There’s a story here in Chicago which you may not have heard about which I think is instructive. A postal worker was abducted in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago but managed to escape before her abductor sexually assaulted her. Both the postal worker and the abductor had been in a convenience store just minutes before. The abductor left the store before the postal worker, entered the postal worker’s van (why was it left unlocked?), and then attacked the postal worker after she returned to her vehicle. Here’s how Matt Masterson reports what happened at WTTW:

Ramirez lunged at her, grabbing her sweatshirt, shirt and bra as she tried to escape, according to prosecutors.

The woman slipped out of that clothing and ran to a nearby auto body shop, where she was given a shirt and called 911. Responding officers allegedly located Ramirez driving the postal van near 20th and Pulaski, but after a 20-minute traffic pursuit, he was able to get away. That vehicle was later found abandoned in the 4300 block of West Marquette Road.

According to prosecutors, the postal worker was hospitalized and treated for high blood pressure and some abrasions around her neck.

The abductor has been apprehended. How?

Later that day, police released a still photo of Ramirez from inside the gas station asking for the community’s help in locating him.

On Sunday, two of Ramirez’s own family members “immediately recognized” him from that photo and contacted police, prosecutors said. A third relative also recognized Ramirez after seeing the same photo later that day, and later told police Ramirez had been wearing a vest this relative had given him a day prior, prosecutors said.

Ramirez was later located and arrested Monday.

Why is that instructive? Because the key element that led to Mr. Ramirez’s apprehension was that those who knew him informed police that he was the individual in the photograph they were circulating. Without that he might never have been apprehended.

My point here is that what makes crime a viable occupation is the complicity of the community in it. Although the cherubic pictures frequently published of individuals who have, for example, been killed by police may represent how his friends and family think of him, they may be a far cry from the present reality which in many cases is that the individual is a hardened professional criminal with dozens or even hundreds of prior offenses. It takes a certain amount of courage and, yes, resoluteness to turn in friends or family which is why it happens so rarely.

It also requires trust in law enforcement which is, sadly, too frequently a missing ingredient.

The table above was sampled from Joanne Jacobs’s post about the recent NAEP English and math test results for this year. Quoting another article she implores:

Tell parents the unpleasant truth about learning loss, writes Andrew Rotherham in a story on the state NAEP scores in the The 74. “The disaster and inequity of pandemic policies is now in clear focus,” he writes. Despite a few outliers — Department of Defense and Catholic schools — “it’s an across-the-board disaster for the United States.”

“Students already furthest from success in school were most impacted,” he writes. “Thirty-eight percent of eighth-graders are at a level in mathematics that leaves them functionally unprepared to fend for themselves in the world, let alone pursue success in various college and career opportunities.”

You may recall that at the time I pointed out two things. First, that the public schools serve two constituencies: students and their parents on the one hand and teachers and school staffs on the other. Second, that the needs of both constituencies could be satisfied by distinguishing between teachers who were at greater risk for contracting COVID-19 from those who weren’t. That flies in the face of long-standing union rules but needs must when the devil drives.

Well, it looks like the needs of one constituency completely overwhelmed that of the other and, as should not be surprising, the triumphant constituency was teachers and staffs. I am strongly reminded of Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions

It is not necessarily true that lost years of learning can be remediated. It has been well known for a century that there are center crucial periods in child development in which if certain skills are not learned they never will be.

We’re not just in competition with each other anymore. We’re in competition with everyone in the world. The students who’ve wasted a year will feel the gap keenly in their later lives.

From Merriam-Webster:

One of the hazards of complaining about the qualities of the opposing party’s candidates is that it increases the stakes for having qualified candidates yourself.

Paraphrasing one of my favorite political figures from the last century, we’re defining competency down.

Revisions to the projections for the midterm elections are coming in, both from Cook’s Political Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. At the Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik updates their projections to predict a coming House Republican majority:

Way back in January, and even as redistricting was still being completed, we suggested that the biggest question about the race for the House was not whether Republicans would win the majority, but rather how big the eventual Republican majority would be. Though there have been twists and turns along the way, that still appears to be the key question with a couple of weeks to go until the election.

While we have always described the Republicans as favorites to win the House majority this cycle, today’s rating changes represent the first time we’ve had at least 218 districts rated as Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican — the minimum number required to win a majority.

Overall, the House playing field remains large and is mostly made up of districts that Joe Biden carried and that Democrats hold. Several weeks ago, we wrote about the districts that have seen at least some outside spending by party groups. There were 57 back then, and the number is up to 61 now. Our sense is that many Democratic incumbents are holding their own but are south of 50%, making them vulnerable to the whims of a GOP-leaning overall national political environment (we’ll address some of these members in one of the bullet points about polling below).

and here’s his conclusion:

After today’s rating changes, we now show 218 districts rated Safe, Likely, or Leans Republican and 195 at least Leans Democratic, with 22 Toss-ups remaining.

Per Crystal Ball tradition, we will push all the Toss-ups to a Leans rating before the election — and we reserve the right to move some of the leaners from one lean column straight to the other, bypassing the Toss-up column (do not pass Go and do not collect $200, to quote Monopoly).

Splitting the Toss-ups down the middle, 11-11, would give the GOP a 229-206 House edge, or a net gain of 16. However, at this point we’d probably pick the Republicans in two-thirds of the Toss-ups, and they may very well end up flipping some of our current Leans Democratic seats as well. Overall, we’re thinking the likeliest House outcome is a GOP gain of somewhere in the high teens or low 20s.

Let’s underscore that. Barring some dramatic new development and, indeed, regardless of dramatic new developments since so many votes have already been cast at this point, Republicans are extremely likely to hold a majority in the House of Representatives in 2023 with as few as 218 seats and as many as 240.

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry about the many complaints about misinformation and disinformation in politics. Has there been more of it in period leading up to the 2022 midterms or are they about the same as usual? Misinformation and disinformation are intrinsic to American politics—they go all the way back to the acrimonious campaign between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the very first real presidential election. There are still some claims made in that election that people believe.

Ending misinformation and disinformation would mean the end of American politics as it’s been for 200 years. Ending the disinformation and misinformation of the “other guys” while leaving that of “your guys” alone would be even worse.

From Our World in Data via a piece in Bloomberg by Niall Ferguson comes the graph above. The spike in 2014 almost undoubtedly represents the combination of the war in Syria/Iraq and the war in Ukraine.

I thought of titling this post “Pax Americana” but it seems to me that’s too self-aggrandizing. I don’t know how to characterize it.

I settled on “you will miss it when it’s gone” and gone it all but certainly is. The deaths in the war in Ukraine alone exceed any year since the 1980s.

I find the lack of balance and proportion in journalism these days very wearing and I’m searching for alternatives. Here are two I’ve found so far:

Ground News

This aggregator site is distinctive not only in that it lists left, center, and right coverage of the news but in that it attempts to assess the bias of each source.

Tangle

This site appears to aspire to be something along the lines of Vox.com without the bias.

Please propose other alternatives, I’ll evaluate them, including them to the list as necessary.

At Politico Caitlin Emma provides a preview of what the agenda of an incoming Republican Congress is likely to be:

Roy is also a member of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus of House GOP lawmakers. It released a budget plan in June that proposes making Trump-era individual tax cuts permanent and gradually raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, among other major changes.

As should be needless to say I have severely mixed feelings about that. I suspect that when push comes to shove the only thing that Republicans will be able to agree on will be that taxes should be cut.

IMO the “Trump-era individual tax cuts” were fiscally irresponsible and our economic situation is worse now if anything.

Additionally, I am waiting with bated breath for the Social Security Trustees’ 2023 report. I can’t help but imagine that the nearly 10% increase in Social Security Retirement Income payments will result in moving the exhaustion of the trust fund forward. Labor force participation rates are significant in that, too. The only real question will be whether exhaustion is one year or two years closer.

And this must play a role as well:

Find more statistics at Statista
When Social Security was put in place in 1935 full SSRA was 65 and life expectancy was 60. Now they are 70 and 79, respectively. Obviously, the program is no longer serving the purpose for which it was intended but has expanded in scope substantially. On the one hand pushing the full Social Security retirement age back to 84 would be inhumane but leaving it at 70 doesn’t look workable, either. I think what we really need is multiple different public retirement programs but that’s probably politically impossible.

The Medicare trust fund is in even worse shape. The insolvency date is 2028. There should be little doubt that it, too, is in need of reform but that will be even harder politically.

In the end I’m guessing that the Republican leadership will chicken out on entitlement reform but push making the Trump tax cuts permanent.

Noting the record number of “encounters” at our southern border, the editors of the Wall Street Journal finally address a point I have been making here for years, namely that the failure to secure our borders undermines the case for legal immigration:

The U.S. needs to tighten its rules on asylum to send the message that not everyone in the Western hemisphere can come to the U.S., but the Biden Administration and Democratic leaders in Congress won’t act.

By the way, these are the migrants you read about who are bused or flown from the border to cities across the country. Most of those flights and buses aren’t sent by GOP Governors. They’re sent by the Biden Administration, which wants to ease the pressure on border regions. But that’s why mayors such as Eric Adams in New York are declaring emergencies as they cope with the new arrivals.

All of this represents an American political failure, of which there are many these days. It is also doing great harm to the cause of legal immigration. The perception of an essentially open border is building a political backlash in favor of more restrictionist immigration policies. The bitter truth, which the left won’t admit, is that Mr. Biden’s border failure has done more damage to the immigration cause than Donald Trump’s policies ever did.

The percentage of immigrants in the United States at present is the highest it’s been in a century, when it was at the highest level in our history. At that time the United States essentially slammed the door on new immigrants.

I believe that countries have carrying capacities for immigrants, that ours is higher than most, but that we have reached that carrying capacity. I think we need a guest worker program with a specific focus on Mexican workers. I think we should be accepting more refugees and legal immigrants. Together I think those things mean that we need to reduce the number of people here illegally. I don’t think a wall would be effective because I think that walls are only as effective as the most corruptible border agent. My preferred solution is very tight employer-based restrictions on the employment of workers here illegally, similar to those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with substantial penalties for violations That’s what I want.

What does the Biden Administration want?.