Many people are familiar with the last part of this quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana but fewer recall the first part:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Here’s something to reflect on. Of the U. S. cities with population of 400,000 or more, the fifty largest cities in the country, eleven have Republicans mayors. Some of those cities are in the South Atlantic census region (Virginia Beach, Miami, Jacksonville), some in the West South Central (Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Fort Worth), some in the Midwest (Omaha), some in the Mountain region (Colorado Springs, Mesa), and some in the West (Bakersfield, Fresno).

Every single one of those cities with Republican mayors has a white majority or even supermajority (60% or more). The converse is not true, i.e. not all cities with white majorities or even supermajorities have Republican mayors, e.g. Seattle and Portland both have white supermajorities and Democratic mayors.

Here in Chicago during the recent mayoral run-off even a lifelong Democrat was campaigned against as a crypto-Republican. It apparently worked.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal echo my reaction to the settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems:

The media cheering for Fox to lose were in effect cheering for a verdict that could have meant more lawsuits, many of them meritless, against journalists. Their hatred of Fox and conservatives is so strong that they ignored their self-interest.

One journalistic lesson of the Dominion case is not to indulge crank claims because your audience wants to hear them. That includes claims about Russian collusion or stolen elections. Mr. Trump could never admit he defeated himself in 2020, so he claimed the election was stolen. He tweeted a false “report” about Dominion, and the grifters who attend him, then and now, spread it.

Journalism is an imperfect craft, and mistakes are inevitable. That’s why the bar for proving libel should be high. But the obligation of a journalist is to discern the truth, or at least as close as one can get to knowing it, and tell it to your audience straight.

The philosopher George Santayana once wrote that fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. Media outlets are businesses so one of their objectives is to stay in business. As journalists they have another, higher objective is to tell the truth. When you abandon both of those objectives in trying to promote an ideology or a personality, what does that leave you with? Not much.

The same is true of the hatred of Fox News and of Trump. When pursuit of those objectives becomes your highest goal, above the truth or staying in business, you don’t have a lot left.

I suppose I ought to comment on the news of the day, Fox’s settling with Dominion for more than three-quarters of a billion (that’s billion with a “b”) dollars for its lies about voting machines manufactured by Dominion falsifying the 2020 election. Some are relieved; some are outraged.

Fox has saved itself several hundred million dollars, possibly more, and ongoing bad publicity which is probably even more damaging; Dominion has received vindication and will get its damages sooner.

IMO most of the media reports lamenting that Fox didn’t have to pay even more are misguided—they’ve dodged a bullet. If Dominion’s suit had gone to its conclusion and been upheld, there is a possibility that the very high standard for libel in American law would have been relaxed which would have made every major news organization vulnerable to suit. It would have been a mess.

Jack is getting to be a big boy. He’s charming, affectionate, opinionated, and occasionally infuriating. His adolescence should be fun.

I’ve struggled to find something to write about this morning. The news that is on everybody’s lips here in Chicago are the riots that took place here over the weekend. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here’s a new report from Jennifer D’Onofrio of ABC7Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — The Illinois Restaurant Association is raising concerns about unruly crowds in downtown Chicago last weekend.

For the past two days, the city has been in the local and national spotlight after a chaotic weekend.

Video showed groups of young people causing mayhem on Michigan Avenue on Saturday and at 31st Street Beach on Friday.

Some teenagers were shot, dozens of arrests were made, with businesses, residents and tourists scared. These meet ups are often hyped up and circulated on social media.

The Illinois Restaurant Association’s goal is to promote, protect and improve the restaurant industry in the state and they’re concerned that if people don’t feel safe, they won’t come downtown, especially as the weather gets warmer.

Some news reports refer to “unruly crowds”. Others refer to “riots”. I think that a disorderly assembly in which shots are discharged and people are shot or beaten is reasonably characterized as a “riot”.

It’s not just Chicagoans concerned. I’ve been hearing concerns expressed by people all over the country.

My take is that all of the parties involved are doing what they’ve learned to do. The young people have learned to organize these mass gatherings through social media and that there are no consequences for disorderly behavior. The police have learned that a “hands off” attitude is the safest strategy (for themselves) and, while there will be some fleeting criticism, there won’t be any real consequences to the police if they fail to do anything about “unruly crowds” shooting each other and beating each other up. Elected officials have learned that as long as they mouth the right platitudes, they’ll still be elected and/or re-elected.

Sadly, it’s a lot harder to unteach than it would have been to prevent people from learning the wrong lessons in the first place.

Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson has characterized the behavior as “unacceptable”. I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. If unacceptable it should not be accepted.

I’m seeing quite a few pieces about how great it is that our immigration rate is rising again. Examples: Paul Krugman in the New York Times, Rana Foroohar’s piece in the Financial Times . They remind me of nothing so much as the old joke about the guy who lost money on every sale but believed he could make it up in volume.

I don’t object to more immigration. Indeed, I welcome it. However, I oppose the immigration we have now. There are too many people who don’t speak, read, or write English and do not have college educations or specialized skills. I oppose it for several reasons.

First, these new immigrants come with costs and what they pay in taxes will never pay for their costs in terms of health care, security, transportation, and education. Those will be paid for with higher taxes on the rest of the population. Second, additional low wage workers depresses wages for the entry level workers who are already here. Third, a steady stream of new low wage workers distorts our economy so that we have more activity in sectors that employ these low wage workers than we would otherwise have.

I think we should have immigration systems more like those of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than our present system.

I also wonder if this sudden rush of pro-immigration articles is intended to prepare us for another surge of immigrants at our southwestern border.

The editors of the Washington Post are outraged that France has national interests and that it pursues them:

French President Emmanuel Macron might have thought he could escape turmoil at home and burnish his credentials as a global statesman by making a high-level state visit to China earlier this month. Instead, he exposed disunity in Europe over Beijing, he handed Chinese President Xi Jinping a propaganda coup, and, for good measure, he threw Taiwan under the bus by suggesting Europeans should not follow the United States in defending the island in the event of a Chinese invasion.

That’s a lot of damage from a three-day trip.

Guess what? Germany, the United Kingdom, and every other country we deem an ally has its own national interests and most of those countries pursue those interests quite single-mindedly. I wish we focused as much on our own national interests as France or Germany does.

As I have been saying for some time, I wish our foreign policy idealists understood that it’s a realist world out there. When Germany or France go along with us, it’s because they see it as in their interests to do so. When they don’t think it’s in their interests, they don’t. That’s why, for example, Germany is not doing many of the things the German leadership said it would do a year ago. They got credit for their followership a year ago when they made their pledges but they’re hedging their bets because following through on those pledges would bear costs.

I am seeing a couple of different, contrasting stories about the document leak. In what I consider the more likely of the stories a young man with a security clearance, trying to impress his online buddies, release a significant cache of secret documents online. The release was not discovered by what we like to call our “intelligence community” for months.

In the other story our intelligence community is conducting a psychological operation on the American people to prepare them for what will be a series of foreign policy setbacks. The young airman is a presumably unwitting dupe in the psyop, given unrestricted access to exactly the documents the intelligence community wanted him to leak.

It seems to me that the unstated assumption in that second story is that our intelligence apparatus could not possibly be so feckless as the leak makes it appear to be. Quite to the contrary I think that power, arrogance, and freedom from consequences has a way of encouraging fecklessness.

A connecting thread between these stories is irresponsibility. At twenty-one Jack Teixeira is a man not a kid. Were he a 14 year old trying to impress 12 year olds, leaking secret documents would be completely understandable. As a 21 year old trying to impress 16 year old, it’s irresponsible. Similarly, granting him access to documents for which he had no need to know is irresponsible.

Matt Taibbi concludes his remarks on the leak which are mostly about the media’s indecision over whether Mr. Teixeira was a racist or a gun nut, with something on which I agree with him:

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.