I find it remarkable how little the opinion writers seem to have to write about. Are they just so accustomed to having Donald Trump to complain about that they can’t think of anything else?

Given how greatly the issue of crime and violence looms in the Chicago mayoral campaign, I was a bit interested in the mayor of Baltimore’s observations in a Washington Post op-ed about a pilot program in his city, long one of the homicide capitols of the United States. To read it you need a very high tolerance for platitudes but here’s the kernel of the piece:

In January 2022, my administration launched Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) pilot in the Western Police District. This strategy, known nationally as focused deterrence, facilitates direct, sustained engagement with individuals who are the most likely to be either the victims or perpetrators of violence. Since the start of this pilot, we have seen homicides and nonfatal shootings in the Western District — historically the most violent of Baltimore’s police districts — drop by a combined 34 percent as of Dec. 31.

Through this strategy, my Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) manages the coordination of law enforcement, the justice system, the community and social service partners to offer individuals the resources to walk away from violence while creating swift, certain and legitimate accountability for those who continue to engage in violent activity. Last year, I made a historic $50 million investment to MONSE in American Rescue Plan Act dollars for violence prevention, which largely funds GVRS implementation.

An act of violence doesn’t start or end when someone pulls a trigger. There are countless points along the way where we can intervene. Building meaningful, impactful public safety requires the creation of pathways for behavioral health services, housing support, life coaching, case management and other resources to ensure that a situation never gets to the moment at which a person harms another human being.

For example, at a weekly review of shootings in the Western District, police intelligence indicates that the brother of a recent murder victim is planning retaliatory violence against the suspected shooters. MONSE then works with trusted community partners to locate the brother while engaging a group of credible messengers tailored to the person and situation, including loved ones, faith leaders, community leaders and law enforcement.

Once located, the brother is invited to a meeting with these credible messengers where he is asked how he is and what he needs, and is reassured that it is our priority to ensure that he remains safe, alive and free. He is also informed that law enforcement is aware that he is planning an act of retaliation and that this act would result in harm to his children, his mother and himself.

He is presented with a choice: (1) agree not to resort to violence and be connected with supports, including emergency relocation and mental health and other services, or (2) face swift and certain consequences that put his freedom, life and safety at risk. The brother agrees to step away from his plan of retaliation. He is immediately referred to Baltimore’s Youth Advocate Programs, through which he receives intensive case management and support.

I’m in broad agreement with that plan but I should admit that I am skeptical about the effectiveness of support services and convinced that “swift and certain consequences” are key to reducing crime and violence in the “most vulnerable communities”. IMO a key problem is that city hall, law enforcement, states attorneys offices, defenders, and judges all need to be pulling in the same direction. The objective should be “swift and certain” justice, whether that means conviction or acquittal.

A comparison with another similar district in which such a “pilot program” had not been introduced might have been illuminating. I guess you can’t have everything. In the past such comparative studies have supported the possibly counter-intuitive notion that additional police presence does not, in fact, have much impact on crime. Had a comparable district not experienced similar declines in violence it would be powerful evidence in support of the program.

Let’s play a little game. The biggest issue in the Chicago mayoral race is crime—no surprise with the sharp uptick in carjackings, daylight robberies, and homicides over the last three years. I’m going to give a list of candidates (in alphabetical order) and then a list of statements about dealing with crime (in a different sequence). Can you match the candidate with the statement?

Candidates

1. Chuy Garcia
2. Brandon Johnson
3. Sophia King
4. Paul Vallas
5. Willie Wilson

Statements

There is substantial agreement among the candidates that crime is a serious problem, that the police superintendent should be replaced, and that Mayor Lightfoot has done a lousy job. Here are some statements from the candidates unedited other than to remove the candidates’ names and formatting in no particular order.

Statement 1
We must work together with the appropriate agencies & personnel to address the consequences exasperated by the pandemic. The uptick in carjackings, murder on the rise, crime out of control & mental health going unchecked.

Statement 2
[The Candidate] will ensure that criminals are held accountable so that the city is safe again. Residents in ALL neighborhoods will feel safe again. Suburbanites and tourists will no longer fear traveling downtown.

Statement 3
We have a framework for how we will be dealing with public safety. We are beginning a series of listening sessions.

Leadership is critical. I, too, will replace Police Superintendent Brown. Improving the morale of the Chicago Police Department is a top priority. We need to modernize our department. We need to have a plan in place for leadership that learns from experiences.

Statement 4
The safest communities in America have the best schools, jobs, parks, hospitals and libraries. [The Candidate] believes we can make Chicago the safest big city in America if we make real investments in root cause solutions, such as creating an Office of Gun Violence Prevention, reopening the city’s mental health clinics and fully funding year-round youth employment and community-based violence intervention services.

Statement 5
[The Candidate] would fire Police Superintendent David Brown and hire a new police superintendent with Chicago roots who is committed to expanding community policing in every neighborhood of the city, cordinating with local officials and communities for more accountability and specificity, and actively coordinating with intervention teams. Immediately putting more officers into the community by creating the Chicago Reserve —made up of 1,000 retired CPD officers; filling 1,600 police vacancies over the next two years; and distributing officers more equitably. Introducing a more effective, equitable, and efficient policing strategy made possible by the creation of the Chicago Reserve unit, made up of retired CPD officers, to handle crucial but nondangerous duties and creating a new recruitment pipeline to fill 1,600 police vacancies in the next two years to enable CPD to allocate more sworn personnel to work after midnight and in places where murders and shootings are more prevalent, and adding officers to community policing beats in every neighborhood.

Can you match the candidate with the statement?

At the Wall Street Journal Ben Chapman and Andrea Fuller report that U. S. public schools have lost roughly a million students since 2020:

Public schools in the U.S. have lost more than a million students since the start of the pandemic, prompting some districts across the country to close buildings because they don’t have enough pupils or funding to keep them open.

The school board in Jefferson County, Colo., outside Denver, voted in November to close 16 schools. St. Paul, Minn., last summer closed five schools. The Oakland, Calif., school board last February voted to close seven schools after years of declining enrollment and financial strife.

Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public-school enrollment, according to school officials.

Districts in cities including Denver and Indianapolis have developed plans to shut down underused schools, and superintendents say more closures are inevitable unless enrollment drops are reversed.

“We are subsidizing and adding funds to those schools as much as we possibly can, but it’s just not sustainable,” said St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard.

Nationwide, public-school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020—a decline of roughly 3%, according to data from the U.S. Education Department. The following school year, enrollment failed to return to prepandemic levels and remained roughly flat.

The authors seem to be making some pretty strong assumptions here. I’d like to see some harder statistics. So, for example, although Catholic schools have increased their enrollments this year they are still below their pre-pandemic enrollments. If that’s true in other private schools as well as in homeschooling, clearly something else must be going on.

I’m passing along the link to this assessment of the war in Ukraine at Foreign Affairs by Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage somewhat reluctantly:

War is inherently unpredictable. Indeed, the course of the conflict has served to invalidate widespread early prognostications that Ukraine would quickly fall; a reversal of fortunes is impossible to discount. It nevertheless appears that Russia is headed for defeat. Less certain is what form this defeat will take. Three basic scenarios exist, and each one would have different ramifications for policymakers in the West and Ukraine.

Since I didn’t really learn much from it. The three scenarios outlined are

• Russia negotiates a settlement
• Russian failure amid escalation
• Russian defeat due to regime collapse

It did make me consider something. In 1989 William S. Lind laid the groundwork for an analysis of warfare in generations.

• First generation: massed manpower
• Second generation: trench warfare, artillery support, and more advanced reconnaissance techniques
• Third generation: maneuver warfare (industrial and attritional warfare)
• Fourth generation: post-modern warfare blurring the lines between war and politics
• Fifth generation: social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, etc.

How does the war in Ukraine fit into that framework? Clearly, there are a number of fifth generation factors at work as well as a number of fourth generation factors.

But what if what is going on is actually old-fashioned World War II-style industrial and attritional warfare? IMO events are showing that we aren’t prepared for that. Could Russia actually prevail under such circumstances?

At CRN Wade Tyler Millward reports that Amazon is laying off 18,000 people:

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services parent company Amazon, said that the company plans to lay off “just over 18,000” employees with cuts expected in the coming weeks and factoring in layoffs from November.

In a post on Seattle-based Amazon’s website, Jassy said that the majority of the cuts will be at Amazon stores and the People, Experience and Technology (PXT) organization—Amazon’s human resources department. The company had more than 1.5 million employees as of September.

That translates into about 1% of Amazon’s workforce. It’s hard to say whether this will be the extent of Amazon’s layoffs or whether these are just the opening move in what will be a lengthier process to cut costs.

Here’s an interesting turn of events. From Just the News:

In a stunning rebuke, the FBI’s retired chief of criminal investigations says his old agency has yielded the independence Congress gave it under the law and is now subservient to a group of liberal ideologues inside the Justice Department who have pressured agents to stray into unwarranted domestic spying and censorship.

Ex-FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker on Tuesday became the latest law enforcement or political figure to support creating an independent commission modeled after the U.S. Senate’s 1970s Church Committee to investigate the FBI’s practices and impose reforms on the storied law enforcement agency.

He told Just the News that the bureau’s problems start with the politicization of its ranks by DOJ.

“What I see is that it’s basically a wholesale takeover by the Department of Justice, which is filled with political appointees in every top position, and then by extension, right into the administration,” Swecker said in a wide-ranging interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“You see DOJ people — and many of the top executive positions inside the FBI now — you see people that have made a career out of bouncing in and out of silk-stocking law firms between the Department of Justice and then these law firms. And I have to say they are incredibly liberal in their politics. And that has now sort of taken over the FBI, and they are inserting that ideology into their high-profile investigations.”

I don’t care whether they’re progressive or conservative—I care that they’re political at all. What do we need a federal bureau of investigations for, anyway? Nowadays every federal agency has its own armed police section. We certainly don’t need political police.

It has always been the case that the Attorney General has been a political hatchet man. You might not like it but it’s a fact and it goes right back to Edmund Jennings Randolph. The contagion has apparently spread to the FBI. I have one caution if you like things the way they are: you have lost any basis for complaint if the new Stasi are used against you.

There’s an article in Nature by Max Kozlov that quantifies something I have been saying here for some time. The pace of scientific breakthroughs has declined sharply:

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

The author is basically at a loss to explain what has happened. Here are some possible causes:

• We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit
• Research organizations are larger and more bureaucratic than they used to be
• The cost of producing new breakthroughs increases exponentially and we aren’t willing to spend as much as is necessary to produce them faster

Whatever the reason it’s a reality. Don’t expect technological progress to save your pet plan. Elaborations will come but don’t expect breakthroughs.

Notice the chart at the top of this page. Breakthroughs in the physical and life sciences are on the floor and in technology and the social sciences not far behind.

In a sense that’s encouraging. If you’re adhering faithfully to the scientific method, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Here’s the meat of Ryan Hass’s advice to the Biden Administration for managing our relations with China in his piece at Brookings:

Rather than reacting to Chinese efforts to negotiate principles for guiding the relationship, the Biden administration would be wise to present its concrete objectives for the year ahead. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China in the first quarter of 2023 provides an opportunity for the United States to set the agenda. By laying out concrete goals and signposts for advancing them, Blinken could orient the relationship toward America’s top priorities and concerns. China’s focus on positive optics for Xi’s visit to the United States in November will offer an opportunity to leverage form for substance.

On the security front, both sides could take practical steps to lower risk. These include reaching agreement on limits around uses of new and emerging technologies in areas where both sides are vulnerable and no rules presently exist. For example, both sides would benefit by establishing limits on uses of artificial intelligence-enabled autonomous weapons systems. As a first step, both sides could agree that humans must be responsible for all nuclear launch decisions and that such decisions must never be delegated to artificial intelligence-enabled systems. Similarly, both sides have demonstrated destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons systems. They could agree to limit future testing of ASAT weapons to prevent the creation of orbital debris.

Both countries also are vulnerable to future pandemics. They have mutual self-interest in the creation of a global disease surveillance network to detect future virus outbreaks before they spread. A similar logic applies to climate change. Methane plays a major role in rising temperatures. Both sides would benefit from pooling capabilities to advance research into methane emission reduction challenges and solutions.

The opioid epidemic in America also demands attention. Chinese officials argue that the problem is one of demand, not supply. Nevertheless, U.S. and Chinese officials must think more creatively about practical steps to reduce the flow of fentanyl with Chinese-origin precursor chemicals into the United States.

This list of priority issues is intended to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

My own view is that we should worry a lot less about China and managing our relations with China and a lot more about the United States and how we operate in the world.

We can no more be dependent on China for rare earths and other strategic materials and goods than we were dependent on Germany or Japan for oil or steel in 1941. If that means we must pay more or manage environmental controls better, so be it. That’s just the cost of doing business.

We need to produce more of what we consume and stop treating increases in the prices of services as economic growth. We need to interfere less in the internal affairs of other countries than we do at present and, again, that’s the cost of doing business. We need to return to what was said a century ago: the business of America is business.

If we do those things, U. S.-Chinese relations will manage themselves. If we don’t in two years we’ll be back stewing about managing U. S.-Chinese relations, just with less security, lower economic growth, and a more assertive China than at present.