Today is Jack’s first birthday. We took at extra-long walk this morning and I must say he behaved very well (for a change).

However, when I saw the enormous bash that Jack’s littermate, Astelle’s owners were throwing for her I must admit it made me feel like a piker.

Okay here’s the situation. A guy intentionally crashes a truck across the street from the White House. He is quoted as saying that he wants to “get to the White House, seize power, and be put in charge of the nation”. He pretty obviously needs psychiatric help. He is arrested on a variety of charges including trespassing, damage to property, assault with a deadly weapon, reckless driving, and “threatening to kill, kidnap, or inflict harm on a president, vice president or family member”. He appears to be an Indian national; there’s some confusion over whether he’s a lawful permanent resident or not.

All but the least serious charges are subsequently dismissed.

Here’s my question: what’s going on? Do the authorities figure that the least significant charges are a slam dunk and sufficient to deport him? Or is it something else?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment on the same tax and spending proposal I (and the editors of Crain’s Chicago Business) remarked on earlier. They don’t add a lot to the conversation. Basically, if you make it costly enough to do business in Chicago businesses will leave and those hurt most will be the most vulnerable.

Except this:

The mayor’s pals say a “city budget is a moral document.” Readers can decide what kind of morality lets criminal gangs run wild while shrinking the police force and chasing taxpayers out of the city.

I join the editors in wondering what sort of moral code they’re following? It sounds more like “nature red in tooth and claw” than any moral code of which I am aware.

One final remark. You can no longer say that the progressives in the Democratic Party don’t want to defund the police with a straight face. The proposal is quite clear; not only does the proposal eliminate the 1,000 positions for uniformed officers presently unfilled permanently it cuts 9% from the CPD budget on top of that. Saying “we don’t want to defund the police we just want to spend less on them” doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Arguing whether having more police officers on the street is the most effective way of improving public safety is a reasonable point and worth discussing. Claiming that cutting spending on the police isn’t defunding the police isn’t.

I’ve already made my views clear: I think that the problem doesn’t start and end with the police. I think that the CPD, the Cook County States Attorney’s office, and the Cook County judiciary need to arrest more people, try more cases, and convict more people found guilty respectively. Our problem is everybody is not rowing in the same direction. The direction should be greater public security rather than reducing incarceration.

In response to a flurry of news and commentary reports on Chinese hacking, James Joyner posts:

This seems to go beyond normal, low-level “competition below armed conflict,” in the current Defense Department vernacular, into something more like preparation of the battlespace. Cyber operations are inherently murky compared to traditional “kinetic” operations, making drawing lines difficult. But we seem to be at a point where China is more than a “strategic competitor” but rather an adversary. Which would seem to portend a considerably different economic relationship.

Here’s my question: is it the activity that is “beyond normal” or is it the reporting on the activity? There has been an enormous amount of Chinese state-sponsored hacking activity being carried out over the last several decades. Is what’s going on now different in kind from what’s gone on in the past?

On the one hand I think it’s good that people are finally noticing just how much Chinese cyberespionage is going on. It constitutes a ridiculously large amount of total Internet traffic. At one point I made a regular practice of blocking Chinese IP addresses. I was shocked at just how much of my total traffic consisted of what were mostly probing attacks originating in China. I once saw a log in which you could see the attacker going systematically through a list of known vulnerabilities.

On the other hand I find the prospect of raising the temperature when nothing has actually changed troubling.

The video embedded above is a recent talk given by John Mearsheimer. It’s lengthy.

In it he makes several points:

• No meaningful negotiations are possible since both the Russians and Ukrainians see the war as existential.
• The Ukrainians can’t win.
• The Russians aren’t interested in conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating it into Russia.
• The Russians will seize more formerly Ukrainian territory, leaving a dysfunctional rump state in eastern Ukraine.

I don’t believe that’s either what he or I want to happen but in all likelihood it’s what will happen.

As you read this lament for Pakistan by Asha Amirali at Al Jazeera:

Crisis is now passé in Pakistan. Admittedly, the current standoff between the authoritarian populist Imran Khan and the military has an element of novelty to it, but even in the most dramatic scenario, it will likely end with not much more than regime change and some further weakening — though not annihilation — of the military’s outsized political role.

This might be significant in the long run, but only if the social forces that move into the ceded political space do something different – and difficult – with it. This remains highly unlikely.

you might want to keep two things in mind. The first is the old quip: “Pakistan is a government without a country”. The other is an observation by an acquaintance of mine: “Some day the Pakistanis will wake up and learn to their astonishment that they are and always have been Chinese”.

At American Purpose Jeffrey Gedmin interviews Frederick Starr who repeats some points I’ve made around here including that Putin is not unpopular in Russia, indeed, he’s doing things of which many Russians approve. Here are some snippets:

We have a Putin problem because we have a Russia problem.

and

George Kennan always viewed writer Anton Chekhov as the model of the wise, prudent, and Western-oriented Russian intellectual. The list of others in that group extends deep into the 19th century and glitters with such names as novelists Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, writer Alexander Herzen, composer Igor Stravinsky, a bevy of modern-thinking Russian lawyers, and a host of Soviet-era figures culminating in Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov.

But there were always others who went along with Russia’s imperial project or actively abetted it. This list, too, includes some of Russia’s greatest artists and thinkers, beginning with the urbane and otherwise humane poet Alexander Pushkin, who actively supported Russia’s conquest of Poland. Think of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s thunderous Marche Slav, or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s hatred of Catholicism and socialism, which he equated with the West, or his belief that Russia’s 1877 war against the Muslim Ottoman empire was necessary for salvation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s post-Soviet proposal to combine Ukraine, Belarus, northern Kazakhstan and Russia into a new superstate also comes to mind. Particularly relevant today are the words of the much-hailed Russian poet Josef Brodsky who, writing after Ukraine declared its independence, dismissed Ukrainians as “khokhols” (the equivalent of our “N-word”) and versified about “spitting or something into the Dniepr.”

and

JG: After Ukraine, does the West need a new containment strategy? What would such a strategy look like?

SFS: Even though all possible outcomes must be considered, it is far too early to speak of a new containment strategy. And in projecting possible outcomes, the West must avoid focusing only on the two extremes, i.e., a “catastrophizing” scenario that includes a complete breakup of the Russian Federation or a rose-colored future that is merely a repeat of the naive optimism that prevailed in 1991 after the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine officially terminated the USSR.

Any postwar strategy by the West must be based on a thorough knowledge of the groupings and individuals who are now coming to prominence in Russia. Some of these are today working in Russian governmental and business offices; others are already meeting abroad; while still others are toiling unobtrusively within Russian academic and scientific institutions or think tanks or are maintaining their own blogs. Particularly important will be members of the rising generation, tens of thousands of whom fled abroad either as conscientious objectors or simply as draft dodgers. Generational change, no less than the outcome in Ukraine, will shape and design Russia’s future.

Read the whole thing.

I don’t agree with the Russians but, like Mr. Starr, I have some understanding of what they think and why. That’s why I recognize that Ukraine’s maximalist objectives are not merely off the table but a formula for the complete destruction of Ukraine. Similarly, not only do I think that breaking Russia up into ten or fourteen smaller chunks is beyond our capability it isn’t even in our interest not to mention that it would result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Glenn Greenwald dissects the results of a recent Harris-Harvard poll that found a sharp dichotomy between the views of most Americans and the stories the major media outlets are covering. Here’s his conclusion:

What’s so striking here isn’t that the corporate media relentlessly advocates views and ideologies that majorities of Americans – often large majorities – reject.

It’s that the views held by majorities are all but banned on NBC, CNN, NYT and WPost.

noting that it is no mystery that trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Here are some of the questions in the survey, my answers, and comments:

By and large my views were in line with the majority of voters. I agree with Glenn that the media are out-of-touch with most Americans. Also they don’t really care. They see themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat—they see their job as telling ordinary people what they should believe.

Feel free to chime in with your views.

The seven states that draw water from the Colorado River have reached an agreement. Daniel Trotta and Brad Brooks report at Reuters:

May 22 (Reuters) – Seven U.S. states that depend on the overused Colorado River on Monday reached agreement to cut consumption and help save a river that provides drinking water for 40 million people and irrigation for some of the country’s most bountiful farmland.

Arizona, California and Nevada will reduce intake by 3 million acre-feet (3.7 billion cubic meters) through the end of 2026, an amount equal to 13% of their river allotment, under a deal brokered and announced by the Biden administration.

Those three make up the Lower Basin states of the century-old Colorado River Compact, which assigns water rights to them plus the four Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

While the Upper Basin states draw their water directly from the river and its tributaries, the Lower Basin states depend on Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and whose spigot is controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

Californians are already kvetching that they got the short end of the stick while the Coloradans have done well.

This agreement doesn’t solve the problem; it just kicks the can down the road for a few years. The fundamental problem is too much demand for water and not enough water. Since all three of the “Lower Basin” states depend disproportionately on growing populations for their economic health, it will only get tougher from here on out.

Changing agricultural practices is part of the problem as well. For example, California’s production of almonds has doubled over the last decade and almonds take a lot of water. California’s share of the $1.3 billion dole from the federal government will effectively subsidize almond production and building houses.

Unlimited cheap power would allow California to extract fresh water via desalinization rather than than taking it from the Colorado but that doesn’t seem to be the direction in which the state is heading.

72% of Arizona’s water utilization is by agriculture, mostly produce but increaingly pistachios and pecans—once again, substantial consumers of water. In Nevada it’s 69% and its top crop is alfalfa.