I have been paying attention to the riots in France and to the occasional pieces in the media about them. Most are incomprehensible.

The language is a problem. “French” and “immigrant” have different meanings in France than they do in just about any other country of which I am aware. There are no hyphenated residents of France. If you profess Frenchness, you are French. If you don’t you are an immigrant. France doesn’t keep track of its citizens by race or origin.

In some ways that’s admirable. However, it does make solutions to the present unrest elusive.

At iNews Leo Cendrowicz remarks:

The rioting has also transformed the political discourse. The initial horror over the shooting of a teenager has now turned into a debate about law and order.

This is fertile territory for Ms Le Pen, who has long railed against what she sees as France’s drift into permissiveness and lawlessness. She lambasted the government on Twitter on Sunday as “a power that abandons all constitutional principles for fear of riots, which contributes to aggravating them”, adding, “Our country is getting worse and worse and the French are paying the terrible price for this cowardice and these compromises.”

She did not directly address the shooting but condemned the National Assembly for holding a minute’s silence for Nahel last week, saying, “Unfortunately, there are young people in our country every week…It’s terrible, but I think that the National Assembly should perhaps measure a little the minutes of silence that are carried out.”

And in a video address yesterday she lambasted the “anarchy”, called on authorities to declare a state of emergence or curfew, and attacked Mr Mélenchon for “conniving” and “morally exempting these criminal acts”, promising that they would face a reckoning with “the nation and history”.

to which I would point out that “left” and “right” are different in France, too.

It should be observed that French opinion to the statements of various French politicians is most favorable to Marine Le Pen and least favorable to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, effectively the spokesman for the “left-wing opposition”.

I try to avoid offering opinions on the political turmoil in countries other than my own but I do regret the violence and destruction in France. It mostly hurts the poor people of the suburbs (“suburbs” means something different, too) and it is without clear objectives. A cri de coeur rather than a call to arms.

When I read Frank Miele’s remarks at RealClearPolitics on the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislature” theory:

The mainstream media (and of course their Democratic Party allies) celebrated the court’s decision in Moore v. Harper that rejected the so-called “independent state legislature” theory. The New York Times called the theory “dangerous.” Vox said the ruling was a “big victory for democracy.” Those who supported the independent state legislature “theory” were called extreme, fringe, radical, and worse. In other words, they were Trump supporters.

The only problem is that if the theory is extreme, then so is the U.S. Constitution, because no matter how much the 6-3 majority insists otherwise, it isn’t a theory at all. It is the plain language of the Constitution. Check it out for yourself.

Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution says specifically, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

It is not the governor or the courts or even the people of the state which set election rules, according to the Constitution, but the legislatures. Mind you, the state legislatures are not entirely unchecked in their decision making, but it is the Congress of the United States that provides the checks and balances, not the courts.

And as for presidential elections, the matter is even more cut and dried. Article 2, Section 1, declares, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

Notice again that the Constitution gives state legislatures the exclusive power to determine the manner in which electors are appointed to vote for president and vice president. In this case, even Congress does not have the authority to override the legislatures.

I was reminded of my dad’s complaints about lawyers whose only knowledge of the law was the U. S. Constitution.

I think that the court’s decision was completely predictable and not on the basis of left/right ideology but based on the court’s longstanding claim of the authority of legal review. That’s something else you won’t find in the Constitution. You will search in vain for that in the Constitution but it has been a persistent part of our system since Marbury v. Madison as I assume Mr. Miele learned in his grade school civics class. It will not go away peacefully.

As I read the SCOTUS opinions that’s what they were upholding. The Constitution contains important law but it isn’t the only law. There’s the common law, state laws, and the power of courts to review state and federal laws. The Constitution does not empower state legislators to ignore state law or state or federal courts.

Yesterday we lost power for about four hours. I’m keeping track of the number of times we lose power this summer. If it goes over a certain number, I plan to get a generator.

When the electricity came back on, I restarted our network and noticed something puzzling. My main PC, the fastest, most power one I have and the one I usually use for writing my posts, on rebooting successfully updated Windows for the first time in six months. I had tried every trick in the book to get it to update but no luck. And today it just updated on its own.

I can only speculate that Microsoft finally got around to fixing a problem that had prevented some small number of users including me from updating.

Jack was born in Canada and on Canada Day (July 1) as a good Canuck he put on his patriotic harness in recognition of the anniversary of Canada’s constitution.

It has rained much of the day today. It’s just ending now.

That pretty much eliminated NASCAR street racing in the Loop today. There’s talk it will be postponed until tomorrow. Our street was flooded briefly from curb to curb.

On the bright side we needed the rain desperately. We’re in drought conditions. Even if we received several inches of rain I doubt that the drought is over technically but it certainly helps.

There’s also some hubbub about this weekend’s notable activity here in Chicago: NASCAR street racing.

I honestly don’t know what the consternation is about. As far as I can tell it will turn out like pretty much any other weekend except that the racing will take place during the day and fewer of the drivers will be shooting at each other.

There are quite a few bitter recriminations going on about the Supreme Court’s striking down of racial quotas by institutions of higher education. It raises a host of questions:

• Do you think it is alright to discriminate against Americans of Asian descent?
• How about racial discrimination more generally?
• Whatever happened to “critical mass”? IIRC that was the basis for SCOTUS’s prior judgment. It seems to have been cast into the dustbin of history not just by conservatives but by progressives as well.

What I wish were being commented on is the light this casts on our whole educational system.

Unlike some I don’t believe that Asians are genetically superior or that blacks are genetically inferior. Similarly, I don’t think that 70% of NBA players are black because of some genetic predisposition towards basketball. I think black athletes try harder and there is cultural support for that within their communities. Contrariwise, I think there is a pathology in black communities which places barriers to academic success.

In addition I would indict our entire education from top to bottom. Our public schools have lost site of their putative mission and are primarily run for the benefit of teachers, administrators, and union organizers. I wouldn’t let institutions of higher learning off the hook, either. If they actually cared about recruiting more blacks and Hispanics, they might have created feeder systems in “disadvantaged” neighborhoods to prepare K-12 students for college. They didn’t do that. IMO they were more interested in appearing to be concerned than in actually taking action.

Yesterday President Biden was in Chicago touting the virtues of his economy policy. He has embraced the neologism “Bidenomics” in describing it. The editors of the Wall Street Journal, predictably, are unimpressed:

In 1982-84 dollars, which takes account of inflation, average hourly earnings were $11.39 when Mr. Biden took office but started to decline immediately and didn’t stop falling until inflation peaked in June 2022. They have bounced up a little but were still back only to $11.03 in May. That’s a 3.16% decline in real earnings for the average worker across the 29 months of the Biden Presidency.

These are official Labor Department statistics. Mr. Biden can’t deny them, so he had someone fudge the point by writing in his Chicago remarks that, “Look, pay for low-wage workers has grown at the fastest pace in over two decades.” We’d like to see how his economists cherry-picked the data to justify that one.

All of which reminds us of the old Marx Brothers joke: Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Regarding Bidenomics, Americans should believe their own eyes.

Much of what has happened over the last several years was predicted by Keynesian economics. When you increase aggregate demand by sending out checks, for example, beyond aggregate supply, you would expect it to result in inflation. The sad fact is that we do not produce enough of what we supply. There is no longer any surplus supply.

Clearly, Bidenomics isn’t Keynesian economics. It also isn’t Modern Monetary Theory which would have predicted the same thing. It’s old fashioned pork barrel politics. I will leave it as an exercise for the interested student to figure out where the pork is going. It isn’t to aid the poor. You can’t help the poor by giving them a check for $5 while increasing the prices of the things they spend money on by $10.

The central planning component of Bidenomics comes with fine print. In the short term it is hypothetically possible for central planning to increase production. It is more likely and certain in the long term to produce deadweight loss.

There’s a certain amount of clucking going on about a piece by Tom Lasseter, Lawrence Delevigne, Makini Brice, Donna Bryson, Nicholas P. Brown and Tom Bergin at Reuters on the present political leaders whose ancestors owned slaves:

In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.

The entire piece is interesting but not particularly surprising, at least to me. However, I think they’re drawing the wrong conclusion:

As Harvard’s Gates wrote, Sherman did issue a special order in 1865 calling for liberated families under his protection to be issued land and, later, a mule. The property in question was a strip of land down the country’s southeastern coast.

Had the order been followed, it would have provided Black Americans assets upon which to build new lives and perhaps pass wealth to subsequent generations.

But the program ended quickly, Gates wrote. President Andrew Johnson, the Southern sympathizer who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, “overturned the Order in the fall of 1865” and returned the land “to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.”

The United States has never paid restitution for slavery.

There are many reasons why I think that, not the least because at this late date paying reparations for slavery would satisfy no reasonable definition of “justice” since it would involve paying people who were never enslaved at the expense of people who never held slaves. As Dr. Gates also is quoted in the piece:

Gates said identifying those familial connections to slaveholders is “not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.”

But I think it goes beyond that and delving a little into my own family history might illustrate why. Not only do I have no ancestors who held slaves, some of my ancestors were abolitionists, and you would be hard put to find anyone in my family who benefited either from slavery or Jim Crow in any but the most indirect way.

I think there’s actually some prediction criteria for slave ownership:

• Residence in a slave state prior to abolition
• Family wealth in that time period
• English ancestry
• French ancestry

more or less in descending order of significance. I have ancestors who lived in a slave state prior to abolition (Missouri), who had the requisite level of wealth, and were French. Nonetheless my researches have revealed that none of them ever owned slaves. And this is the critical point. Not only do I doubt that I am unique in that regard but I suspect that the percentages of Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves and who never benefited in any but the most indirect way from slavery or Jim Crow is growing. Furthermore, I suspect that the percentage of Americans whose families included American slaves is actually decreasing.

Consequently, I think they’re asking the wrong question. Rather than trying to enumerate the Americans who owned slaves, why not figure out what percentage of Americans’ families never owned slaves? My suspicion is that the issue of reparations for slavery becomes less relevant with every passing year.