There are articles in both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times about the individual who was shot and killed by ICE officers after he struck and injured another ICE officer as he tried to evade arrest. Leah Hope reports at ABC 7 Chicago.

There have since been demonstrations in Franklin Park “demanding justice”.

My question is what is justice in this case?

My understanding is that vehicular assault against a federal law enforcement officer who is in the course of his duty while trying to evade arrest is a severely aggravated felony.

I don’t do this very often but I’m going to quote a lengthy chunk of Gerard Baker’s most recent Wall Street Journal column:

It is almost quaint the way some try to play by old rules. Traditional news organizations (like this one) carefully edited the video so that it faded to black before the fatal moment. It was a decent but wholly obsolescent act of restraint in an age of moral destitution and rancid self-indulgence. It was a little like watching someone trying to enforce those old movie-studio rules about no nudity while millions of viewers peer into their smartphones to access the most explicit sexual content the human imagination has ever conjured.

Then of course there are the helpfully tendentious political interpretations of Kirk’s murder, neatly unfolded for us in the universe of X and its imitators. The stomach-churning celebrations from one side by human degenerates insisting he somehow deserved it. The subtler, nuanced “commentary” that carefully clears its throat with a ritual condemnation of violence but quickly expatiates at length on Kirk’s allegedly wicked contributions to political debate.

From the other side, the eager attribution of this and other acts of political violence to a vast dark army of forces committed to the erasure of all those who oppose their ideology. The unarticulated but clearly identified “they” who are out to kill “you” or “us.”

We could have a proper debate about the extent to which there has been a dangerous escalation of rhetoric—and sporadic acts of violence—against those of us who seek to roll back the progressive tide. Or we could ascribe all murders like that of Kirk to the amorphous nearly-half-the-country conspiracy of Democrats, mainstream media, left-wing academics and transgender militants roaming the country picking off their critics.

What hurts especially hard in the wake of such a terrible event is the grifting quality to all this: the rapacious, unending hunt for clicks and likes and donations and descriptions kicks into a frenzy as a young man lies dying.

This reflects a paradox of our newly democratized digital media. The overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, appalled by violence, eager to respond with a constructive determination to do what we can to root it out. But the discourse is led by a small minority of opportunistic ghouls (not to mention, I suspect, a significant number of foreign enemies, successfully promoting bitter division among Americans).

And we can be sure of the recycling effect of all this on the climate of political violence itself—the way this hate and gore and menace is recycled in the minds of the young men who then go out motivated to commit acts of murder.

A historian will object that alarms about the contemporary media landscape are ahistorical. The modern web is only the latest forum in which the appetite for the worst of humanity has played out. The Romans had their gladiatorial combats in packed arenas; the medieval British their public disemboweling and executions. There was no social media to blame for what went on in the minds of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

True. But it isn’t much of a consolation. The current public American temper is getting more and more like that of the French Revolutionary terror of the 1790s—a civilization at war with itself ever more willing to justify internal violence. If we don’t change course soon, I fear we will become a nation of latter-day tricoteuses, spellbound by the roll of the tumbrils and the swoosh of the guillotine.

Inspired by that I want to make some observations and suggest some action items.

Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Full stop. It doesn’t make any difference what he said, what he believed, whether it was hateful, or whether it hurt your (or somebody else’s) feelings. Words are not violence. Beliefs are not violence. Violence is violence.

The Democrats did not kill Charlie Kirk. Neither did “the left”. An individual did. They’re fuzzy right now but we’ll gain some better notion of his motives and state of mind in due course. Our political parties are not at war with each other.

Calling Republicans “Nazis” or “fascists” has been a staple among fringe elements loosely supportive of the Democrats for almost 70 years. Before Trump Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush were all called “Nazis” or compared with Hitler by somebody at one time or another. That is a practice not becoming of public figures. That includes entertainers, media figures, and politicians. It needs to stop.

Republicans calling Democrats “communists” or Trump calling his political opponents “scum” are not equivalents to that. Here’s how we treated Nazis:

Dresden, Teilansicht des zerstörten Stadtzentrums über die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche.

Here’s how we treated communists:

and

We went to war against the Soviets once, a century ago, and that was a half-hearted expeditionary force. We never went to war directly against Mao’s China. The closest was in Korea and we didn’t bomb either Beijing or Moscow.

Calling someone a “Nazi” or “fascist” is an urgent call to action, including violent action. Calling someone a “communist” or “scum” is not.

Democratic leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

Republican leaders need to address their supporters, telling them we are not at war.

These statements need to come from the leaders to their own supporters, not generally as “we all”. It needs to be more specific than that.

I just figured out something that would be fun to build. An application that used publicly available satellite photography to analyze the amount of vacant space in Chicago and report it on a daily basis.

I figure it would take me a couple of days to build. Before I do that I would need to check if somebody’s already done it.

I had originally intended for this post to be more detailed but I’ll just limit myself to a few basic observations.

During the Biden Administration the U. S. population increased by between 5.5 and 7 million people. That includes the “natural increase” of about 1.5 million + people admitted to the U. S. with legal visas + people seeking asylum + people apprehended at the border and released into the country. During the same period the number of housing units increased by about 4 million. Most of those statistics are from the Census Bureau, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Under the circumstances all else equal you would expect the price of housing to increase.

Unfortunately, all else was not equal and the price of housing increased a lot, by most accounts between 25% and 30% over that period. A number of factors could explain that including inflation, increased taxes, pent up demand (following the COVID lockdowns), and a tendency by builders to build larger homes. We can see that right in my neighborhood. A small, nondescript house a block from here was upgraded to a large, ugly sore thumb of a McMansion. The house that the developers bought for $500,000 is now being sold at an asking price of $1.25 million. We’ll see how long it takes to sell. In this neighborhood the time between initial listing and sale tends to be extremely small, occasionally just hours (like the house I’m sitting in).

Clearly, there is a mismatch in public policy. Either the population needs to increase more slowly or more houses need to be built more quickly. And those new housing units need to be places that people can afford to live in.

I’ve already expressed my preference: I think we need to limit immigration to those with skills plus a small number of asylum seekers (using the legal definition of “asylum” from the Immigration and Naturalization Act). And those admitted should not merely be replacing workers already in the country at a lower cost as has too frequently been the case over the last 30 years.

The irony, of course, is that the mismatch is greatest in places that have designated themselves as “sanctuary cities”.

As of this writing a suspect in the murder of Charlie Kirk has been apprehended and, indeed, it appears that his motivation was political. To the best of my ability to determine that suspect does not have a criminal history or a history of mental illness.

In reaction to Mr. Kirk’s murder the editors of the Washington Post declaim:

Too often, partisans appear eager to blame their opponents after any heinous attack — rather than straightforwardly condemning it. Studies suggest that strong public denunciations of violence from elected leaders help strengthen norms against it.

The overwhelming majority of prominent Democrats forcefully and promptly condemned the killing of Kirk, including New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on his podcast six months ago. Former president Barack Obama said that “this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy.” Though Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) decried the violence, he couldn’t help himself from taking a dig at Trump. “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” he said, a disgracefully ill-timed comment.

The more effective strategy for deterring violence is when political leaders criticize their own supporters for engaging in violent conduct or inflammatory speech. That would require a degree of honesty and integrity among our elected officials I don’t believe we have seen in decades.

If you need a case in point for why I disapprove of Illinois’s governor, Gov. Pritzker’s remarks quoted above are sufficient. Note that I am not alone. The majority of Illinoisans feel the same way.

Also in the Washington Post Megan McArdle’s column on political violence:

The people who do these things are not in any sense normal. The United States does not have the kind of organized political violence you see in countries tipping into civil war. What we have, at the moment, is too many people who have been deranged by life circumstances and mental illness and whose fractured brains have been further sickened in the fever swamp of online politics. The Second Amendment makes it easy for those people to get guns that do real-world damage.

If reports are correct, there is no “reasonable gun control” that could have stopped the attack on Kirk; the shooter appears to have used a bolt-action rifle, about the last category of weapon that would be banned. The only policy option is mouth control, attempting to tamp down the cultural forces that point sick people toward this most destructive and dangerous form of violence.

The most obvious place to start is with the legions of keyboard warriors, 101st Chairborne Division, who enjoy spinning online fantasies about hurting their political opponents — or glorifying those who do, like Luigi Mangione. Almost all those people are just talking, trying to signal their ideological purity or make themselves feel tougher and more courageous than their nondescript white-collar job would otherwise suggest. But they are giving ideas to those who want to do more than talk, including the idea that hurting other people can be a shortcut to fame. So stand down and knock it off. You are not a member of the online French Resistance; you are a soft and silly adolescent engaging in performative sociopathy to compensate for your real-world deficits.

Although I think her column is pretty good, there’s one thing that I think she’s missing. For those whose livelihoods depend an ever-expanding federal government any reductions in federal spending are, indeed, existential threats. That’s true, too, of those who imagine such a career for themselves.

Deterring political violence requires either a much higher level of surveillance than we’re willing to impose or pay for or a prevailing moral code that puts such violence beyond the pale. Realistically, there is no such prevailing moral code today. We have outgrown such primitive beliefs.

In the Wall Street Journal poli sci prof Ken Wallsten laments:

Ask Americans who’s to blame for the country’s recent outbreak of political violence and you’ll get mirror-image answers. The left points to the Whitmer kidnapping plot, the bludgeoning of Paul Pelosi, the shooting of Minnesota Democrats Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, and the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The right points to the congressional baseball practice shooting, the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, the two attempts on Donald Trump’s life, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Each side sees the other as uniquely dangerous, and reactions to every new act of politically motivated violence quickly devolve into partisan score keeping.

But the biggest divide in support for political violence isn’t ideological, it’s generational.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings show that more than one-third of students now say “using violence to stop a campus speech” can be acceptable. This should set off alarm bells in the nation’s classrooms, faculty lounges and dean’s offices.

It’s tempting to blame higher education. Over the past decade, campuses have seen a steady stream of disruptive protests targeting invited speakers, all while university leaders equivocate about the importance of political tolerance. At the same time, students are steeped in orientation materials, DEI trainings, lectures and syllabi that recast speech as violence and valorize resistance in the name of social justice. Many critics have concluded that colleges and universities are “teaching intolerance.”

But support for violence aimed at shutting down speech runs much deeper than college campuses. In a national survey I conducted last year, respondents were shown a list of eight politically divisive and potentially offensive statements (e.g., “All whites are racist oppressors,” “America got what it deserved on 9/11,” “January 6th was a peaceful protest”). They were then asked to select the statement they found most offensive from the list. Following this selection, respondents were asked whether “using violence to stop a speech” advocating the idea they selected as most offensive is “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “always” acceptable.

The good news is that nearly 80% of Americans reject efforts to silence speech they find personally offensive, with large majorities of Democrats (77%), independents (80%) and Republicans (82%) all saying violence is never acceptable.

The bad news is that the story changes dramatically when looking across generations. While 93% of baby boomers and 86% of Generation X say violence is never acceptable, only 71% of millennials and 58% of Generation Z do. And, there’s no meaningful difference between the attitudes of 18- to 26-year-olds who are and who aren’t enrolled in college.

or, shorter, fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

On right-leaning sites I’ve been seeing a lot of complaints that President Barack Obama’s criticism of political violence is mealy-mouthed because he’s been calling President Trump a fascist. I have identified no such statements from President Obama.

Hillary Clinton is another story. She has frequently compared Trump to Hitler see here, here, and here. Are any further comments necessary to explain why I could not vote for her?

Also note the distinction between the “left” and “right” litanies of offenses with which Dr. Wallsten opens his op-ed. All of the offenses of “the left” listed by Dr. Wallsten are mortal attacks whose perpetrators appear to have been in their right minds and whose motives were explicitly political. The offenses of “the right” are either not mortal, the perpetrator was deranged, or the motives are not clearly political (or some combination).

We clearly have a problem and they both do it. It’s just “it” and “they” that are different. I don’t exculpate either Republicans or Democrats. There is, however, a matter of degree.

A story that I do not believe is receiving sufficient attention is that of the Russian drones over Poland. At the Wall Street Journal Daniel Michaels, Karolina Jeznach, and Thomas Grove report:

WARSAW—Just before midnight on Tuesday, NATO sensors scanning for hostile aircraft spotted drones infiltrating Poland’s eastern border from Ukraine and Belarus.

Fighter pilots from the military alliance were already in the air preparing to lock on and shoot them down.

What unfolded over the course of the night marked a moment in North Atlantic Treaty Organization history: the first time its warplanes engaged Russian aerial weapons over an alliance member’s territory.

“This situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflict since World War II,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told lawmakers in the hours afterward.

NATO surveillance planes and jet fighters are regularly deployed above Poland when large attacks on Ukraine threaten to spill over into allied territory, but the direct engagement marked a significant escalation in the game of cat-and-mouse between Russian drones entering alliance airspace and NATO aircraft sent to deter them.

It seems to me there’s some urgency in determining what the heck is going on. If Russian drones and/or aircraft straying into Polish airspace is a commonplace, why are the Polish reacting as they are? If that’s not a commonplace, how do the Russians think we should respond? How would they respond in a similar situation?

By now most of you must have read of the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk yesterday.

The best remarks about the horrible murder I’ve encountered were written by Isaac Saul, editor-in-chief of Tangle:

When I first heard the news, I didn’t believe it. Then I saw the video. There was Kirk, speaking before an audience, microphone in hand, when a crack splits through the air. His body goes stiff, his neck explodes with blood, his head falls back. Pure chaos ensues.

I didn’t think it was real. Or I thought it was real, but I couldn’t process it — of course it’s real, it’s right there — but I wanted so badly for it not to be. I could only watch it once. My stomach turned.

I’m going to spend one sentence directly sharing my views about Charlie Kirk’s political positions: I vehemently disagreed with him on some things, and I thought he offered a great deal of needed clarity, often with courage, on others.

Kirk made a living off of debating people. Most people know him through the viral, 30-second clips of him hitting someone with a closing slam dunk to “win” an argument. Yes, Kirk often framed his content as “owning” the left — but his goal was persuasion. Yes, he often went to college campuses and goaded (then ran circles around) sophomore lit majors on topics he was far more knowledgeable about — but if you watched his events in long form, you’d see something different, something far more empathetic.

He was trying to persuade not just the person he was talking to but everyone watching, and then welcome them into his political movement. He would allow people to frame an argument, and then he’d ask follow-ups; he sought clarity on what they were saying, he made sure he understood them, and then he made his case. I remember the first time I watched a full video of one of his events. Having only been familiar with the 30-second dunking videos, I was seriously surprised by the tone — how often he said “that’s fair” or “that’s a good point” or “I understand why you think that” before he went into action — often in ways I found deeply alluring.

Kirk was especially keen to compel young people, and young liberals, to the conservative cause. And he didn’t just operate where he had advantages; he’d debate political rivals, sitting down with people like Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He chose a righteous path of talking to people from across the aisle. In his own words, he did what he did because “when people stop talking, that’s when you get violence, that’s when civil war happens.”

He did not use violence; he used words.

Saying much other than that is grossly premature.

I wanted to take note of a WSJ op-ed from Roland Fryer. The short version is that there are good ways to reform our educational system, particularly in the lowest-performing schools. Here’s the kernel of the op-ed:

In 2012, my graduate student Will Dobbie and I collected unprecedented data from nearly 50 New York City charter schools to see which practices truly boosted student learning. Class size and teacher credentials—political obsessions for decades—mattered little. What mattered most were five concrete, replicable practices: more instruction time, high expectations, frequent teacher feedback, data-driven instruction and high-dosage tutoring. Together, these five tenets explained roughly half the difference between effective and ineffective schools.

Armed with that evidence, we searched for districts willing to test the model—from Haiti to Harlem. Most weren’t interested. But in Houston, superintendent Terry Grier opened the door. Together we applied the Five Tenets in 20 struggling public schools serving nearly 20,000 students. We lengthened the school year by 20%, brought in hundreds of tutors, replaced 95% of principals and half the teachers while retraining the rest, embedded data into instruction, and built a culture of high expectations. It was one of the most ambitious social experiments in American public education.

The results were astonishing. In elementary-school math, students gained the equivalent of four extra months of learning a year—enough to erase the racial achievement gap in less than two years if we implemented these practices in the lowest-performing half of schools nationwide. In secondary schools, where skeptics said reform was impossible, students gained nearly eight additional months of learning in a nine-month school year. These were bigger effects than those produced by the Harlem Children’s Zone. Bigger than Success Academy. Bigger than anything else I’ve seen in my career.

For context, cutting class size yields about three months of extra learning. Teach for America adds two months in math. Head Start delivers about two months in early literacy. The Houston schools doubled those gains—year after year. By the third year, elementary students had accumulated the equivalent of an extra academic year. In middle and high school, it was two. These weren’t “miracle kids” or “superhuman teachers.” The system—not the students—changed.

He concludes:

High-dosage tutoring, extended learning time, relentless use of data and feedback, and refusing to accept the soft bigotry of low expectations—these aren’t theories. They’re proven. They worked in Houston. They worked in Denver. They can work anywhere, if we have leaders with the courage to act. Kids don’t get a do-over on their school years. If we squander another decade, the damage will be permanent.

The nation faces a choice. We can let another school year pass while students—especially minority students—fall further behind. Or we can finally summon the will to scale what works and sustain it beyond the news cycle. America’s children hang in the balance.

Per Dr. Fryer nobody is doing that. My question is why?

I could speculate but it would only be a speculation. My conjecture is that Dr. Fryer’s strategy gores too many sacred cows.

I’m not sure whether to call this article a report, an analysis, or an opinion piece. In the Business section of the Washington Post Taylor Telford, Jaclyn Peiser and Federica Cocco have a piece saying the U. S. has its toughest job market in years.

It’s the toughest time in years to be searching for work in America.

New data last week showed a fourth month of tepid job growth and propelled joblessness to its highest level since late 2021, when the economy was still recovering from the effects of the covid-19 pandemic. Now, as companies wrestle with inflation, economic uncertainty and trade policy whiplash, many are shredding payrolls and shifting tasks to artificial intelligence while pulling in higher profits. And some executives are pointedly broadcasting sizable layoffs as wins, a sign they’re making workforces leaner and more efficient.

Hardly any corner of the economy is untouched by jobs cuts and slowdown: Employment in all goods-producing industries slumped in August, with the deepest losses coming from manufacturing and mining. The service sector was racked by steep layoffs in business and professional services and IT.

The graphic at the top of the page illustrates what they’re talking about. I’ve criticized the BLS Employment Situation in the past but I think what it’s reporting this month is directionally right if not right in detail. Note that although its numbers are slightly different from those reported by the payroll processing company Automatic Data Processing (ADP) (in which I have more confidence) they both point to a very tough jobs market. You need only to read posts on Glassdoor or LinkedIn to recognize that.

But wait! There’s more. Consider these charts of real total annual revenue 2019-2025 for some big outsourcing companies




My understanding is that TCS’s revenue has declined sharply in the current fiscal year-to-date. I can only guess what this level of stagnation or even decline is doing in India.

The U. S. labor market is even a little worse than suggested by what has been reported. Since so much of healthcare funding comes from tax dollars in one form or another, the entire sector is effectively underwritten by governments if not paid from tax dollars outright. Anything that bears the slightest risk is either stagnant or contracting. That’s not a good sign.