What do you think of the Obama Administration’s failure to have the president, vice president, or an cabinet member take part in the large solidarity rally that took place in Paris yesterday? In my view it was pretty typical of this administration: terrible atmospherics but materially insignificant.

As usual the president’s friends will fall over themselves defending him while his enemies make idiots of themselves attacking.

What do you think?

I would like to commend a Point/Counter-Point style pair of articles at New York Magazine to your attention. In his article, “History Will Be Very Kind”, Jonathan Chair defends the president’s legacy:

It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama, who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters of his presidency. But if it isn’t, it will be for a highly ironic reason: Our historical memory tends to romance, too. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fatherly reassurance, a youthful Kennedy tossing footballs on the White House lawn, Reagan on horseback—the craving for emotional sustenance and satisfying drama runs deep. Though the parade of Obama’s Katrinas will all be (and mostly already have been) consigned to the forgotten afterlife of cable-news ephemera, it is not yet certain whether this president can bind his achievements into any heroic narrative.

while in his article, “Why History Will Eviscerate Him”, Christopher Caldwell declaims:

Obama’s legacy is one of means, not ends. He has laid the groundwork for a political order less answerable to voters. His delay of the Obamacare employer mandate by fiat, his provision of working papers to immigrants by executive order—these are not applications of old tricks but dangerous constitutional innovations. After last fall’s electoral rout, the president claimed to have “heard” (presumably to speak on behalf of) the two-thirds of people who didn’t vote. And he has forged a partnership with the country’s rich—not the high-earning professionals calumniated in populist oratory (including his own) but the really existing Silicon Valley and Wall Street plutocracy.

I think the truth will be somewhere in between. Like Kennedy, for the next generation or so President Obama will be lionized by historians but as the glamor fades, a century or more in the future, I think he will be a footnote, noted as the first African American president but for little else. By then his signature domestic achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will either have been abandoned or transformed beyond recognition and be seen as a wan precursor of the system then in place.

Depending on your views that is either treating the president kindly or, in a president who has patently had his eye on his legacy since the moment of his election to office, eviscerate him. So I guess they’re both right.

There has been an arson attack on the offices of Hamburger Morgenpost, a German tabloid that re-ran the caricatures of Mohammed originally published in Charlie Hebdo:

Berlin (AFP) – A German tabloid that paid tribute to those killed at Charlie Hebdo by reprinting cartoons from the French satirical paper mocking the Prophet Mohammed was firebombed Sunday, police said.

With security services on high alert after a jihadist killing spree in Paris, police in the northern German port city of Hamburg said no one was at the headquarters of the regional daily Hamburger Morgenpost at the time of the attack, which caused only slight damage.

In France more than a million people have participated in demonstrations in solidarity with the French people and in tribute to the French cartoonists murdered in the terrorist attack earlier this week:

More than a million people have taken part in a unity march in Paris, after 17 people were killed during three days of deadly attacks in France’s capital.

The government has described it as the largest march in the country’s history.

More than 40 world leaders joined the start of the march, linking arms in an act of solidarity.

The marchers wanted to demonstrate unity after the attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, police officers, and a kosher supermarket.

“Paris is the capital of the world today,” French leader Francois Hollande said.

Other solidarity marches took place in London, Madrid, Cairo, Montreal, Beirut, Sydney and Tokyo. For more news and opinions on the incidents described see memeorandum.

The word used in the AFP headline in English for the attack in Germany is “firebombing”. The German language press seems to be using the word Brandanschlag, literally “fire attack” although a better translation into English would be “arson attack”, which seems to be a fair description of what happened.

The editors of Bloomberg remark on European official reaction to the incidents, which largely consists of proposing better databases to monitor travel and stronger security apparatus:

What is the best way for authorities to deal with any of the thousands of people they find clamoring for blood in Internet chat rooms? And how does the answer to that question change as technology makes relatively simple plots easier to hatch and faster to execute?

Law enforcement can certainly get better (despite last week’s impressive operation, France’s security services have had their share of embarrassments lately). And new tools, such as a common database for air passengers entering and leaving the EU, may prove useful.

Yet Islamist terrorism is a menace that European nations, with their colonial histories and large Muslim populations, will be fighting for years if not decades to come. Defeating it is a task larger than any security service. The hatred that motivated this attack, and others like it, can only be defeated by society itself.

I have been asked what I think the West should do in response to the incidents. In preface I should mention that I object to the framing. I do not believe there is a “West” in any meaningful sense. Whom does it include? Western Europe, the British Commonwealth, Canada, the U. S., Japan, and Israel? More? Less? I think that the term was originally coined to distinguish between Greece on the one hand and the Persian Empire on the other and was resurrected at the turn of the last century to unite the United States with the older, presumably more sophisticated United Kingdom and Continental Western Europe. After World War I, it received new currency to tie the United States to Western Europe against Russia and its satellites. I think that distinction has largely lost its meaning and is no longer helpful to the United States.

However, I’ll divide my response into two questions. What should we (the United States) do? What should the countries of Europe do?

I don’t think we should do anything. France has its own distinct issues, quite different from ours. France is quite capable of dealing with its own problems and its citizens need to decide what response if any is appropriate.

What should the countries of Europe do? They really have only three alternatives. They can push their Muslim populations farther away possibly alienating and radicalizing them in the process, they can do nothing and determine that occasional mass murders by radical members of that population are an acceptable risk, or they can take affirmative steps to integrate their Muslim populations more closely into their societies.

I think it is up to the citizens of those countries to decide what kind of countries they wish to be. My preference would be that they accept their Muslim populations whether citizen or resident, not relegating them to second class status as is too frequently the case but that’s not a decision for me, an American, to make. They should do as they think best in the full knowledge that whatever they decide will have implications.

I suspect that no one will pay any attention to Rober VerBruggen’s findings about the rate at which young black men are killed by police:

Essentially, once you make any plausible attempt to adjust for violent-crime rates, the disparity in police killings disappears. This has now been shown with homicide data from the Supplementary Homicide Report, violent-crime statistics from the National Crime Victimization Survey, and cop-killer numbers from the FBI.

Without denying that white racism exists, I do not believe that the facts support the notion that the rate of killing of young black men by the police is caused by racism. I think it’s caused by the high rates of violent crime among young urban black men which itself has complex causes of which white racism isn’t irrelevant but probably isn’t the most important cause.

I want to tell you about a journey I engaged in today. Today’s journey began with this article by British historian Tom Holland about what he experienced when he made a documentary which was aired on the BBC which questioned the historicity of the Mohammed story. Jews and Christians have a lot invested in the historicity of their holy books but those pale in comparison with the investement that Muslims have in the historicity not only of the Qur’an but the entire corpus of stories, traditions, and teachings about Mohammed. Dr. Holland writes:

Never before, though, had it—or, indeed, any other British TV channel—aired a documentary questioning the basis of what most Muslims believed about the origins of their faith. I still remember a feeling of almost physical panic as I stood on the battlements of an abandoned Roman city in the Negev Desert and raised the possibility, on camera, that Muhammad might not have come from Mecca. The director, the brilliant and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Sim, had aimed to make me and my anxieties about what I was doing a part of the film, and he more than succeeded. There is barely a shot in the documentary in which I do not look mildly terrified.

Nevertheless, by the time the program finally aired in late August 2012, I had come to feel more sanguine about its prospects. My book had come out four months before, and I had not felt threatened in any way. Reviews had been mixed, which was no surprise considering how controversial the subject matter was: Some were adulatory, some vituperative. Muslim critics, without exception, had hated it. None, though, to my relief, had disputed my right to subject the origins of Islam to historical inquiry and to publish my conclusions. For that reason, as I looked ahead to the airing of the documentary, I felt tolerably confident that no one would get too upset.

It didn’t take long for me to realize my mistake. Just a few minutes into the broadcast, my Twitter stream was going up in smoke. By the time the show ended, the death threats were coming in thick and fast—and not just against me but against my family as well. Channel 4 was also deluged with protests. A private screening scheduled for assorted movers and shakers had to be canceled after the police warned that they couldn’t guarantee the security of those attending the event. Because many of the invitees had been journalists, this naturally gave the controversy a new lease of life.

I was curious so I began to do a little research. If you’re interested you can watch the documentary yourself on YouTube. However, my curiosity didn’t end there.

Some of the reaction is pretty hyperventilated but not all. One criticism was that Dr. Holland had not taken Muslim sources into account but the criticism I found most most telling was that Dr. Holland had not taken many other non-Muslim sources into account. This list of sources, collected in the Wikipedia article on the book, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It made pretty interesting reading and I plan to look into some of them more deeply. And I found this criticism in The Arab Review pretty sensible:

Anyone who tells you that they know anything for certain about the 7th century is lying to you.
This is the basis of Tom Holland’s recent documentary Islam: The Untold Story, based on his book In the Shadow of the Sword. The documentary – to abridge it considerably – argues that the Prophet Mohammed was not from Mecca, but more likely from the present day Israel-Jordan-Palestine area. Holland also says that Islam, as a fully formed religion, did not emerge until many years after the death of Mohammed.
The reaction on Twitter from the Muslim community has been almost universally negative. Some vitriolic, others more measured in their response, but all agree that Holland’s documentary is either wrong or ill-researched. It is this reaction that has thus far dominated much of the comment about the programme.
I do not want to lie to you so I will not claim any specialist knowledge of the 7th century, but for my part, I still believe that Mohammed came from Mecca. As for the point that early Islam had a fluid identity and traditions about the prophet sometimes differ considerably, I think many Muslims would agree with such an assertion. After all, there is a whole branch of Muslim scholarship that has been dedicated to the sole task of evaluating the reliability of stories about the prophet. This Science of Hadith (sometimes simply called ‘The Science’) devotes all its efforts to finding out which stories are true and which spurious.

I may be misinformed but my impression is that the Qur’an has not been subjected to the intensive sort of analysis to which the Hebrew Bible and New Testament have been subjected over the period of last three or four hundred years.

My own nonbeliever’s and barely informed view is that the Qur’an was probably written by people, may be a compilation of works that had been around in the oral tradition for quite a while, and that, although I believe that Mohammed was a historical person, we’ll never be truly certain where or when he was born. My intuition is that there are aspects of Islam that are reactions to the religious conflicts of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries AD.

I also suspect that somewhere there are ancient, buried copies of the Qur’an that will someday be unearthed and avoid destruction that will bear out the idea that the Qur’an, like the Bible, developed over time.

I increasingly find that the world resembles nothing so much as one of those “How Many Things Can You Find Wrong in This Picture?” puzzles. My latest example is a statement by the executive directors of the Teachers Retirement System, the pension fund for retired Illinois teachers (other than Chicago teachers who have their own fund):

You can click here to open the document (PDF) in another window.

If you’re not familiar with some of the terminology being used the strategy that the state legislature adopted in an attempt to keep the pension fund solvent was to divide teachers into two “tiers”, those who had contributed to the TRS before January 1, 2011 and those who began contributing to the fund afterwards.

Is it my imagination or is the director’s message very long on whining and very short on solutions?

Here’s a summary of the situation:

1. The TRS doesn’t have enough money to keep paying all of those to be paid from the fund unless something changes.
2. The Illinois Constitution prevents the state legislature from reducing the fund’s commitments.
3. Those who’ve contributed to the fund prior to January 1, 2011 aren’t willing to reduce what they expect to receive so that newly hired teachers, staff, etc. can receive more.
4. The people of Illinois aren’t willing to pay more taxes to pay into the fund.

I could go into a lengthy explanation of how we got into the fix we’re in but I’ll just summarize it this way: we didn’t pay enough into the fund, particularly while Rod Blagojevich was governor. There were other priorities.

I’d have my own priorities for fixing the present system. For example, I’d put a ban on “double-dipping”, collecting more than one pension from the state, and I’d amend the constitution to do it if necessary. I’d also put a cap on the wages that can be paid by the state and on the size of a pension to be paid by the state, amending the constitution to do it if necessary. Right now in some cases the state is paying salaries in seven figures and pensions high into six figures.

That would be a start. There are all sorts of other commonsense steps that could be taken but right now we’re at an impasse. Our problem in Illinois is not a Democrats vs. Republicans thing. It’s a politicians’ perfidy thing.

Addressing the same topic as did the WP editors, the editors of the Wall Street Journal provide their own prescriptions to dealing with radical Islamist terrorism:

It’s tempting but probably wrong to think that France has a unique jihadist problem because of its relatively large Muslim population (about 7.5% of the country) and the immigrant ghettoes where they congregate. These certainly are breeding grounds for radicalism. Yet the United Kingdom has Birmingham, the Islamist petri dish for the London subway bombers, and the U.S. sheltered the killer Tsarnaevs in Boston and the Somali immigrants in Minnesota who’ve gone to Syria.

America may have a better historical record of assimilating diverse peoples, but that was when the U.S. had a less fragmented national culture and an elite that was more confident in Western values. The Internet, for all its benefits, also makes it possible for young men in the West to be inspired or recruited by jihadist networks around the world.

It’s hard for me to come up with a prescription more wrong-headed than those of the WSJ’s editors: they want more military action (against DAESH in Syria and Iraq) and heightened surveillance. Not only is increased surveillance impractical as the murders in France have shown us, what do they envision? A Stasi that spies on everybody all of the time? And I would have thought that the last fifteen years might have taught us the lesson that not every problem can be solved by applying enough force.

The editors of the Washington Post lament the problems faced by France and other European countries:

The challenge for France’s leaders, and its European Union neighbors, will now be complex. They must promote greater security, defend free speech and fight anti-Semitism. But they must also head off a backlash against a disadvantaged and alienated minority Muslim population that already is the target of populist demagogues.

and detect a similarity between the Tsarnaev brothers, presumed perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the Kouachi brothers, presumed murderers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and editorial staff:

The attacks offer intriguing parallels to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Both cases involved brothers from immigrant Muslim families who grew alienated and embraced radical Islam. In both cases, the brothers led police on bloody manhunts. And they were both known to authorities as suspected militants prior to the attacks. The French brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, were part of a radical network first organized a decade ago in an immigrant-dense Paris slum; another member of the group was killed Friday after taking hostages in a kosher supermarket, while his female partner was still at large.

The French case, like that of Boston, shows the difficulty of preventing assaults by militants who may be inspired by al-Qaeda or other foreign extremist groups but who blend in among fellow citizens — including the vast majority of Muslims who are peaceful and law-abiding. One of the Kouachi brothers had been imprisoned for attempting to travel to Iraq to fight U.S. forces in 2005, while the other was known to have visited Yemen in 2011 and trained with al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch. That will lead to reasonable questions as to why French police did not have the brothers under closer surveillance. But hundreds of French citizens have traveled to the Middle East to support extremist groups; in a democratic society, it is not easy to continuously monitor all of them.

France’s Muslim population is mostly of long standing, the emigration from France’s former African colonies having begun in the 1940s and 50s. Most of France’s Muslims are French citizens, most born French citizens. France’s Muslim population has predominantly been quite secularized. Islamist radicalization is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Not enough note is being taken of France’s 1,400 Muslim citizens who have gone to fight with DAESH in Syria and Iraq or the unknown number of its citizens who have received training from Al Qaeda’s Algerian or Yemeni affiliates and, presumably, become more radicalized during the experience. As the experience with the Kouachi brothers underscores, they cannot all be watched all of the time.

None of France’s alternatives are particularly easy or appealing. My hope would be that France deal with its social problems in which despite their French birth and citizenship its Muslim population is all too frequently relegated to second class citizen status. In other words I would hope they are brought closer rather than being pushed farther away but it is France’s problem to solve.

In my view the worst case outcome is not capitulation to radical Muslim demands or Muslimization but one in which the most radical views of both sides dictate the agenda.

An op-ed by A. W. Gaffney on the failure of Vermont’s proposed single-payer plan made a point I hadn’t thought of before. Here’s the kernel of the point:

The Shumlin plan, for instance, didn’t integrate either Medicare or TRICARE into its “Green Mountain Care” plan, and was set to allow “ERISA employers” (big businesses that self-employ their workers) to continue providing private health insurance (albeit while still having to pay taxes for the public system, which they didn’t seem to like).

As a result, Vermont would have still had multiple insurers, or “payers,” and hence, it wouldn’t have “single-payer”; the plan would have additionally accommodated other private plans, like Medicare Advantage and “Part D” drug plans.

Unfortunately, this is a profound problem, for the administrative simplicity of single-payer plans is the crucial source of the large savings these systems can achieve. The Harvard School of Public Health study that put forth the original “public-private single-payer” reform proposal for Vermont, for instance, estimated some $580 million in savings from a Vermont single-payer-like system for 2015, savings which the Shumlin administration now asserts are not “practical to achieve.”

There are three problems being highlighted here. One is economic, one is administrative and legal, and the third is political.

The administrative and legal problem is that state moves towards single-payer can’t proceed without the permission and cooperation of the federal government. The federal government has a multiplicity of plans: Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, and now the PPACA. Reconciling the requirements of these plans is a daunting and perhaps impossible task.

The political problem is that the beneficiaries of these various plans will oppose any aspect of a prospective plan that isn’t as good or better than the plan they already have.

The economic problem is how in the heck do you pay for a plan that’s better (read: more expensive) in every way than Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, the PPACA, and private insurance?

The article outlines the varying paths that countries have taken to national healthcare systems. This seems like a good point at which to repeat something I’ve mentioned before: no country as large and diverse as we are with healthcare costs as high as we pay has ever adopted a national healthcare system. Might we? Who knows? I strongly suspect it will be much more difficult than its supporters think.