The campaigning for the upcoming mayoral primaries in Chicago are drawing to a close. Eleven days from now. As I suggested in an earlier post, right now the battle lines are being drawn along racial lines. There is one white candidate, Paul Vallas, the plurality of whose support is from white voters; one Hispanic candidate, Chuy Garcia, the plurality of whose support is from Hispanic voters, and nine black candidates who divide the plurality of the black vote among themselves.

What a difference four years makes! In the last Chicago mayoral primary election, Lori Lightfoot received the plurality of her support from white voters and ultimately prevailed, largely because she wasn’t Toni Preckwinkle. Her performance as mayor has lost much of that support.

Right now she’s running TV spots, the gist of which is “if you want a black mayor, vote for me—I’m the only black candidate who can win!”. We’ll see if that’s a convincing message.

If no candidate wins the majority of the vote in the primaries, there will be a run-off between the two top finishing candidates in the primary. NBC News reports that a recent poll suggests that Mayor Lightfoot might not even make it to the general election:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot finds herself bunched together in a crowded field ahead of this month’s mayoral race, raising the specter of her possibly missing out on the likely runoff.

The new poll sponsored by Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, as well as a handful of other non-profits, finds Lightfoot in third place with 14% support from registered Chicago voters (when those who say they are leaning one way are included).

That puts the incumbent mayor behind former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas (19%) and Democratic Rep. Chuy García (17%), and in front of businessman Willie Wilson (12%) and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson (9%), as well as others in the field. But 12% say they’re undecided (even after being pushed to pick the candidate they’re leaning toward supporting), and the poll has a margin of error of +/- 3.9%, which means the race is a jump ball.

Garcia is pulling support from 40% of Latino voters (the only other candidate in double digits is Vallas with support from 13%); Lightfoot is winning the plurality of Black voters (23%); and Vallas has support from the plurality of white voters (25%).

I honestly think that none of the candidates would make a particularly good mayor. Lightfoot is objectively the worst mayor in Chicago history. Vallas is a bland apparatchik. IMO Chuy Garcia is an empty suit. Brandon Johnson has the shortcoming of believing that every problem can be solved by throwing money at it. Willie Wilson has never held elective office—I’m afraid that the career pols and permanent bureaucracy will tie him up in knots.

At the Wall Street Journal Warren P. Strobel and Gordon Lubold report on a development I’m glad to see happening. The Pentagon, State Department, and USAID are preparing to send auditors to Ukraine to monitor how U. S. aid to Ukraine is being used:

WASHINGTON—Top oversight officials responsible for tracking over $110 billion in U.S. military and economic aid to Ukraine said they would press to deploy auditors and investigators directly into the war zone to beef up monitoring as the scale and scope of American assistance expands.

Inspectors general from the Pentagon, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development said in a joint interview with The Wall Street Journal that, thus far, they have been able to conduct critical oversight tasks remotely using personnel based in Washington, Poland and Germany.

But following a trip by the trio to Kyiv in late January, they said they would press to put some of the 177 auditors and investigators scrutinizing Ukraine aid on the ground in Ukraine. The Biden administration has limited the number of government personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv for security reasons.

The rule of thumb on waste, fraud, and abuse for government programs in the United States is around 3%. That’s not unlike the presumed rate in places like France and Taiwan.

But Ukraine is reckoned as the second most corrupt country in Europe. That puts them about on a level of most African or Caribbean countries. You’ll never guess which the most corrupt country in Europe is.

What if the rate of waste, fraud, and abuse in Ukraine is 20%? 50%? One of the aggravating factors is rate of onset. That’s what we saw in Puerto Rico with respect to aid following the hurricane a year or so ago. A lot of aid just sat rotting on the docks or in warehouses.

Ruy Teixeira urges, presumably, the Democratic Party leadership to adopt the following principles:

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained forpeople of all races.
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is hugely important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. However, more and better policing is needed to get criminals off the streets and secure public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.
• There are underlying differences between men and women that should not all be attributed to sexism. However, discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong and should always be opposed.
• People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Free speech is a fundamental American value that should be safeguarded everywhere.

in preference to what he says is the present Democratic strategy—pretending those concerns will go away.

I think the problem he’s facing is that those who work on campaigns or on staffs tend to be more radical than those who don’t. When you’re radicalized with respect to race, you can’t accept most of those principles or “values” as Mr. Teixeira calls them. You’ll believe the account laid out in the “1619 Project” which rules out the top four in that list. When you’re radicalized with respect to sex or sexual preference, everything bad that happens can be attributed to sex or sexual preference and rules out accepting some of the others.

He doesn’t even touch on the disparity in beliefs between “normies” and radicalized activists with respect to climate change. When you’re radicalized with respect to climate change, you attribute everything bad that happens to AGW. I suspect that most Democrats believe that human-caused climate change is happening but they still want to have their own cars, heat and cool their homes, etc. That puts them at odds with the radicalized activists and those activists are punching above their weight these days.

I would subscribe to the values he lists as I believe most Americans would. However, I think Mr. Texeira is right:

Then think of how many Democratic politicians, especially national Democrats, are willing to go on record espousing these values. Precious few.

Are there any reasonable prospect for what Mr. Teixeira is urging? Or is he beating a dead mule?

At GZero Ian Bremmer, presumably in reaction to Seymour Hersh’s breathless post, gives his two cents on who blew up the Nordstream pipeline:

My money is on Ukraine. Ukrainians had the most to gain from blowing up this multi-billion dollar, Russian-owned cudgel. They were also the most risk-tolerant. Russia poses an existential threat to them, so they are willing to do almost anything to prevail. They knew they couldn’t win without a strong and united NATO behind them, and they knew the alliance would be vulnerable as long as Russia could leverage its gas against Germany.

Five months ago, I would’ve been skeptical that the Ukrainians had the technical and operational capabilities to do something like this. But I also didn’t think they’d be able to blow up the Kerch Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia, itself quite a sophisticated operation. Nor did I imagine they could assassinate Darya Dugina just outside of Moscow. So it’s clear the Ukrainians are eminently willing and able to plan and execute high-risk reasonably complex operations.

possibly with assistance from Poland. However, for my money this is the most important statement in Mr. Bremmer’s piece:

More broadly, the very contention that the US would sabotage infrastructure partially owned by a key ally (Germany) in concert with another shared ally (Norway) without alerting Berlin beggars belief given what we know about Washington’s strategic interests.

At the time, the Biden administration was pursuing closer ties with Germany on a range of issues, including tech regulation, China decoupling, and reversing the pullback in transatlantic cooperation initiated by the Trump administration. Blowing up Nord Stream would have jeopardized all those initiatives and invited Russian retaliation for a questionable benefit: definitively ending Germany’s already-dwindling dependence on Russia to strengthen NATO unity.

Targeting Germany in cahoots with Norway also would’ve risked fracturing the NATO coalition Biden had explicitly focused on bolstering from day one — a risky move for a generally risk-averse administration.

That rings true to me.

John Halpin has two pleas for American education:

1. No discrimination and ideology in America’s schools.
2. Teach the basics—reading, writing, math, science, and fact-based history.

It made me wonder where he’s been for the last 50 years, as postmodernism and deconstructionism have made their way through American academic institutions. Had he been paying attention he would realize there is no such thing as “fact-based history”. Even science has not escaped.

Refocusing American education on what used to be called the “3 Rs”, is no joke. According to the ISBE Illinois Report Card for 2022 there were 30 Illinois high schools in which no students could read at grade level, 53 Illinois high schools at which no student could do math at grade level, and 10% or fewer kids could do math at grade level in a quarter of the high schools. That’s not explained by lack of spending. Quite a few of these underperforming schools have a per student spending level of $20,000 or more.

It can’t be explained by COVID-19, either—some of these schools were just as bad in 2019.

I should add that some of the lack of reading proficiency is easily explainable and should be taken into consideration. Almost 10% of K12 students have weak to non-existent proficiency in English. Expecting them to read at grade level in a language they don’t understand is a big ask.

Is the explanation for why Americans have such a low opinion of the present U. S. economy the difference between surviving and thriving as proposed by Henry Olsen in his Washington Post column?

The news is sobering: In 1985, it took 39.7 weeks of work each year to pay for these things, giving families plenty of room to enjoy other consumer goods and luxuries. But today, it takes 62.1 weeks of work to cover the same expenses. In other words, about 40 years ago, the median American family could enjoy a middle-class life on one earner’s paycheck. Today, it takes two.

One might argue that the move from one-earner to two-earner families is unimportant. That would be correct if families preferred it that way, but most do not. A 2021 survey showed that more than half of married mothers would prefer to have one parent in the home full-time with children aged 5 or younger. That preference is especially pronounced among lower- or working-class families.

Consider the following graph (from American Compass):

I found the way they subdivided the groups in the graph above confusing, indeed, even capricious. I think it would be interesting to see how Men 25-34 (HS Grads) are faring. If it is I expect it would explain a lot more than just why people say they’re unhappy with the economy in opinion polls.

At iai News Pavel Kroupa and Moritz Haslbauer report on a paper with a controversial finding: the standard cosmological model is wrong. We’re not as smart as we thought we were.

I’m not sure what the real world implications of this may be but I suspect it will have some.

George Friedman is puzzled by the mysterious balloons:

The problem I have is imagining the mission these objects could carry out, one that would be invisible, allow loitering if needed and be able to avoid detection. There could be some highly specialized targets, but the fleet that the Chinese appear to have, and that they claim the U.S. has, seems excessive to the task. One Chinese craft was over a U.S. Air Force base that is doubtless loaded with secrets, but how many of the secrets would be visible or broadcasting in the clear?

One theoretical mission would be to divert attention. Russia is much closer to Alaska than is China. It is engaged in a war where the United States has a role, to understate it. Having large, weird craft flying over the continental United States could, in this thinking, generate panic, with the public demanding that the government focus on national defense and not Ukraine. There are a hundred diversionary functions these objects could serve for a limited time, although the result of this episode is low panic and high confusion.

The fundamental question is how objects this large, at altitudes allowing enhanced visibility, could go unnoticed if U.S. and Chinese charges are even close to true. From available information, the craft move with the grace of an elephant and could be shot down by aircraft, missile or a well-aimed slingshot. They must be stunningly advanced, which would explain why the U.S. government is withholding answers. If national security requires it, then it should be. But the price is that the U.S. government is shooting down aircraft and, knowing from the beginning that they are Chinese, is unable to tell us what it found in the wreckage.

and spending probably $1 million a pop or thereabouts to do it. I agree with Mr. Friedman that it behooves the Biden Administration to explain what it’s doing. Sadly, I doubt we’ll ever receive a genuinely coherent explanation. The answer may be “letting them fly didn’t work so now we’re shooting them down to see if that works” which isn’t very satisfying.

Here’s Heather Long’s explanation for the state of the economy from her Washington Post column:

The most plausible explanation of all is that the pandemic and subsequent recovery were so unusual that the normal rules of economics don’t apply. Demand surged for everything from toaster ovens to used cars. Supply chains could not keep up. Prices spiked. Now, there’s a right-sizing. Goods inflation has come down for most items (even for eggs) as demand has subsided. The question is whether services inflation for travel, restaurants, entertainment, insurance and deliveries will follow.

It’s reasonable after a fashion to think that the phrase “the normal rules of economics don’t apply” has actual meaning. If it means anything it means that people don’t have preferences, don’t pursue their incentives, and behavior is completely unpredictable. And yet everywhere I go, on a daily even hourly basis, I see almost exactly the opposite. I see people buying things when they’re on sale, stopping their cars when the traffic light turns red (unless they think they can get away with running it), and picking Coke over the store brand of cola.

On the other hand I think it’s completely plausible, when the measured numbers are 10% or the reported numbers, to wonder if the calculations are completely reliable.