Yet another Substack to which I’d subscribe if I had the money is Noah Smith’s “Noahpinion”. I was recently somewhat shocked in his observations about one of five things he found interesting. As it works out the average income of black Americans is rising, largely due to “selective immigration”:

As you can see from that chart, Black immigrants earn about as much as native-born Black Americans. But 2nd-generation Black Americans earn about as much as White Americans.

There are several important implications of this finding.

First, selective immigration is very important. The kids of Black immigrants to America move up in the world because they’re highly educated. Selecting for immigrants that value education is therefore a way of reducing racial gaps in America — in addition, of course, to the substantial contributions they make to America’s economy.

Second, fears of segmented assimilation — the idea that the kids and grandkids of Black immigrants will end up with economic trajectories similar to those of native-born Black Americans — seem overblown.

Third, America is a land of opportunity for Black immigrants, but not nearly as much so for Black people whose families have been here a long time. This means that the “ADOS” concept — meaning Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves — is probably a useful one. It defines the group of people who most need help from the government. For example, affirmative action programs targeted at Black people in general are likely to award college spots to the kids of elite African immigrants. Instead, in the interest of maximum efficiency and fairness, they should probably be targeted at ADOS specifically.

That is a point I have made for more than 20 years but Mr. Smith doesn’t appreciate the degree of what is actually happening. Black immigrants are benefiting disproportionately from racial set-asides, quotas, preferential hiring or college admissions, and programs intended to promote “equity”. That has been true for 50 years. I think the reason for that is culture (see above). But it bodes very poorly for what he refers to as “ADOS” and which the late sociologist Charles Moskas called “Afro-Americans”.

What Mr. Smith doesn’t address is how do you accomplish what he wants to do? I presume he opposes nativism. Isn’t he supporting it explicitly in this post?

Tomas Pueyo’s Substack, “Uncharted Territories” is another to which I’d subscribe if I had the jack which I don’t. I think it is interesting and he is insightful. I don’t know whether his basic theme is that geography is dispositive or merely a highly important factor but it’s one of the two.

In a recent post he considered why Argentina is poor. A century ago it was one of the richest countries. Now it isn’t. His conclusion is that the Argentines have mad a lot of bad decisions over a long period of time.

I would suggest that Mr. Pueyo (a Spaniard) consider an additional question. Why are nearly all former Spanish colonies poor and nearly all former British colonies rich? I would suggest two reasons and they both apply to Argentina. The first is that the Spanish did not invest capital in their colonies (the opposite if anything) and the second is cultural.

Consider the British colonies as a comparison. The British (and Dutch) invested heavily in the young United States. Even just a few years after the War of 1812 the Erie Canal (now celebrating its bicentennial) was heavily financed by British and Dutch investors. The same is true later on of the railroads that enabled the U. S. to remain a single country which were heavily financed by foreign private investors (mostly British and Dutch). The British were also vitally important in financing the telegraph lines that tied the farflung country together.

I think that a major reason the British and Dutch invested so much in the U. S. is cultural. The United States was settled by middle class and lower class Britons (then the Germans, then the Irish). By and large the British nobility stayed at home.

And, as I noted in one of my earliest posts, although settlers don’t bring their meager possessions with them when they emigrate they do bring their cultures. Behaviors, practices, religion, language. And so on. The British and Dutch saw that as an attractive basis for investment.

On his Substack Nate Silver remarks on the apparently imminent end of the government shutdown:

As someone who is supposed to take three cross-country flights over the next seven days, I’m happy that I won’t miss my meetings, I guess.

But as political strategy, I think this is malpractice. Predictable enough malpractice for a perpetually risk-averse party with a weak, unpopular leader who clearly doesn’t have confidence of his caucus. But malpractice all the same.

What happened in late October? There are a handful of plausible explanations, but I think the evidence is reasonably clear. On Oct. 18, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned voters that food stamps — more formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP — would run out of funding at the end of the month. This program is a huge deal, affecting roughly 42 million Americans. Although Rollins tried to blame Democrats, voters didn’t buy that at all — not when the Trump has been fighting court orders to continue to fund the program, and holding Great Gatsby-themed dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

Google searches tell the story here. Since the shutdown began, searches for terms related to the Affordable Care Act — Democrats’ ostensible rationale for withholding votes — has never been more than a blip on the radar. Conversely, searches related to SNAP benefits increased roughly tenfold over their baseline beginning in late October.

The numbers really tell the story.

Of course President Trump’s approval rating would decrease more over the SNAP issue than over the ACA or the “No Kings” rallies.

Nate continues by observing that Chuck Schumer is a poor Senate Minority Leader. I’ve heard Chuck Schumer speak in person. The amazing thing isn’t that he’s a poor Senate Minority Leader. It’s that he’s a senator at all.

As I predicted at the outset of the shutdown, it will end shortly after the election. My logic was simple. Has any opposition party ever received concessions following a government shutdown? Any benefit realized will have been realized in the election. The Democratic candidates won the elections they were expected to win plus, perhaps, a few seats in the Virginia state legislature. Time for the shutdown to end.

I don’t have any insider information on the operations of the Senate Democratic caucus but note that the senators “crossing the aisle” have nothing to lose. Is it statesmanship, conviction, or are they sacrificial lambs?

Nate’s Substack is one of the half dozen or so to which I’d subscribe if I had the jack which I don’t.

On Friday night my wife and I attended Lyric Opera’s productions of Mascagni’s 1888 one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s 1890 one-act opera Pagliacci. The two one-acts are routinely paired and referred to as “Cav/Pag”. At 1:10 and 1:15 respectively, the timing is reasonable and together these two short operas form the very definition of the Italian verismo style of opera.

In verismo the main characters aren’t heroes or kings but ordinary people and the problems they face are generally sexual, romantic, violent, or all three.

I have always thought that Cavalleria’s music was magnificent but its libretto is troubling, even flawed. Nearly all of the significant action—Turiddu’s love for Lola, his going into the army, Lola’s marriage in his absence to Alfio, Turiddu’s marriage proposal to Santuzza, his resuming his affair with the now-married Lola, and the duel with Alfio in which he is killed—take place offstage. Nonetheless, the opera is full of action including Santuzza’s appeal to Turiddu’s mother, an Easter procession, Alfio’s challenge to Turiddu, and Turiddu’s farewell to his mother. There’s enough emotionally-charged action for a full-length opera. Hearing about it rather than having it performed for us is not dramatically satisfying.

Pagliacci on the other hand is nearly perfect. All of the action takes place on stage and in real-time. When coupled with Leoncavallo’s stunning music, particularly Tonio’s introduction in front of the curtain turning the classical tradition on its head by advising the audience that what they are about to see are real people and Canio’s famous Vesti la giubba (“put on the costume”).

I found all of the performances in both works very good with no particular standouts. The orchestra was fantastic—a great improvement over the performance of Medea we heard a few weeks ago.

When my wife and I arrived at our seats tape to the seat was a card from Lyric Opera, thanking us for having been subscribers and contributors for 40 years now. Prior to that I had been a subscriber (and contributor) on my own for six years.

I found this observation by the reviewer insightful:

Lyric musical director Enrique Mazzolaa didn’t exactly make the Lyric Orchestra swing Saturday night, mi dispeace, no, but he certainly pushed for a lush, enveloping volume, an accessibly immersive melodic experience that influenced the scores of Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams, and even the Scottish composer John Lunn, who wrote the music for “Downton Abbey”.

Mascagni’s lush music was proto-Hollywood scoring and the libretto by Giovanni Targioni–Tozzetti and Gujido Menascii involving love and betrayal in a Calabrian village was the prototype of the verismo genre, operas about ordinary folks that emerged as the European theater was also discovering the power of domestic realism.

Lawrence Johnson writes:

Lyric Opera has seen few house bows in recent years to match the sensational company debut by SeokJong Baek as Turiddu Saturday night. The young Korean tenor is the real thing, blessed with a big Italianate voice, ample squillo, intelligence and taste. From the yearning ardor of his offstage Siciliana that opens the opera, Baek was terrific across the board, impassioned in his confrontation with Santuzza, delivering a jaunty Brindisi, and conveying stark remorse and impending doom in his final aria. It was a genuine thrill to hear a voice of this quality cutting loose in Mascagni’s soaring music. The young singer also has dramatic chops, and Baek conveyed the persona of the impulsive, self-pitying Turiddu whose affair with another man’s wife leads to his sad fate.

As the rejected Santuzza, Yulia Matochkina was nearly as fine vocally. The Russian mezzo-soprano has an attractive, flexible and lustrous voice with enough reserves of power for this role. She sang an affecting “Voi lo sapete,” soared over the chorus’s Easter hymn (“Regina coeli”) and brought fervent desperation to her scene with Baek’s Turiddu.

Dramatically, Matochkina proved less inspired. The hectoring Santuzza is a tough role to carry off, but the mezzo’s melodramatic gestures and histrionics were over the top even for this emotionally unhinged character, for which revival director Peter McClintock must take some blame.

Quinn Kelsey is the only cast member to appear on both ends of Saturday’s double bill. With his suit and walking stick, Kelsey’s Alfio was more a bourgeois nouveau-riche owner of a successful trucking firm, than the usual T-shirt-clad ruffian who drives a horse cart.

Despite his mobster-like social promotion, Kelsey’s Alfio is clearly still someone you don’t want to mess with. Singing fluently with his dark, oakey tone, the baritone delivered a spirited account of his aria and conveyed the lurking violence beneath the character’s respectable exterior in his duet with Santuzza.

There has been no review from the Sun-Times as yet.

Members of Chicago’s City Council were surprised to find that the city plans to purchase the moribund Greyhound Bus Station in downtown Chicago. Melody Mercado reports at Block Club Chicago:

DOWNTOWN — A permanent fix for Chicago’s Greyhound bus station is on the horizon, with a $50 million line item allocated for the station in the city’s TIF financing reports that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office said will be used to buy the site.

Ald. Bill Conway (34th) said during a Department of Planning and Development budget hearing Tuesday that he “happened upon” the line item while reviewing tax-increment financing reports outlining ward projects. Page 61 of the report shows $35 million in 2026 and $15 million in 2027 allocated from the Canal/Congress TIF fund for a Greyhound bus station.

Conway also said Tuesday that he had received no communication from the city about this project before finding the line item.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Mayor’s Office confirmed to Block Club Chicago that the city intends to purchase and rehab the station at 630 W. Harrison St.

There are any number of worthwhile things that can be accomplished with enough money. The city doesn’t have any. Apparently, that isn’t stopping Mayor Johnson. By most accounts his present approval rating in Chicago is less than 30%. It has been as low as 6%. It’s the Chicago limbo! How low can he go?

I don’t know whether to quote this as an excellent example of sophistry or as an example of lying with numbers. In his retrospective on Nancy Pelosi’s career in office Matt Yglesias says:

When she became the #2 figure in the leadership hierarchy in 2002, she was the progressive voice in the councils of leadership. Prior to assuming that role, she was the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, which made her one of the most prominent congressional Democrats to buck the Bush administration on the invasion of Iraq.

By the numbers, most Democrats in Congress voted “no” on the war.

By the numbers the majority of Senate Democrats voted “aye” on the war. 29 of 50 Democratic senators voted to support the war. The final vote was 77 to 23. Only by combining House votes with Senate votes, a meaningless number, can Matt get to his numbers.

I opposed going to war against Iraq. It was clearly a sideshow, a distraction, in the War on Terror. And I did not find the weapons of mass destruction argument convincing.

In musing about the effects of artificial intelligence on jobs James Pethokoukis remarks:

A different approach is taken in the new paper “Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work.” The authors, from the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, decided to treat AI systems as if they were freelance workers on real jobs. They took 240 genuine Upwork-style projects—everything from data dashboards and 3D product designs to marketing videos—and provided the same briefs, files, and deliverables to both humans and AI models such as GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Human evaluators then judged whether the AI’s submissions would be acceptable to a paying client.

The result: Almost never, with a tiny 2.5 percent success rate “revealing a stark gap between progress on computer use evaluations and the ability to perform real and economically valuable work,” the paper concludes. Even the top-performing model, Chinese AI agent Manus, “earned” only about $1,700 out of $144,000 worth of human labor.

IMO he’s looking at this from the wrong perspective. The perspective he needs to consider is that of those making staffing decisions, the hiring and firing decisions. The CEOs.

In the technology sector alone in 2025 alone 100,000 layoffs have been announced. Those layoffs aren’t of minimum wage employees but of middle managers and developers at all levels (junior, senior, C-suite). Go beyond the technology sector and layoffs amounting to 1% of the total U. S. workforce have been announced in this year alone.

To take another sector the financial sector has announced roughly 50,000 layoffs just this year. I’m guessing those layoffs won’t be of either top management or those at the lowest levels of compensation but people with incomes well into six figures.

In other words in the near term it doesn’t make a smidgeon of difference. The only things that make any difference are whether the CEOs think they can use AI to trim expenses and if that will increase their stock value. There’s an old wisecrack—I don’t know who said it. “When it’s time to railroad everybody railroads.” A lot of companies are jumping on the AI bandwagon and devil take the hindmost.

A shocking incident is getting a lot of news coverage here in Chicago. Tahman Bradley, Marisa Rodriguez, and Brónagh Tumulty report at WGN:

CHICAGO — A day care teacher was taken into ICE custody Wednesday morning on the city’s North Side, WGN News has confirmed.

The incident happened around 7:05 a.m. at Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center, located at 2550 West Addison Street in the North Center neighborhood.

An SUV of federal agents followed the teacher’s vehicle to the day care, then proceeded to follow her into the building — where children were in attendance at the time.

According to Congressman Mike Quigley, the agents did not have a warrant.

“It’s just absolute terror. Why are you at a day care at 7 in the morning? This isn’t right. This isn’t American. This isn’t who we are. It’s an absolute travesty,” said Adam Gonzalez, a lawyer and rapid response team member.

The piece goes on to quote numerous others.

The press release at DHS.gov contradicts that report in a number of particulars:

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today released the following statement correcting inaccurate and false reports claiming that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers targeted a daycare in Chicago, Illinois.

This illegal alien from Colombia, Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, was encountered by Border Patrol on June 26, 2023 after she illegally crossed the southern border. The Biden administration released her into the U.S.

Just last month, Galeano reportedly paid for smugglers to illegally bring her 17-year-old and 16-year-old children into U.S. via the southern border. Facilitating human smuggling is a crime.

On October 19, 2025, the two children, a 16-year-old and 17-year-old, entered the U.S. illegally near El Paso, Texas. Customs and Border Protection apprehended the children, and they were processed as Unaccompanied Children and brought to a shelter in the Chicago area.

That is followed by a point-by-point litany:

“ICE law enforcement did NOT target a Daycare. Officers attempted to conduct a targeted traffic stop of this female illegal alien from Colombia. Officers attempted to pull over this vehicle, which was registered to a female illegal alien, with sirens and emergency lights, but the male driver refused to pull the vehicle over. Law enforcement pursued the vehicle before the assailant sped into a shopping plaza where he and the female passenger fled the vehicle. They ran into a daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare—recklessly endangering the children inside. The illegal alien female was arrested inside a vestibule, not in the school,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Upon arrest, she lied about her identity. The vehicle is registered in her name, though she claims that she didn’t know the man who was driving her car and just picked him up from a bus stop.?Facts including criminality and information on the male assailant are forthcoming and we will update the public with more information as soon as it becomes available.”

FALSE CLAIM: DHS law enforcement targeted a school or daycare center in Chicago.

THE FACTS: ICE targeted an illegal alien, Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, from Colombia, and attempted to pull her vehicle over as it was being driven by another individual and Galeano was in the passenger seat. The driver ignored law enforcement emergency lights and sirens and both of the illegal aliens fled the vehicle, attempting to barricade themselves inside of the daycare center.

FALSE CLAIM: ICE made an arrest inside a daycare center in Chicago.

THE FACTS: The male passenger barricaded himself inside the daycare center—recklessly endangering the children inside. However, Galeano could not enter through the second set of locked doors.

FALSE CLAIM: ICE arrested the illegal alien in front of children.

THE FACTS ICE did NOT arrest her in front of children.

FALSE CLAIM: ICE is not going after the ‘worst of the worst.’

THE FACTS: President Trump and Secretary Noem are restoring the rule of law in the U.S. and directing ICE to target criminal illegal aliens. More than 70% of all ICE arrests are of aliens with pending charges and convictions in the U.S.

FALSE CLAIM: Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano was in the country legally with employment authorization.

THE FACTS: Work authorization does NOT confer any type of legal status to be in the U.S. The illegal alien’s work authorization was approved by the Biden administration which exploited this loophole to help facilitate the invasion of our country.

I took the trouble of reproducing the format of the DHS press release because it is so unlike the format I would expect in federal government websites. More like something on Reddit.

My question is whom should we believe? My answer is that I don’t believe either account. I that the parties are doing their level best to make their cases and the truth is the first casualty. We’ll probably never know what actually happened.

There are three other points I want to make. First, I want to commend Molly DeVore and Mack Liederman at Block Club Chicago for publishing what is to my eye a good effort at reporting the facts in an objective manner.

Second, I suspect that although the ICE agents were within their rights in apprehending Ms. Santillana Galeano they probably did enter the daycare center and they did make some arrests in front of the children there. At the very least that does not paint the agency in the best light.

Third, there’s an unreported story. Rayito de Sol is a chain of Spanish-language immersion daycare centers located in majority Hispanic neighborhoods of Chicago. Having such things are well within people’s rights but their existence does contradict some key aspects of the prevailing narrative about the most recent groups of immigrants crossing our southern border. Despite significant efforts I was unable to identify a chain of Tamil immersion daycare centers in Chicago.

I want to call two fine posts on tariffs at SCOTUSBlog to your attention. The first, by Adam White, considers the recently executive-imposed tariffs in the context of the Court’s responsibilities:

When it comes to diplomatic and national security powers, the court often defers to the president “as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” If justices see the Trump tariffs as mainly a matter of foreign policy, and if they see IEEPA’s “regulate” provision as ambiguous, then perhaps they will give substantial deference to the president’s interpretation.

Then again, another way to see this case would be, first and foremost, as a case about Congress’ “power of the purse.” As we have seen in recent cases involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Communications Commission, Congress can delegate substantial fiscal power to the executive branch. (In CFPB v. Community Financial Services Association, it was perpetual funding from the Federal Reserve to the CFPB; in FCC v. Consumers’ Research, it was the power to impose fees on the telecommunications services industry.) Yet Trump’s highly publicized approach to tariffs may give the justices pause. The sheer enormity of many of these new taxes, the erratic changes he makes to them, their immediate effects on U.S. companies and consumers, and his repeated identification of tariffs as revenue for domestic policy programs make this at least as much a matter of domestic policy as it is a matter of foreign policy.

The second, from Amy Howe, analyzes the SCOTUS’s likely decision:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed skeptical of President Donald Trump’s authority to impose sweeping tariffs in a series of executive orders earlier this year. During more than two-and-a-half hours of oral arguments, a majority of the justices appeared to agree with the small businesses and states challenging the tariffs that they exceeded the powers given to the president under a federal law providing him the authority to regulate commerce during national emergencies created by foreign threats.

She proceeds to consider the justices’ views seriatim.

My own personal view, not rooted in existing law or precedent, is that the justices should rule that the Congress does not have the authority to delegate its own Constitutional responsibilities to any other branch of government. That won’t happen. The members of Congress want to delegate all of their Constitutional responsibilities to the executive and judicial branches so they can devote fulltime to their core responsibilities: running for re-election and posturing.,

I think they’re likely to limit the president’s authority to impose “emergency” tariffs somehow that does not include requiring the federal government to refund tariffs already collected.

At any rate read the two linked posts for background on the case. They’re highly informative.