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.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post in this:

Justice Thomas should immediately review all his financial disclosure reports, amend them with the newly revealed transactions and add any information he has not reported. The Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the federal judiciary, should press him to do so if he fails to complete the reports on his own.

but I am less certain about this:

The conference should then examine Justice Thomas’s conduct and determine whether his repeated nondisclosure merits a referral to the Justice Department.

Justice Thomas’s lapses undermine public trust in the court. They also reflect a disturbing indifference to official rules that is unacceptable for a justice, or any public servant.

Does the Department of Justice actually have that authority?

The precedent that people are thinking of is undoubtedly Abe Fortas. However, Justice Fortas resigned after accepting a payment from a financier who was under investigation. Is the parallel actually that strong? Furthermore, just as in 1969 the political considerations are front and center. Appointing an associate justice to replace Justice Thomas would provide President Biden with the opportunity to move the court from its present trajectory. Inducing Justice Thomas to resign (or impeaching him), appointing someone to replace him, and getting that individual confirmed would be quite a feat.

At the conclusion of his Washington Post column on the leaks of sensitive documents David Ignatius quotes Winston Churchill:

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

It looks like the question is whether the truth has been overwhelmed by her bodyguard.

Here’s his assessment of the trove:

We’re in Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors” here. What matters, as he observed, is that you know what’s accurate and what is a manipulated reflection. Though a few documents appear to have been doctored, an administration official told me Monday: “We’re still examining them, but at first glance, this appears to be real.”

and here’s what he thinks we’ve learned:

• Ukraine’s air defense weapons have dwindled to the point that Russia about to gain air superiority.
• Ukraine is firing faster than the West can replenish.
• The Biden Administration has been less inclined to use our own troops in the conflict more than some of our allies, e.g. the United Kingdom.
• U. S. officials think the conflict is reaching a stalemate.

I found this passage in the column wryly amusing:

This ought to be the trump card for the United States. In World War II, the United States converted manufacturing plants across the country to make tanks, planes and aircraft carriers that simply overwhelmed Japan and Germany. No similar mobilization has taken place this time. Why not? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has met several times with defense contractors, but why hasn’t President Biden appointed the equivalent of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Production Board?

It may have escaped Mr. Ignatius’s attention but this isn’t 80 years ago. The “manufacturing plants across the country” to which he refers were dismantled decades ago and much of that manufacturing is being done in China. Surprise! China isn’t on our side in this conflict.

The reason that President Biden hasn’t appointed a “war production board” is that it would take a lot more than that to restart our manufacturing. Millions of square feet of auto manufacturing, just to cite one example, no longer exist to be converted for use building tanks. The same is true in Europe. They have been offshoring their manufacturing to China for the last 30-50 years.

We’d need to be mining more coal and iron, making more steel, building more plants. We’ve been moving in the opposite direction for 50 years. A war production board can’t change that overnight.

Let me try to summarize David Brooks’s latest New York Times column.

• Lots of people are leaving Blue States for Red States
• Red States have lower taxes, are more pro-business, and have more affordable housing
• People are moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States
• Blue cities in Red States are socially more liberal than the rest of the state
• Therefore the “winning formula” is low tax, pro-business, and socially liberal
• Neither political party espouses the “winning formula” and it doesn’t look like they’re likely to in the foreseeable future

I think that’s a superficial analysis and far too “from 50,000 feet”. IMO examining what’s actually happening tells a slightly different story.

For one thing to some extent what he’s observing is nothing new. It’s the same Mad Tea Party that’s been going on since the founding of the Republic. The main difference is now that now the frontier isn’t moving West but moving to the relatively undeveloped parts of the country in the West and the South.

For another are people actually moving from Blue cities in Blue States to Blue cities in Red States? Or are people moving from Purple suburbs in Blue States to Purple suburbs in Red States? I don’t honestly know but I suspect at least some of that is going on.

I note that the words “labor union” do not appear in his column. I suspect that unionization is a factor in the present migration. I don’t know what the situation is in other states but here in Illinois paying public employee pensions and benefits makes up nearly 30% of the state’s spending. The courts have seen to it that the only way for Illinoisans to escape that tithe is to leave the state. Ironically, about 20% of retired Illinois public employees move to other states thereby draining Illinois’s economy in two ways at the same time.

Which provides me a smoother transition to the last point I wanted to make. Ostensibly the United States has a common law system. A common law system has several features that distinguish it from a civil code system. In a common law system the law may or may not apply; if it doesn’t apply, it doesn’t apply. Also in a common law system the written law is only the tip of the legal iceberg. Most of the law has been made by judges and lawyers, precedents, some going back hundreds of years or longer. In that sense our legal system is inherently conservative.

I think there’s a quiet rebellion going on, particularly in Blue States, against our common law system because the common law gets in the way of progressives accomplishing the things they want to do. In Blue States they’re freer to ignore precedent; in Red States even people in Blue cities need to conform to the common law.

And I haven’t even touched on the degree to which the rest of the country has been subsidizing the “Sun Belt” for the last 80 years.