The Daily Mail is reporting that DNA evidence has unmasked Jack the Ripper after 126 years:

I reasoned that it made no sense for Eddowes to have owned the expensive shawl herself; this was a woman so poor she had pawned her shoes the day before her murder. But could the Ripper have brought the shawl with him and left it as an obscure clue about when he was planning to strike next? It was just a hunch, and far from proof of anything, but it set me off on my journey.

Before buying it, I spoke to Alan McCormack, the officer in charge of the Crime Museum, also known as the Black Museum. He told me the police had always believed they knew the identity of the Ripper. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, the officer in charge of the investigation, had named him in his notes: Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew who had fled to London with his family, escaping the Russian pogroms, in the early 1880s.

Kosminski has always been one of the three most credible suspects. He is often described as having been a hairdresser in Whitechapel, the occupation written on his admission papers to the workhouse in 1890. What is certain is he was seriously mentally ill, probably a paranoid schizophrenic who suffered auditory hallucinations and described as a misogynist prone to ‘self-abuse’ – a euphemism for masturbation.

I have no idea how credible any of this is but if you have even the slightest interest in Ripperology the article makes for fascinating reading.

A bit disappointing that it wasn’t a member of the royal family.

I always love this sort of article. Here’s a piece from Wired on the mathematics (and physics) of holding a slice of pizza:

Behind this pizza trick lies a powerful mathematical result about curved surfaces, one that’s so startling that its discoverer, the mathematical genius Carl Friedrich Gauss, named it Theorema Egregium, Latin for excellent or remarkable theorem.

with a bonus feature on supporting a can of beans with an ordinary piece of paper.

Gauss is one of the great geniuses of history, a truly wonderful and divergent thinker. It’s a shame that more people aren’t aware of that remarkable man and his many contributions.

From the department of “we’re too warlike for some and not nearly warlike enough for others”, Robert Kagan, unsurprisingly, takes the latter view:

The wise men and women of our own time insist that this history is irrelevant. They tell us, when they are not announcing America’s irrevocable decline, that our adversaries are too weak to pose a real threat, even as they pile victory upon victory. Russia is a declining power, they argue. But then, Russia has been declining for 400 years. Can declining powers not wreak havoc? Does it help us to know that, in retrospect, Japan lacked the wealth and power to win the war it started in 1941?

Let us hope that those who urge calm are right, but it is hard to avoid the impression that we have already had our 1931. As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.

I would not be surprised at all at “how quickly things fall apart”. What would surprise me is if they were our things.

I think a good portion of the world is in grave danger of falling apart. As I persist in reminding people there is a swathe of territory in the Middle East 3,000 miles wide that comes pre-fallen, another similar swathe in Africa, and others in South America. Or must you have fallen together in order to fall apart?

Whatever the case, if Germany doesn’t find the situation in Ukraine sufficiently urgent to trim its oil and gas trade with Russia and Turkey doesn’t worry enough about the situation in Iraq and Syria to take action, it’s unclear why we should see the situations in those places as much more urgent. I can, however, see why Germany, Turkey, France, and the United Kingdom, just to name a few, not to mention many in the U. S. might want us to see those situations as in extreme need of intervention.

After two weeks in the hotel, my stay over here has been extended by one week and they’ve decided to change my accommodations. I have moved from the hotel to an apartment and I couldn’t be more delighted.

I’m now in a spacious two bedroom apartment, each bedroom with en suite as they say over here, meaning with attached bath. It’s actually quite luxurious and best of all from my point of view: I have a kitchen.

My apartment is located in a row of what must have been prosperous Regency row houses no more than a few blocks from city center. Right in city center there’s a large, nice grocery store where I picked up a few essentials: oatmeal, sausages, toothpaste, strawberries, beer, bread. A few doors down from the supermarket there was a cheesemonger (French as it turned out) from whom I purchased a nice selection of local cheeses, very reasonably priced as well as some fresh eggs. If you’re interested the cheeses are Bath Blue, a locally made Brie-style soft cheese which I had sampled elsewhere and found delicious, and Wyfe of Bath, a locally made Gouda-style cheese. I will have a nice dinner of cheese, bread, and beer.

A few blocks from the cheesemonger I found a tea shop that had been recommended to me. I purchased several different varieties of loose tea. With that and the P. G. Tips, I feel like I’m settling in.

There’s also been quite a bit of speculation lately over what if any is the president’s strategic vision. For example, the editors of the Wall Street Journal wonder:

Is the administration’s foreign-policy apparatus as rudderless, ad hoc and faux-sophisticated as it looks?

Is the president starting to fear, deep down, that maybe he is the junior varsity?

Who at this key moment is the president talking to? The world of American foreign-policy professionals is populated by some brilliant and accomplished men and women who’ve been through the wars. Is he seeking their counsel?

The problem is really not that the president, as he said, does not yet have a strategy. It is that the world doesn’t know and the country doesn’t know how, deep down, he thinks about the Islamic State. What is its historical meaning and import? Is it something new that requires new thinking? Is it a game-changer in the region? Does it, alone or in league with others, actually threaten the United States? Or are the threats more like bluster as it attracts new members from throughout the world and work to hold the ground it’s seized?

What is the president internally committed to doing? Is he dodging a decision or has he made one?

What has more than five years of White House experience taught him? All presidents learn on the job, but because he tends to blame others for his woes and, like many of his predecessors, avoids public reflection on his mistakes, we don’t know how events have shaped his thinking. For instance: Deciding against his political nature to be militarily proactive and topple Moammar Gadhafi of Libya in 2011 was, pretty clearly, a mistake. Does he think so? A monstrous little dictator was removed, which left an opening for people who were more monstrous still, who murdered our ambassador, burnt our consulate in Benghazi and have now run us out of Tripoli. What did the president absorb from this that now affects his thinking?

Mr. Obama loudly insisted Bashar Assad of Syria must go, then did nothing to help his opponents. Assad was thus turned from an often dangerous and duplicitous adversary to an embittered and enraged formal foe. Was that progress? How does it fit into the current drama? Does Mr. Obama fear that if the U.S. goes after the Islamic State in northern Syria it will strengthen Assad’s position? If so, should it be the most crucial and immediate fear? Isn’t the Islamic State a more dangerous and pressing threat? If it is, can a deal be made with Syria for the U.S. to move militarily for a limited time within the relevant part of that nation?

Does Mr. Obama conflate “go back to Iraq” with “move decisively against ISIS through bombing, with limited troops on the ground guiding and gathering intelligence”? Does he believe these are the same thing? If so, why?

An overriding question: To what extent will the passage of time erode the U.S.’s ability to move effectively and decisively? Does the chance of effectiveness recede as the days pass? Is the administration working with its eye on the clock?

As I have said before I think the president has a political strategy rather than a policy strategy. Where does “don’t bluster” fit into “don’t do stupid sh*t”?

Reflecting on the beheadings of Americans in Syria and the experiences of the last thirteen years, Fareed Zakaria writes:

What did I miss in that essay 13 years ago? The fragility of these countries. I didn’t recognize that if the dictatorships faltered, the state could collapse, and that beneath the state there was no civil society — nor, in fact, a real nation. Once chaos reigned across the Middle East, people reached not for their national identities — Iraqi, Syrian — but for much older ones: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd and Arab.

How can he possibly not have known? That was obvious even to people with a smattering of ignorance about the region.

I do disagree with one other thing he writes: “It’s not an Islam problem but an Arab problem.” I don’t think it’s an Arab problem, either. I think it’s a traditional society vs. modernity problem. In that sense it’s an Islam problem and an Arab problem but not limited to those.

I find it truly remarkable that President Obama should be surprised at the circumstances he has faced during his term of office. It is a movie he has seen before.

On April 29, 1983, just a few years before a newly-minted Harvard Law graduate graduate of Columbia University arrived in Chicago to take a job as a community organizer at a church-based not-for-profit, Harold Washington became mayor of Chicago, the first non-white to do so. He immediately faced strident, angry opposition from a faction of the Chicago City Council known as the “Vrdolyak 29”. The group was lead by Ed Vrdolyak, Ed Burke, and parks superintendent Ed Kelly and supported by mayor-to-be Richie Daley, Congressman Dan Rostenkowsky, and William Lipinsky (father of now-Congressman Dan Lipinsky).

Anything President Obama has endured from the Republican House majority pales in comparison with what Harold Washington experienced in what has been termed the Council Wars. It consisted not only of opposition but invective, racial slurs, and law suits.

Twenty-nine is a majority of the Chicago City Council but not enough to override a mayoral veto. Gridlock took hold.

I think it is a natural part of the DNA of any politician to think that the problems of his predecessors could never happen to him, that he is far better than that, but the parallels are just too close to ignore and I can only see a failure to learn from the experiences of others as a basic miscalculation.

Harold Washington died in office in 1987, was succeeded by Eugene Sawyer who served out the balance of Washington’s term and we haven’t had a black mayor since. Chicago’s changing demographics may make it difficult for any other black candidate although I think that Chicago Teacher’s Union president Karen Lewis has a good chance if she actually runs.

You may recall that for years I have maintained that the so-called “college wage premium”, the increase in lifetime earning potential that results from having a college education, is illusory. Here’s some empirical evidence that I’m right:

The much discussed college wage premium is quite clear, as the median worker with a bachelor’s degree earns well above the median worker with only a high school diploma, a trend that has held throughout the past four decades. Measured at the medians, the wage premium for a bachelor’s degree has generally hovered between 60 and 70 percent since the 1990s. As we have cautioned before, this earnings gap may arise at least in part from differences in the skills and abilities of those who earn a college degree compared with those who don’t, rather than from the knowledge and skills acquired while in college.

However, when we look at wages for the 25th percentile of college graduates, the picture is not quite so rosy. In fact, there is almost no difference in the wages for this percentile ranking of college graduates and the median wage for high school graduates throughout the entire period. This means that the wages for a sizable share of college graduates below the 25th percentile are actually less than the wages earned by a typical worker with a high school diploma. While we can’t be sure that the wages of this group wouldn’t have been lower if they had never gone to college, this pattern strongly suggests that the economic benefit of a college education is relatively small for at least a quarter of those graduating with a bachelor’s degree.

I think the result is mathematically obvious. If some significant percentage of college graduates, e.g. those who go on to MDs, MBAs, or JDs, earn three, five, or ten times median wage, that necessarily means that there’s another significant percentage who are earning median wage or lower.

There has been considerable criticism of President Obama’s foreign policy lately both from foes and erstwhile allies. For example, Rich Lowry declaims:

What we have been witnessing the past few weeks, in real time, is the intellectual collapse of Obama’s foreign policy, accompanied by its rapid political unraveling. When Al Franken is ripping you for lacking a strategy against ISIL in Syria, you have a problem.

Obama’s view was that Al Qaeda was holed up in the badlands of Pakistan and you could drone it into submission. Then, if you stopped stirring up hornets’ nests in the Middle East, and demonstrated your good intentions, and pulled entirely out of Iraq and stayed out of Syria, you could focus on “nation building at home” and not worry about places like Mosul and Aleppo.

This, in a nutshell, was the theory of the “don’t do stupid stuff” doctrine.

Every particular was wrong.

while Jonathan Alter remarks:

Presidents must act at least as much as they react; they must seize the initiative and thrust their enemies on the defensive. Sometimes threatening war is the only way to keep the peace. Obama knows this abstractly, but it’s at odds with his interpretation of history and his assessment of the mission of his presidency, which is to end wars, not start them.

To put it in terms of compelling historical metaphor, Obama is a “Guns of August” guy. The book of that title, by Barbara Tuchman, chronicles how bluster and a series of miscalculations led European powers to blunder into World War I exactly a century ago.

Not to enter the “it’s all Bush’s fault” camp but I think it’s helpful to reconsider those ancient days of the last administration.

I think it’s a misconception to speak or think of the “Bush foreign policy”. I think it’s better to think of the first term Bush foreign policy and the second term Bush foreign policy. The Bush foreign policies.

Rather than recapping and analyzing what those policies were in the two different terms, I’d rather zip ahead, and note that there is no Obama foreign policy but Obama foreign policies. The first term Obama foreign policy closely resembled the second term Bush foreign policy.

The president would like us to think of his second term foreign policy as “don’t do stupid sh*t” but I think it’s closer to “no boots on the ground”. That may be stupid or it may be shrewd. It’s unquestionably shrewd in political terms. The American people are not in a mood for a ground war that involves taking casualties. I don’t think they were in a mood for that in 2003 either but that’s a different subject.

That policy will necessarily limit the objectives you can reasonably accomplish.

The sad reality is that there are occasions in which a president must convince the people that doing something they don’t want to do is the right thing to do. That is one of the hardest jobs of the president and the incumbent has shown very little interest in doing it.

Are the foreign policy challenges that face us today necessitate doing things that are unpopular? I’m not convinced they are but I also think that anybody who expects this president actually to go out and sell his policies and convince the American people to support something they oppose is thinking of some other president.