The editors of the Washington Post consider the dire plight of Afghanistan:

The situation there is dire: Aid agencies say 3.7 million children and 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women are suffering from malnutrition. Children are experiencing “wasting” — slowly dying from hunger — because of a lack of therapeutic feeding.

concluding:

Donor fatigue with seemingly endless conflicts is undeniable. The U.N. badly needs reforms to streamline burdensome bureaucracy and wasteful spending.

Americans don’t want their tax dollars feeding terrorists. Careful controls must be imposed to ensure that food aid goes to women and children, not military-age males. But Americans are generous, and the crisis calls for compassion.

The world’s richest nation should not let the poorest people on earth die of hunger.

The editors are correct that these humanitarian disasters demand a response. The more important question is who should bear the burden? Responsibility should fall first on those governments whose policies have materially contributed to the crises. That responsibility includes the United States but it does not end there.

Between 2002 and 2021 the U. S. provided considerable humanitarian aid to Afghanistan—at least $7 billion. When military aid, reconstruction aid, and humanitarian aid are combined the U. S. provided a substantial portion of the country’s GDP during that period. When the Taliban reassumed control in 2021 the GDP fell correspondingly.

During the twenty years in which Western governments financed much of Afghanistan’s economy, widespread famine was largely averted. Once the Taliban regained power, foreign assistance collapsed, the economy contracted sharply, and predictable humanitarian disaster followed.

In the editorial the editors also note 13 other “hot spots” around the world with serious humanitarian calamities. Of the thirteen, the overwhelming majority involve armed Islamist movements, governments that have supported them, or conflicts in which such movements play a major role. The remaining countries are Myanmar, Haiti, and Madagascar.

I have a modest proposal. The U. S. should provide humanitarian assistance to Madagascar. Haiti presents a specific problem. Humanitarian aid cannot be delivered effectively while heavily armed criminal gangs dominate large portions of the country. The first humanitarian imperative is restoring sufficient security that food and medical assistance can actually reach civilians. If the United States chooses to assist Haiti, helping the Haitian government reestablish order should come before large-scale relief efforts.

China already supports Myanmar. The Chinese government should provide additional humanitarian aid to Myanmar to counter the bad results the government they have supported has produced.

Saudi Arabia has long provided ideological and financial support for radical madrassas and, at times, insurgent movements throughout the region that is the area primarily in crisis including Afghanistan. The Saudis should provide humanitarian assistance for the people in the countries presently roiled by the activities of radicals and insurgents.

Americans have demonstrated extraordinary generosity for decades. The question is not whether humanitarian aid should be provided. It is whether the burden should continue to fall primarily on the American taxpayer while governments whose policies have contributed to these crises escape comparable responsibility.

I’ve encountered a number of pieces in which the authors wrote that LLM AI never disagreed with them. That puzzles me.

I occasionally use ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. They’ve all disagreed with me at one time or another. When I have remonstrated with them they occasionally back down, particularly when I point out the logical flaws in their statements. Even more occasionally they’ve been flatly wrong. When I point that out, they’ve acknowledged that.

One of the great things about contradicting an LLM AI model is that I can do so harshly without worrying about its feelings.

I don’t think the proper lesson from this is that the models aren’t useful. It’s that they are easy to misuse.

The first successful municipal water treatment plant in the United States was built in 1872 in Poughkeepsie, New York. It was not connected to the public Internet.

The largest municipal water treatment plant in the United States was the Jardine Water Treatment Plant built in the 1960s in Chicago, Illinois. It was not connected to the public Internet. It is still operational and remains the large municipal water treatment plant in the U. S.

There are probably around 150,000 municipal water treatment plants in the U. S. nationwide according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Cyberattacks on municipal water treatment facilities have been much in the news lately. U. S. officials suspect Iran-backed hackers are responsible. For example, at CBS Nicole Sganga reports that such cyberattacks have been reported in at least 12 states:

Cyberattacks on U.S. water systems that officials suspect may be linked to Iran-backed hackers have been reported in at least a dozen states, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News on Wednesday.

Those states include Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, New Jersey and South Dakota. In Minnesota specifically, more than 30 community water systems were impacted, CBS News previously learned.

In Georgia, the Clayton County Water Authority, which serves 300,000 customers in the Atlanta area, said cyber activity last month caused a water pressure drop and forced the agency to issue a boil water advisory. Service was restored within hours, however.

Some utilities have lost critical remote-control capabilities, forcing operators to switch to manual mode. In several cases, the hackers gained remote access to pumps, valves and water pressure.

So far, according to officials, the cyberattacks have had no impact on drinking water, which has remained safe.

Connection to the public Internet is not an operational necessity. It is merely one possible engineering choice, not an inherent requirement of modern water treatment.

Direct connections between operational control systems and the public Internet should be prohibited by law. Where remote access is genuinely necessary, it should occur through dedicated, authenticated, cryptographically protected communications over private networks designed so that a compromise of the public Internet cannot directly compromise plant operations. Security should be achieved primarily through system architecture, not through perfect human behavior.

President Trump’s threat to “decapitate” Iran if no agreement is reached raised a question for me: How do you decapitate an organization that has no single head?

One lesson of the conflict so far is that Iran’s military and political structure appears decentralized enough to continue functioning despite heavy losses among senior leaders. Leadership strikes may disrupt operations but they have not produced collapse.

A prolonged war of attrition could eventually deplete Iran’s missiles and drones. Whether it would similarly deplete the willingness of people to continue resisting is a much more difficult question.

Another major officer in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration has resigned. That makes three in less than a month. Jasmine Minor and Sarah Schulte report at ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Chicago Budget Director Annette Guzman is resigning from Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration as the city prepares for another challenging budget season.

Johnson said Guzman, who has been with his administration since he took office, is leaving City Hall to care for her ailing mother.

“She has certainly helped us navigate some of the most significant fiscal challenges that our city has faced,” Johnson said.

Both the Chief Financial Officer and the Budget Director have resigned in the last several weeks. I have little doubt that both intend to spend more time with their families.

In addition the field of candidates to replace Mayor Johnson is substantial. It includes the Illinois Secretary of State, the Cook County Treasurer, the Illinois Comptroller, and my Congressman, Mike Quigley, just to name a few. My greatest concern is that in such a large field the “anybody but Johnson” votes will divide the vote and Johnson will be re-elected.

His present approval rating in Chicago is 23% and only 13% of Chicagoans want him to run again.

During the month of August Turner Classic Movies (TCM) typically devotes its programming on each day to a different Hollywood star. The first half dozen stars for this month are Doris Day, Humphrey Bogart, June Allyson, Glenn Ford, Joan Bennett, and Diane Keaton. Today’s “Star of the Day” is June Allyson. If you get TCM in general they’re a good opportunity to see the movies of individual stars, some rarely broadcast. For the whole list see here.

There are some good Doris Day pictures, as documents if nothing else. For example, The Pajama Game captured the performances of much of the Broadway cast of the show. Except that Doris Day replaced Janis Paige as Babe. I would rather have seen Janis Paige but you can’t have everything.

At the risk of being unkind is there such a thing as a good June Allyson picture? They just finished showing a movie I’ve never seen: The Secret Heart. In it June Allyson portrayed a 14 year old. When it was made she was 29 years old. Watching it required a certain suspension of disbelief. I’ve never seen the movie from beginning to end and I suspect I never will.

On the other hand yesterday they showed Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and others of Bogart’s best.

I believe in free markets. I think they remain the most effective mechanism for organizing voluntary exchange, and I believe capitalism has produced extraordinary increases in prosperity. At the same time, command economies have repeatedly demonstrated a tendency toward inefficiency and toward concentrating power and privilege in relatively few hands.

All of that notwithstanding John Gordon Steele’s recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on the history of capitalism left a sour taste in my mouth. Here’s his opening paragraph:

The grandeur of the Roman Empire was built on the aggregation of wealth. Using its superior military organization, Rome conquered its neighbors, took their gold and silver and sold their populations into slavery. When the empire ran out of neighbors, the Roman economy began to falter.

The Roman economy was not primarily a plunder economy. It rested on agriculture, taxation, and commerce. The Rhine-Danube frontier roughly marked the limits of the Mediterranean-style agriculture and urbanized populations that Rome knew how to administer and tax.

The populations of conquered lands remained free provincials who paid taxes to the Romans. The Romans rarely enslaved whole populations. Enslaving their populations was, however, a typical punishment for cities that resisted them.

Furthermore, Rome persisted for hundreds of years after it had reached the limits of its conquests.

Having disposed of Rome in a few sweeping sentences, Steele turns to the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism, where his account becomes more persuasive but also more selective. Much of the balance of his op-ed consists of a list of notable Britons and Americans over the last 150 years and their contributions to the English and American peoples. Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt and their railroads. Isaac Singer’s invention of the sewing machine that reduced the amount of time necessary to make a shirt from 16 hours to 2. Steel. Computers. Microprocessors.

Consider this passage:

When the PC was wedded to the Internet, the world changed profoundly in only a couple of decades. Jeff Bezos saw how the new technology could revolutionize retailing again.

I was immediately reminded of Matt Yglesias’s wisecrack to the effect that Amazon was “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers”. Now it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that Amazon was a web services company with a near-break-even retail adjunct.

Which brings me to the core of my objection. Mr. Steele invokes the Forbes 400, a list of the wealthiest individuals. Of the Forbes 400 at least a third derived their fortunes from finance, real estate, or insurance. Their contribution lies primarily in allocating existing capital rather than expanding productive capacity directly. Railroads, steel mills, sewing machines, computers, and microprocessors increased society’s productive capacity. By contrast, much of modern finance specializes in allocating capital, pricing risk, and trading existing assets. Those services are valuable, but the connection between their profits and broad increases in productivity is often less obvious. And I wonder how many of those fortunes would have reached their present scale absent what market participants came to call the “Greenspan put”—the expectation that the Federal Reserve would intervene aggressively to cushion major declines in financial asset prices.

The modern financial system excels at pricing, trading, leveraging, and repricing existing assets. It is less obvious that it channels a correspondingly large share of national wealth into new productive investment. If investors expect monetary policy to cushion major declines in financial asset prices, the incentives may increasingly favor holding and trading appreciating assets over financing new productive enterprises. Mr. Steele celebrates capitalism because it rewarded those who dramatically increased society’s productive capacity. I share that admiration. My concern is that an increasing share of modern wealth derives not from creating new productive capacity but from owning, financing, and trading existing assets. If that is true, then the incentives of modern capitalism have shifted in ways that deserve far more attention than Mr. Steele gives them.

I did not know whether to laugh or to cry when I heard that the Chicago Public Schools planned to balance its budget by relying on additional state spending. From Paris Schutz NBC 5 Chicago:

The Chicago Board of Education approved an amended $10 billion budget plan that relies on $150 million in additional funding from the state on Thursday, despite warnings that it would be out of balance and could lead to drastic mid-year cuts and layoffs.

A marathon and contentious Chicago Board of Education meeting came down to the wire after hours of debate, testimony, meetings, and lobbying.

“I’m asking the board to pass my budget,” said CPS CEO Macquline King in her opening statements, warning that failure to pass by Thursday’s deadline could lead to a delay in the start of the upcoming school year and a failure to meet payroll in the immediate term.

This budget is built on funding that has not been approved. Unless the state ultimately provides that money, CPS will face the same fiscal problem later in the year.

IMO CPS’s first line of recourse for balancing the budget should be reducing excess capacity. According to Illinois Policy the CPS has nearly 300 schools that are underutilized (meaning a utilization of 70% or less) including a high school designed for 1,000 students with fewer than 30. The cost to operate that high school is estimated at $55,000 per student. Maintaining facilities that empty diverts money from classrooms and places additional pressure on taxpayers.

Given those figures, refusing even to consider substantial consolidation appears fiscally irresponsible.

It also presents an interesting conundrum. The political question is whether Gov. Pritzker will support additional aid for CPS. Outside Chicago, further funding for the district is unlikely to be popular. Supporting higher taxes or additional borrowing to finance it could also carry political costs. Whether those considerations outweigh pressure from Chicago remains to be seen.

I thought it prudent not to bundle this into my last post on the war with Iran. Last month President Trump announced and signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think that was imprudent. Have we learned nothing?

When the Shah was in control of Iran we aided Iran in its own nuclear development program. The Shah was overthrown in 1979 and ever since we have opposed the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions. To me at least the moral of the story was clear: we shouldn’t depend on authoritarian states to remain aligned with us indefinitely. Governments change, sometimes literally overnight, and yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s adversary.

The same lesson applies to Saudi Arabia.