I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but I certainly have. Judging by the various reactions, the assault on Paul Pelosi is practically a Rorschach test.

Some saw it as an example of right-wing extremism. Some saw it as an example of left-wing extremism. Some saw it as being hoist by one’s own petard. Or a security state cover-up. Now there’s apparently an illegal immigration side of it.

As I tried to indicate in my quick take post, I thought that people should be cautious before leaping to too many conclusions.

Stand aside, baseball. Jumping to conclusions is apparently now the national pastime.

Among the many offices and other matters on which Illinoisans will be voting next Tuesday is something called “Amendment 1”. Here’s how the referendum appears on the ballot:

PROPOSED AMENDMENT TO THE 1970 ILLINOIS CONSTITUTION
EXPLANATION OF AMENDMENT

The proposed amendment would add a new section to the Bill of Rights Article of the Illinois Constitution that would guarantee workers the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively and to negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions, and to promote their economic welfare and safety at work. The new amendment would also prohibit from being passed any new law that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety. At the general election to be held on November 8, 2022, you will be called upon to decide whether the proposed amendment should become part of the Illinois Constitution. For the proposed addition of Section 25 to Article I of the Illinois Constitution.[

Amendment 1 would add the following language to Article I of the Illinois Constitution:

(a) Employees shall have the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing for the purpose of negotiating wages, hours, and working conditions, and to protect their economic welfare and safety at work. No law shall be passed that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and work place safety, including any law or ordinance that prohibits the execution or application of agreements between employers and labor organizations that represent employees requiring membership in an organization as a condition of employment.

(b) The provisions of this Section are controlling over those of Section 6 of Article VII.

Several lawsuits have been brought concerning this amendment. In one of them the appellate court found that the amendment would only pertain to public sector workers, the supremacy clause ensuring that the provisions of the NLRB would continue to hold for private sector workers.

If I had to pick the ten most important issues facing Illinoisans today, this would not be among them. I have been unable to find any newspaper, print or online that has come out in support of the amendment. the Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, The Daily Herald, and the Wall Street Journal have all published editorials against it. As I see it among the things this amendment would do would be to render all “no strike clauses” in public employee contracts null and avoid which seems to me to be the opposite of what needs to be done. Is it really true that public employees in Illinois do not have enough power?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal certainly don’t seem to think so:

Illinois debt teetered close to junk bond status until nearly $200 billion in Covid bailouts provided enough cash for a reprieve to its fiscal mess. A peek at the startling state payroll reveals why the mess will return.

According to Open The Books, which focuses on government transparency, the state has 132,188 public employees with salaries and benefits over $100,000. That’s a total cost of $17 billion. The list includes 10 police department leaders and 18 school superintendents with salaries above $300,000 and some 16,592 retirees with six-figure pensions. Five of the top 10 public school employee payouts are for pensions above $330,000 a year.

That’s in a state school system that fails its most vulnerable children. See the National Assessment of Educational Progress, if you dare. In 2020 the average Chicago teacher’s compensation was $108,730 including salary and benefits. Chicago teachers are among the highest paid in the nation, which might be fine if they were also among the highest performing measured by student achievement. But pay for performance is unknown in Springfield.

Giant pensions in some cases outstrip salaries, as politicians know they can increase pension benefits that will be paid long after they leave office. Open The Books says there are “more state police officers retired on six-figure pensions (1,555) than officers currently paid on six-figure salaries (1,540).”

Many states offer high salaries to public employees, but Illinois state workers are the second highest-paid government workers in the country when adjusted for cost of living, according to Wirepoints. The Land of Lincoln beats California, New Jersey and New York on the metric. This is one reason Illinois voters pay the second highest property tax rates. New Jersey is number one.

In my view there are presently several major problems with the relationship between the state and public employees. First, public employee unions’ contributing to political campaigns is inherently corrupt. That’s the very nature of being able to recycle tax dollars into political contributions. Second, many of those who benefited from the high pensions offered to public employees aren’t paying for them. They’ve left the state, leaving the state with a larger tax burden than might otherwise be the case. That is unjust. And we aren’t receiving value for what we’re paying. Also, not only are Chicagoans paying the pensions of retired Chicago schoolteachers, they’re paying the pensions of all Illinois schoolteachers. I believe that Chicago is the only jurisdiction so burdened. Jurisdictions should pay their own pensions rather than depending on other jurisdictions to do it for them.

I will vote “No” on Amendment 1 and I encourage all Illinoisans to do the same.

Ballotpedia has considerably more detail on Amendment 1.

As I had anticipated Kyle Kondik has an update on the midterm elections at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Here’s the bottom line:

This week’s rating changes leave us with 219 seats at least leaning Republican. 196 at least leaning Democratic, and 20 Toss-ups. Splitting those would lead to a 229-206 Republican House, or a net gain of 16 for Republicans. However, as we wrote above, that represents the low end of what we’re expecting, and we think our final handicap will be better for Republicans.

The Senate remains a toss-up. Here in Illinois the status of the 6th Congressional District, presently represented by Democrat Sean Casten, has shifted from “likely Democratic” to “leans Democratic”. Given that the boundaries of the gerrymandered 6th had been drawn specifically to save Casten’s seat while packing Republicans into an adjoining district, it would be a shock if he lost his re-election bid.

In front of our house is a large silver maple. I presume it was planted in the 1960s after the elm that had been there succumbed to Dutch elm disease which would make it in the vicinity of 60 years old. The silver maple and both Japanese garden maples (neither typical) we have planted in our front yard still have most of their leaves.

They say that over the weekend a big wind will come along and all of the leaves will fall off. That’s pretty typical for Chicago. We tend not to have beautiful, colorful falls like Wisconsin or New England. Basically, the leaves change color and a week or so later a big wind comes along and blows them all off.

Sounds like my work may be cut out for me this weekend.

I found this piece on the earliest settlers of South America from Florida Atlantic University at Phys.org fascinating:

Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil—Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça—and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast—for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B : Biological Sciences, suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route—5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.

“Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast,” said Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author who specializes in human, evolutionary, and computational genomics and is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science within FAU’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. “These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.”

Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.

The DNA of the sweet potato has suggested to some that South America was settled from the Pacific hundreds of years ago. The human DNA seems to suggest that it took place millennia ago.

It’s always gratifying when someone with a much larger audience than I have manages to lurch onto a point I made years ago. In this case in his latest New York Times column Ross Douthat points out that conservatives and progressives have, in a real sense, swapped places:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

These reversals are especially evident in a pair of prominent headlines from the last week. If you had been told at any point from, say, 1970 to 2005 that a disturbed-seeming man living in the Bay Area with a history of involvement with nudist activists and the hemp jewelry trade had allegedly followed his paranoid political delusions into a plan to assault an important national politician, the reasonable assumption would have been that his delusions belonged to the farthest reaches of the left and therefore his target was probably some notable Republican.

By the same token, if you had been told in George W. Bush’s presidency that a trove of government documents would reveal the Department of Homeland Security essentially trying to collude with major corporations to regulate speech it considers dangerous or subversive, an effort extending from foreign threats to domestic ones, you would have assumed that this was all Republican overreach, a new McCarthyism — and that progressives would be up in arms against it.

In our world, though, things are otherwise. The man who allegedly attacked Paul Pelosi while hunting the speaker of the House did, seemingly, belong to left-wing, Left Coast culture in the not-so-distant past. But at some point in his unhappy trajectory, he passed over to the paranoias of the extreme right — probably not in some semi-rational radicalization process in which he watched too many attack ads against Nancy Pelosi but more likely in a dreamlike way, the nightmares of QAnon matching his mental state better‌ than the paranoias of the left.

His journey’s violent endpoint was singular and extreme, but this kind of left-to-right migration has more normal correlatives: the New Age-QAnon overlap, the Covid-era migration of formerly left-wing skeptics of Big Pharma onto right-wing shows and platforms, the way that all doubts about the medical establishment are now coded as right-wing, Trumpy, populist.

And the political right’s response to the Pelosi attack reflects these shifts as well. The ethos of Fox Mulder in “The X-Files,” “Trust no one,” is a now dominant value on the right, which in this case encouraged a swift leap from reasonable questions about the details of the assault, based on inaccurate initial reports, to a very specific narrative about a gay assignation that the cops and the Pelosis were presumably covering up.

which I pointed out quite some time ago. Sadly, Mr. Douthat does not go so far as to explain how something happened only that it happened.

I think I know how it happened. They got power. Once they had power they became loth to relinquish it, particularly when their personal business models became corrupt influence peddling. You need only consider the Clintons to see how that is true. They got hundreds of millions of dollars as long as Mrs. Clinton was the heir apparent to the presidency. When that fell through, the donations dried up. The practice is now so widespread and accepted not to mention lucrative among the nomenklatura, not just politicians but generals and civil servants, they don’t even think of it as corrupt any longer.

That’s how you can tell the system is corrupted. When something that’s obviously corrupt is no longer thought of as corrupt, the system itself has been corrupted.

In a thought-provoking column in the New York Times Thomas Edsall explains why the drift of working class voters away from the Democrats is not at all surprising:

In a September 2022 paper, “Tasks, Automation and The Rise In U.S. Wage Inequality,” Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, an economist at Boston University, found that automation “accounts for 50 percent of the changes in the wage structure” from 1980 and 2016, reducing “the real wage of high-school dropout men by 8.8 percent and high-school dropout women by 2.3 percent.”

Task displacement — the replacement of workers with machines — has wide-ranging adverse impacts, they write: “A 10 percentage point higher task displacement is associated with a 4.4 percentage point decline in employment between 1980 and 2016, and a similar 3.5 percentage point increase in nonparticipation (in the work force).”

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, emailed me to say that “it is extremely unlikely that we will create an employment miracle in manufacturing.” Even if the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Biden signed in August, is “successful in reshoring some manufacturing,” he argued,

I am afraid that will do very little to create good jobs for U.S. workers without college or advanced degrees. Semiconductors and advanced manufacturing are among the most capital- and skill-intensive sectors in the economy and ramping up investment in them — as worthwhile as it may be on geopolitical grounds — is one of the least effective ways of increasing demand for labor where it is most needed.

In addition, Rodrik wrote:

Many of America’s competitors have successfully increased the share of manufacturing in G.D.P., including Taiwan and South Korea. But in none of these cases has the employment share of manufacturing bounced back up. In fact, to my knowledge, there has never been a case of sustained reversal in the downward trend of the manufacturing employment among advanced economies.

There is, Rodrik observed,

broad and compelling evidence, from Europe as well the United States, that globalization-fueled shocks in labor markets have played an important role in driving up support for right-wing populist movements. This literature shows that these economic shocks often work through culture and identity. That is, voters who experience economic insecurity are prone to feel greater aversion to outsider groups, deepening cultural and identity divisions in society and enabling right-wing candidates to inflame (and appeal to) nativist sentiment.

In an April 2021 paper, “Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism,” Rodrik wrote that he studied

the characteristics of “switchers” in the 2016 presidential election — voters who switched to Trump in 2016 after having voted for Obama in 2012. While Republican voters were in general better off and associated themselves with higher social status, the switchers were different: they were worried about their economic circumstances and did not identify themselves with the upper social classes. Switchers viewed their economic and social status very differently from, and as much more precarious than, run-of-the-mill Republican voters for Trump. In addition to expressing concern about economic insecurity, switchers were also hostile to all aspects of globalization — trade, immigration, finance.

The irony of this abounds. The low-hanging fruit for manufacturing and lot of other jobs for individuals without college or professional degrees was already picked long ago. Why, then, do we continue to import such workers in the millions? Furthermore the task displacement that is primed to bear the greatest fruit is among professionals. I’ll just cite one example. Judges can be replaced by expert systems. Not only would such systems be as good as human judges they would be better. They could keep track of every precedent, know the entire background to the extent it could be known. They would not be swayed by emotion, political considerations, or personal benefit.

What prevents that? It isn’t the technology. The technology was available decades ago. The professionals themselves prevent it.

A propos of nothing in particular is anyone else as irritated by the new online format of the Washington Post opinion page as I am? In addition to the old subdivisions (columnists, op-eds, editorials, etc.) they have added focus topics. That means that the same pieces are now appearing as many as four times on the page and you need to scroll and scroll and scroll to reach the end of the page. I have no idea what they’re thinking. It’s actually harder to read than the old format was and very nearly the opposite of an effective web design.

I found Rahul Tongla’s piece at Brookings on the unfairness of pushing poor countries to reduce their carbon emissions aggravating for a number of reasons. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

The poor need more energy, and much of it will be clean energy which is already viable. It’s the last fraction of energy that is hard to keep fossil-free. It can be done – at a cost. That cost should disproportionally be borne by the rich, first as they go full zero and pay the early adopter premium, and second, through financial support for developing nations. The premium is important, not just to cover the cost of developing batteries, but also for green hydrogen to avoid industrial emissions.

Such support should be part of promised aid or concessional finance and certainly not more traditional debt. At COP15 in 2009, there was a pledge to provide $100 billion of annual climate support for the poor by 2020, but the form such support would take was never specified. Sadly, the pledged funds haven’t yet fully materialized, and the date has since been pushed back to 2023.

Many developing countries are asking for funds due to climate-related “loss and damage.” How much materializes remains to be seen. Regardless of what form it takes, all climate finance support should be flexible, allowing recipients to not just mitigate their emissions, but also pay towards adaptation and resilience.

I found it aggravating for a number of reasons. Let’s assume that carbon emissions are a risk (I do). Per capita carbon emissions are a red herring—they’re simply irrelevant. It’s the total amount of carbon emitted that drives climate change not the per capita carbon emissions.

All that is necessary to render anything the United States might do in reducing carbon emissions meaningless is for China and India to continue to increase their own carbon emissions. And that doesn’t even take Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. into account. Consequently, if the strategy for dealing with whatever impact carbon emissions have on the climate is solely by limiting what we emit, it’s doomed to failure. It’s not the right strategy. Either the poorer countries must reduce their carbon emissions or a different strategy should be pursued.

That’s why I think the smart strategy is, yes, reduce our carbon emissions as is practicable by using wind, solar, and nuclear as appropriate but concurrently pursue carbon capture and sequestration. Don’t put all of our climate eggs in the renewables basket.

A second reason I found the article frustrating was this remark:

First, if all carbon is equal, then we cannot ignore historically accumulated carbon.

If we’re going to consider historic carbon emissions, shouldn’t we also take the historic failure to remove carbon from the atmosphere represented by deforestation into account? Poor countries are among the heavyweight champions in deforestation, China and India in particular.

Finally, every time I hear pleas for assistance from richer countries to help poorer countries reduce their carbon emissions it reminds me of a remark about foreign aid: foreign aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. Let’s be pragmatic about it. Such assistance will inevitably result in payments to enable the highest-emitting individuals in poor countries to emit even more carbon while in all likelihood doing nothing to reduce their countries’ carbon emissions. No such plan should be undertaken without considerable oversight and I suspect the oversight itself will be intolerable.