You might be interested in these interviews of three Washington, DC rabbis about the murders of two employees of the Israeli embassy by Brian Bennett at Time. Here’s a snippet from one of them:

On the personal level, just like any other Jewish person in DC, in this country, it’s scary to think that we’d be targeted for being in a Jewish space. As a rabbi, I’m showing up in Jewish spaces on a regular basis. I’m publicly identified as Jewish. So that’s scary.

There’s also feelings of anger. This is the natural outgrowth of hateful rhetoric that we’ve been seeing from all kinds of different groups in this country. Jews know from our history that hateful rhetoric leads to hateful action. You see that playing out last night.

As a rabbi, I’ve got this added burden of trying to make meaning of this moment. I’m not sure what meaning there is. It’s pretty senseless. It’s pretty painful. I can say with confidence that violent political action is not going to move us toward peace. It’s not going to heal anything. That’s the one thing I’m clear on. I’m not clear on a lot else, to be honest.

There’s a lot of similarity among the three reactions. All are, obviously, saddened, shocked, and horrified.

But there are other similarities as well. None wants to talk about the situation in Gaza and all question the sincerity of the Trump Administration’s approach to antisemitism.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post:

It now seems that, for a considerable time, Biden might have lacked the stamina and cognitive capacity the job demands — and that his family and closest aides concealed this from the public. Their apparent decision to put personal loyalties ahead of their duty to the country must be reckoned with. A legal mechanism should be considered to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

The people closest to Biden could hardly have avoided observing his infirmity — indeed, the actions they took to hide it indicate that they knew all too well. Early issues surfaced in the 2020 campaign, when he had memory lapses, including forgetting the name of one of his closest advisers and the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence. A Democrat interviewed by Tapper and Thompson who was involved in making Zoom videos of Biden speaking to constituents during the pandemic lockdown said that, after watching hours of mostly unusable footage, they concluded he was incapable of doing the job.

Such observations then became more frequent. “Since at least 2022,” Tapper and Thompson write, “he has had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day. He can sometimes seem incoherent. He is increasingly prone to losing his train of thought.”

“By late 2023,” the authors say, “Biden’s staff was pushing as much of his schedule as possible to midday, when Biden was at his best.” Even in small groups, the president often read from notes or a teleprompter.

This suggests that Biden might have been too impaired to responsibly lead the United States. The country was fortunate not to have experienced a late-night crisis that he would have had trouble handling. It would be folly to count on such luck in the future.

concluding:

Ideally, Congress would create a sober, bipartisan commission to investigate ways to maintain transparency about the president’s health, mental and physical.

Perhaps some objective cognitive testing should be required, in addition to a physical examination, with the results made public annually.

Officials in both parties have a responsibility to enable their voters to select standard-bearers who are up to the job. In the case of the former president, top Democrats turned a blind eye to Biden’s limitations — until the debate made that problem impossible to ignore and activated their political survival instincts.

In a democracy, the voters, when selecting a commander in chief, need to be discerning, to elevate candidates who have the stamina and the smarts to serve. Four years later, they can assess that person’s ability to take on another term. If problems arise between elections, then White House officials and Congress must be counted on to act responsibly.

I question whether a “sober, bipartisan commission to investigate ways to maintain transparency about the president’s health” or “objective cognitive testing” are possible but they do raise some difficult questions about the events of the last year or so. Would President Biden have been elected at all had those been applied to candidates for the presidency in 2020? When did President Biden become incapable of handling the responsibilities of the presidency?

Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution is:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Note that there’s nothing about incentives there. It is assumed that the Vice President, “principal officers of the executive departments”, and members of the Congress are high-minded individuals, motivated exclusively by the law and the common good. While that’s something to which we should aspire, I doubt it has ever actually been the case. Furthermore, no consequences apply should they fail to exercise those responsibilities.

Time and old age eventually catch up to all of us. Together I think all of the above make a very good argument for setting an age limit on when an individual may run for president. I suggest 70. That would be clear and objective.

You might be interested in this description of a novel weapon developed by the Ukrainians from Christopher M. McFadden at Interesting Engineering:

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (MOD) has officially authorized the KRAMPUS, a domestically developed thermobaric-armed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Intended for use in offensive and defensive operations, the UGV can also be armed with reactive thermobaric launchers for use by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

According to the Ukrainian MOD, the KRAMPUS is compact in size and weight and can be carried on the bed of a pickup truck, minibus, or trailer. The UGV is also very quiet thanks to its silent electric motors and a tracked chassis.

See the picture at the link. Here’s its firepower:

At the UGV’s business end, the integrated thermobaric system is designed to deliver devastating close-quarters firepower. Upon triggering the warhead, the system disperses a fine aerosolized fuel cloud with a diameter of approximately 7 to 8 meters (roughly 23 to 26 feet).

According to MILITARYNYI, within 0.2 seconds, the vaporized mixture is ignited, producing a high-temperature fireball reaching up to 4,532°F (2,500°C). This ignition results in extreme thermal damage and a powerful overpressure wave that “neutralizes personnel” in enclosed or fortified spaces.

Its tactical use is not quite clear to me. It appears it would be most useful where enemy troops are packed closely together. Sounds pretty horrifying.

Chicago’s City Hall is being investigated by the federal Department of Justice over Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hiring practices. Cate Cauguiran reports at ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — The U.S. Department of Justice is opening up a civil rights investigation into the city of Chicago, it said in a letter to the mayor’s office on Monday.

The DOJ is specifically looking into the city’s hiring practices.

This comes after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s remarks at the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn on Sunday prompted a barrage of social media posts calling for an investigation.

This adds a little more texture:

Johnson’s office released a statement on Monday afternoon, saying, “Mayor Johnson is proud to have the most diverse administration in the history of our city. Our administration reflects the diversity and values of Chicago. Unfortunately, the current federal administration does not reflect either. We are aware of the letter issued by the Department of Justice, but are awaiting the official receipt of the letter. Our Corporation Counsel will review it at that time.”

The mayor’s office released a demographics breakdown of the office. It’s 34.3% Black, 30.5% White, 23.8% Hispanic and 6.7% Asian.

That demographic breakdown bears little resemblance to anything—it’s certainly not the demographics of the City of Chicago. Hispanics and Asians are underrepresented if anything.

Mayor Johnson’s remarks remind me of what used to be said about the Ford Model T: any color you want as long as it’s black.

I should add that the demographic breakdown is inherently misleading. It is deliberately divisive. Neither Hispanic nor Asian are a race, an identity, or anything else other then a politically motivated census category. If Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. were broken out of the “white” category, the United States would have stopped having a white majority a century and a half ago.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
 
I’m writing this, not because I think that the regular readers here do not understand it, but because the readers somewhere else where I comment clearly do not understand it.

For workers who receive a wage 6.2% of your gross wages up to $176,100 is deducted from your pay. Another 6.2% is what is referred to as the “employer’s contribution”, a payroll tax. That money is added to your account maintained by the Social Security Administration. Once upon a time Social Security’s total revenue exceeded its outlays. That is no longer the case. Most recently, for example, Social Security revenues were around $1.2 trillion while Social Security Retirement Income outlays (that’s what most people mean by “Social Security”) were $1.6 trillion and the difference was deducted from the “Social Security trust fund”. Where did the missing $400 billion come from?

It came from the Treasury Department. From what are called “general revenues”. Since the federal government is operating at a substantial deficit, in effect we borrowed it. Yes, Social Security adds to the deficit. When the accumulated differences between Social Security revenues and Social Security outlays over the last 90 years reaches zero Social Security will be insolvent. That is expected in 2036. That is what is generally meant by “Social Security insolvency”.

By law that means that SSRI benefits will be reduced to whatever the system can pay on an ongoing basis. I (along with at least one regular reader here) think the outrage over that will be sufficiently great that the federal government will continue to pay promised benefits even after Social Security insolvency.

Over the years I’ve made various proposals for extending the cliff of Social Security insolvency including eliminating Social Security max and subjecting all wage income to the tax and raising the age of full Social Security retirement age to 80 (that’s consistent with the original structure of the plan) indexed to life expectancy. I should also mention that I’m one of those poor benighted souls who think that Social Security’s problem is not that it’s a Ponzi scheme but that its original assumptions have not held true and have been abandoned.

Let’s start here. At Time Charlotte Alter does a preview into the Democrats’ analysis of why they lost the 2024 election:

Democrats could dismiss Trump’s first win as a fluke. His second, they know, was the product of catastrophic failure—a nationwide rejection of Democratic policies, Democratic messaging, and the Democrats themselves. The party got skunked in every battleground state and lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. They lost the House and the Senate. Their support sagged with almost every demographic cohort except Black women and college-educated voters. Only 35% of Democrats are optimistic about the future of the party, according to a May 14 AP poll, down from nearly 6 in 10 last July. Democrats have no mojo, no power, and no unifying leader to look to for a fresh start.

and

Over the past two months, I’ve spoken to dozens of prominent Democrats, from Senators to strategists, frontline House members to upstart progressives, and activists to top DNC officials, in an effort to figure out how the party can chart its way back. I asked them all versions of the same questions. How did they dig this hole, and how can they get out of it? What ideas do Democrats stand for, beyond opposing an unpopular President? How can they reconnect with the voters they’ve lost? Who should be leading them, and what should they be saying? In other words: What’s the plan?

Many of these conversations made my head hurt. Democrats kept presenting cliches as insights and old ideas as new ideas. Everybody said the same things; nobody seemed to be really saying anything at all. But in between feeble platitudes about “showing up and listening” and “fighting for the working class” and “meeting people where they are,” a few common threads emerged.

Those “threads” include:

• branding
• messaging
• mismatch between what most Americans believe and party orthodoxy
• generational issues

Now let’s turn to an editorial from the Chicago Tribune on the gap between what the mayor is saying and what’s actually happening in Chicago:

We’re halfway through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s term, and the city the mayor described in a series of recent interviews to mark the milestone hardly resembles what we see.

We agree with the mayor that Chicago is a great American city, made so by the people who live, work, play and love here.

But in many other respects — a transit system that continues to perform unacceptably, public schools that cost too much and do a poor job of teaching our children, violent crime levels well above peer American cities and a local economy needlessly deprived of the dynamism that produced our uniquely beautiful skyline — Chicago is ailing.

For all the unfair shots ideologically motivated critics take at the city, Chicagoans who’ve grown up here and made adult lives here know something has gone wrong these last two years. They’ve seen what this city looks and feels like when things are going well. And, judging from Johnson’s rock-bottom public-approval numbers, many of them have concluded he’s a big part of the current problem.

The job of mayor is tough no matter who’s in the office, but Chicago could be doing so much better with a different brand of leadership — and, really, a wholly different philosophy — than Johnson has brought to the fifth floor.

Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, we’ve got to produce more of what we consume. Until that happens governments, whether federal, state, or local, can’t tax more or borrow more without producing inflation. Taxing is another way of saying “reduce the private sector’s ability to spend or invest and increase deadweight loss”. If the Democratic orthodoxy is that we must produce less, other priorities will be doomed to failure. Fortunately, the “abundance doctrine” being promulgated by some progressives suggests that they are getting that message. Whether anything will come of it is another story.

Second, if you are more interested in identifying and expelling heretics than you are in making converts, you will have a perennially shrinking caucus.

Third, the results you produce have got to be what you are promising and what the people want. It makes little difference how benign your intentions. And how vile your opponents are makes little difference if they’re producing the results that the people want.

President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with “aggressive” metastatic prostate cancer. My heart goes out to him and his family.

According to the American Cancer Society the incidence of prostate cancer per 100,000 population rises with age:

While that’s still far from a certainty, it’s yet another reason that we should avoid electing men over 70 to the presidency.

In an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune Mayor Johnson’s erstwhile opponent for the job of mayor, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, provides his assessment of the first two years of Mr. Johnson’s term as mayor:

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first two years in office can best be described as delusional. Even from a progressive perspective, there is a glaring disconnect between his rhetoric and reality. 

Johnson has declared his tenure the most accomplished of any mayor in Chicago history and claims the city is now a national model for building a worker-centered, safe and affordable city. But his proudest accomplishments amount to little more than a progressive Potemkin village.

He goes on to catalogue the mayor’s putative accomplishments and, needless to say, finds them lacking.

My own view is that there’s plenty of delusion to go around—being delusional is not limited to the mayor. I have no idea what Chicago voters, the Chicago Teachers Union, or the major media outlets are thinking.

Chicago has the worst credit rating of any major U. S. city. There isn’t even any real competition. Chicago has the highest real estate tax of any major U. S. city and the highest sales tax.

Here is Mr. Vallas’s statement of the present Chicago budget deficits:

Johnson or his administration has done nothing to address the financial storm engulfing the city, schools and public transit system — each faces historic deficits in the coming year. The city projects a budget shortfall exceeding $1 billion. The new teachers contract pushes Chicago Public Schools’ deficit to more than $800 million, and the CTA faces a $600 million revenue shortfall. Meanwhile, the mayor’s backing of a $1.5 billion contract with the Chicago Teachers Union makes it virtually impossible to balance either the city or CPS budget without major tax hikes.

For those not residents of Illinois, the state has more independently taxing entities than any other. It’s not just the state and local legislatures that levy taxes but school districts, park districts, sanitary districts, and many other entities have independent power to levy taxes.

My question is how did any Chicagoan expect Mr. Johnson to do anything else? He has not even attempted to economize.

And how does the CTU expect to boost the incomes of Chicago teachers into the top 10% of income earners while teaching fewer students and evading scrutiny?

While I’m reflecting on delusion what has Gov. J. B. Pritzker accomplished that he promised when he first ran for governor? Illinois’s credit rating is only slightly better than that of New Jersey—it’s the second worst in the nation. Also, Illinois’s contribution to public education is among the lowest of any state.

It hasn’t always been this way. Chicago’s credit rating used to be pretty good and the state of Illinois’s credit rating used to be quite good. The last twenty years have been disastrous.

This memo from the Democratic polling organization Impact Research (PDF) for the progressive activist organization End Citizens United provides some advice for Democrats that I wish they would take but doubt that they will. Here are some of their takeaways:

1. Keep the focus on Congress, more than Trump or Elon. For these swing participants, their views on Trump and Elon are complicated and still forming. Trump retains some inoculation on corruption issues. His longstanding “drain the swamp” rhetoric combined with the way he’s messaging DOGE through the framework of ridding waste and corruption gives him some credibility. Likewise, while participants had real concerns about Elon’s role, they were ill-formed, and they saw some positives from his cuts. They are not positive towards either person, but candidates should note that only utilizing corruption framing against Trump and Musk will present some barriers. However, members of Congress are ripe targets for corruption messaging – voters view all (nameless) politicians as corrupt, focused on self-enrichment and gaining power. They attach a lot of the problems facing the country to these ills, and while they are not necessarily able to articulate specific examples of corruption, they are certain that corruption is rampant in Washington.

and

2. Focus on self-enrichment and the influence of special interests and lobbyists as the leading examples of corruption in Washington. More so than past cycles, these participants were fluent in ways that members of Congress use the office for personal gain – they cite examples of members who go into office “with no money” and come out “millionaires.” They are aware that members make less than $200k and assume their net worths increase due to self-dealing. Relatedly, they see lobbyist influence on behalf of special interest as corrupting – buying off politicians to get their own deals. They see this as connected to their own problems – when elected leaders are focused on lining their own pockets, they make decisions based on that, not what is best for people. They want to see action to address this.

When there is no such thing as real privacy and everyone is carrying a videocamera, it’s a lot harder to get traction by complaining about the other guy’s corruption while engaging in corrupt practices yourself than it used to be.