suburbs.Yet Mannix, whose daily grind is depicted as a continual effort to keep his dream factory humming, has no taste for this coming America. He gets more pleasure from manufacturing fantasies than producing machines of death and destruction. (In case we don’t get it, the Lockheed man tries to entice Mannix with a photo of H-bomb tests on the Bikini Islands.)In addition of ignoring the real future, Mannix has no truck with the cadre who dub themselves the “The Future”—a nest of Hollywood communists. No one in “Hail, Caesar” can foresee that they are the opposite of the future. Because in this Hollywood they loom large: They have kidnapped the studio’s biggest star, Baird Whitlock (a pitch-perfect George Clooney).This version of a communist cell, ensconced in a sleekly modern beach house on the bluffs above Malibu, is a far cry from the grindingly banal existence of the world-weary Soviet agent in the Coens’ smart scenario for “Bridge of Spies.” That sad-eyed true believer, as played by Mark Rylance, could easily fit into an early John le Carré thriller.These Hollywood communists, however, are more like the eccentric band of professors concocted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett for “Ball of Fire.” (A screwball update of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, with Barbara Stanwyck as Snow White . . . er, Sugerpuss O’Shea.) The Coens’ communist cadre might seem ominous, but they happily spend hours arguing economic dialectic, as laid out by political philosopher Herbert Marcuse. The Coens have even placed Marcuse in the bohemian chic beach house with them—ever ready to explain himself between bites of tea sandwiches (crusts removed, of course).Even when the communist threat is most manifest, “Hail, Caesar” views the Soviet menace as more loopy than destructive to the American way of life. In the real world, by the 1950s the movie industry had already established the blacklist, to appease the fiercely anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee. But in this alternate reality, no one’s career is destroyed by the Cold War—except if he wants it to be.Meanwhile, no cog in the dream factory escapes Mannix’s attention—or the Coens’. The studio’s Esther Williams manqué (a tough-talking Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant but unwed, so Mannix concocts a plan for her to adopt her own child. (Actress Loretta Young beat him to it in the 1930s, though.) He reshapes the celebrity profile of a sweet singing cowboy (an adorable Alden Ehrenreich) into an urbane sophisticate, after Schenck demands that he play the lead in a snappy society comedy. (Ehrenreich’s rope tricks with spaghetti recall Charlie Chaplin making dinner rolls dance.)All the mechanics of moviemaking are stunningly captured, down to Frances McDormand’s sly cameo as C.C. Calhoun, a tough-as-nails film editor whom Mannix checks in on as she works. She personifies that cadre of brilliant women film editors who spliced millions of hours of celluloid together. These expert film cutters knew the flaws of even the best actors—and, most important, how to edit footage so that no moviegoer ever saw them. From Margaret Booth (“Camille,” “Mutiny on Bounty”) to Dorothy Spencer (“Stagecoach,” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”) to Dede Allen (“Bonnie and Clyde,” Reds,” “The Breakfast Club”) to Thelma Shoonmaker (“Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas”) these women have been essential to the movie industry.Not that Baird Whitlock has to worry. He may be a king-sized dope (cue Clark Gable)—but like any real star, he knows how to deliver the goods once the cameras roll.And so do Joel and Ethan Coen.

Why Japan Wants to Fell and Burn Its Forests

Tokyo is turning to its forests as a way of making up the power generation capacity lost by Japan’s move away from nuclear energy following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Bloomberg reports:

Japan is giving favorable tariffs to power producers who burn leftover wood as a way to cut the country’s dependence on imported fossil fuels.

It’s a program that’s so successful that local biomass producers already are having problems meeting demand, and researchers warn there may not be enough raw materials to feed the power stations now being planned. Some environmentalists even question whether the use of biomass is as carbon-free as advertised.

Japan doesn’t have much by way of domestic sources of energy, which is why we’ve seen it explore exotic new technologies like “fire ice” in the past, and why it had such a large fleet of nuclear reactors online before Fukushima. Following that event, Japan shuttered those nuclear plants and has had to rely heavily on imports of oil and LNG to keep the lights on—an unenviable position. It is in this context that the island nation is now looking inwards towards its forests for energy.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen countries embrace burning wood—a decidedly low-tech power option—as an energy source of the future. Biomass facilities have been hyped before as renewable options, and for Japan, their biggest selling point is the fact that the feedstock—wood—is domestically abundant. But while biomass can have obvious benefits for Japanese energy security, let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it’s some grand green solution.As an energy source, biomass can only be considered renewable or carbon neutral if the people burning it are also ensuring the forests they’re harvesting are being responsibly replanted. Historically that hasn’t been a given, and there are plenty of incentives for the unscrupulous to fell a swathe of trees, make a quick buck, and not follow through on that crucial next step of reforestation. Moreover, once you add in the emissions from the felling, transporting, and processing of the wood involved, net carbon neutrality is all but impossible.Chopping down trees in the Land of the Rising Sun could lessen Japan’s demand for foreign energy sources, and that’s plenty of motivation to follow through with such a policy. Just don’t fall for the green window dressing here: This isn’t a boon for Gaia.