You might be interested in this description of a novel weapon developed by the Ukrainians from Christopher M. McFadden at Interesting Engineering:

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine (MOD) has officially authorized the KRAMPUS, a domestically developed thermobaric-armed unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Intended for use in offensive and defensive operations, the UGV can also be armed with reactive thermobaric launchers for use by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

According to the Ukrainian MOD, the KRAMPUS is compact in size and weight and can be carried on the bed of a pickup truck, minibus, or trailer. The UGV is also very quiet thanks to its silent electric motors and a tracked chassis.

See the picture at the link. Here’s its firepower:

At the UGV’s business end, the integrated thermobaric system is designed to deliver devastating close-quarters firepower. Upon triggering the warhead, the system disperses a fine aerosolized fuel cloud with a diameter of approximately 7 to 8 meters (roughly 23 to 26 feet).

According to MILITARYNYI, within 0.2 seconds, the vaporized mixture is ignited, producing a high-temperature fireball reaching up to 4,532°F (2,500°C). This ignition results in extreme thermal damage and a powerful overpressure wave that “neutralizes personnel” in enclosed or fortified spaces.

Its tactical use is not quite clear to me. It appears it would be most useful where enemy troops are packed closely together. Sounds pretty horrifying.

Chicago’s City Hall is being investigated by the federal Department of Justice over Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hiring practices. Cate Cauguiran reports at ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — The U.S. Department of Justice is opening up a civil rights investigation into the city of Chicago, it said in a letter to the mayor’s office on Monday.

The DOJ is specifically looking into the city’s hiring practices.

This comes after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s remarks at the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn on Sunday prompted a barrage of social media posts calling for an investigation.

This adds a little more texture:

Johnson’s office released a statement on Monday afternoon, saying, “Mayor Johnson is proud to have the most diverse administration in the history of our city. Our administration reflects the diversity and values of Chicago. Unfortunately, the current federal administration does not reflect either. We are aware of the letter issued by the Department of Justice, but are awaiting the official receipt of the letter. Our Corporation Counsel will review it at that time.”

The mayor’s office released a demographics breakdown of the office. It’s 34.3% Black, 30.5% White, 23.8% Hispanic and 6.7% Asian.

That demographic breakdown bears little resemblance to anything—it’s certainly not the demographics of the City of Chicago. Hispanics and Asians are underrepresented if anything.

Mayor Johnson’s remarks remind me of what used to be said about the Ford Model T: any color you want as long as it’s black.

I should add that the demographic breakdown is inherently misleading. It is deliberately divisive. Neither Hispanic nor Asian are a race, an identity, or anything else other then a politically motivated census category. If Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. were broken out of the “white” category, the United States would have stopped having a white majority a century and a half ago.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
 
I’m writing this, not because I think that the regular readers here do not understand it, but because the readers somewhere else where I comment clearly do not understand it.

For workers who receive a wage 6.2% of your gross wages up to $176,100 is deducted from your pay. Another 6.2% is what is referred to as the “employer’s contribution”, a payroll tax. That money is added to your account maintained by the Social Security Administration. Once upon a time Social Security’s total revenue exceeded its outlays. That is no longer the case. Most recently, for example, Social Security revenues were around $1.2 trillion while Social Security Retirement Income outlays (that’s what most people mean by “Social Security”) were $1.6 trillion and the difference was deducted from the “Social Security trust fund”. Where did the missing $400 billion come from?

It came from the Treasury Department. From what are called “general revenues”. Since the federal government is operating at a substantial deficit, in effect we borrowed it. Yes, Social Security adds to the deficit. When the accumulated differences between Social Security revenues and Social Security outlays over the last 90 years reaches zero Social Security will be insolvent. That is expected in 2036. That is what is generally meant by “Social Security insolvency”.

By law that means that SSRI benefits will be reduced to whatever the system can pay on an ongoing basis. I (along with at least one regular reader here) think the outrage over that will be sufficiently great that the federal government will continue to pay promised benefits even after Social Security insolvency.

Over the years I’ve made various proposals for extending the cliff of Social Security insolvency including eliminating Social Security max and subjecting all wage income to the tax and raising the age of full Social Security retirement age to 80 (that’s consistent with the original structure of the plan) indexed to life expectancy. I should also mention that I’m one of those poor benighted souls who think that Social Security’s problem is not that it’s a Ponzi scheme but that its original assumptions have not held true and have been abandoned.

Let’s start here. At Time Charlotte Alter does a preview into the Democrats’ analysis of why they lost the 2024 election:

Democrats could dismiss Trump’s first win as a fluke. His second, they know, was the product of catastrophic failure—a nationwide rejection of Democratic policies, Democratic messaging, and the Democrats themselves. The party got skunked in every battleground state and lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. They lost the House and the Senate. Their support sagged with almost every demographic cohort except Black women and college-educated voters. Only 35% of Democrats are optimistic about the future of the party, according to a May 14 AP poll, down from nearly 6 in 10 last July. Democrats have no mojo, no power, and no unifying leader to look to for a fresh start.

and

Over the past two months, I’ve spoken to dozens of prominent Democrats, from Senators to strategists, frontline House members to upstart progressives, and activists to top DNC officials, in an effort to figure out how the party can chart its way back. I asked them all versions of the same questions. How did they dig this hole, and how can they get out of it? What ideas do Democrats stand for, beyond opposing an unpopular President? How can they reconnect with the voters they’ve lost? Who should be leading them, and what should they be saying? In other words: What’s the plan?

Many of these conversations made my head hurt. Democrats kept presenting cliches as insights and old ideas as new ideas. Everybody said the same things; nobody seemed to be really saying anything at all. But in between feeble platitudes about “showing up and listening” and “fighting for the working class” and “meeting people where they are,” a few common threads emerged.

Those “threads” include:

• branding
• messaging
• mismatch between what most Americans believe and party orthodoxy
• generational issues

Now let’s turn to an editorial from the Chicago Tribune on the gap between what the mayor is saying and what’s actually happening in Chicago:

We’re halfway through Mayor Brandon Johnson’s term, and the city the mayor described in a series of recent interviews to mark the milestone hardly resembles what we see.

We agree with the mayor that Chicago is a great American city, made so by the people who live, work, play and love here.

But in many other respects — a transit system that continues to perform unacceptably, public schools that cost too much and do a poor job of teaching our children, violent crime levels well above peer American cities and a local economy needlessly deprived of the dynamism that produced our uniquely beautiful skyline — Chicago is ailing.

For all the unfair shots ideologically motivated critics take at the city, Chicagoans who’ve grown up here and made adult lives here know something has gone wrong these last two years. They’ve seen what this city looks and feels like when things are going well. And, judging from Johnson’s rock-bottom public-approval numbers, many of them have concluded he’s a big part of the current problem.

The job of mayor is tough no matter who’s in the office, but Chicago could be doing so much better with a different brand of leadership — and, really, a wholly different philosophy — than Johnson has brought to the fifth floor.

Let me offer a few suggestions.

First, we’ve got to produce more of what we consume. Until that happens governments, whether federal, state, or local, can’t tax more or borrow more without producing inflation. Taxing is another way of saying “reduce the private sector’s ability to spend or invest and increase deadweight loss”. If the Democratic orthodoxy is that we must produce less, other priorities will be doomed to failure. Fortunately, the “abundance doctrine” being promulgated by some progressives suggests that they are getting that message. Whether anything will come of it is another story.

Second, if you are more interested in identifying and expelling heretics than you are in making converts, you will have a perennially shrinking caucus.

Third, the results you produce have got to be what you are promising and what the people want. It makes little difference how benign your intentions. And how vile your opponents are makes little difference if they’re producing the results that the people want.

President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with “aggressive” metastatic prostate cancer. My heart goes out to him and his family.

According to the American Cancer Society the incidence of prostate cancer per 100,000 population rises with age:

While that’s still far from a certainty, it’s yet another reason that we should avoid electing men over 70 to the presidency.

In an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune Mayor Johnson’s erstwhile opponent for the job of mayor, former CEO of the Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, provides his assessment of the first two years of Mr. Johnson’s term as mayor:

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first two years in office can best be described as delusional. Even from a progressive perspective, there is a glaring disconnect between his rhetoric and reality. 

Johnson has declared his tenure the most accomplished of any mayor in Chicago history and claims the city is now a national model for building a worker-centered, safe and affordable city. But his proudest accomplishments amount to little more than a progressive Potemkin village.

He goes on to catalogue the mayor’s putative accomplishments and, needless to say, finds them lacking.

My own view is that there’s plenty of delusion to go around—being delusional is not limited to the mayor. I have no idea what Chicago voters, the Chicago Teachers Union, or the major media outlets are thinking.

Chicago has the worst credit rating of any major U. S. city. There isn’t even any real competition. Chicago has the highest real estate tax of any major U. S. city and the highest sales tax.

Here is Mr. Vallas’s statement of the present Chicago budget deficits:

Johnson or his administration has done nothing to address the financial storm engulfing the city, schools and public transit system — each faces historic deficits in the coming year. The city projects a budget shortfall exceeding $1 billion. The new teachers contract pushes Chicago Public Schools’ deficit to more than $800 million, and the CTA faces a $600 million revenue shortfall. Meanwhile, the mayor’s backing of a $1.5 billion contract with the Chicago Teachers Union makes it virtually impossible to balance either the city or CPS budget without major tax hikes.

For those not residents of Illinois, the state has more independently taxing entities than any other. It’s not just the state and local legislatures that levy taxes but school districts, park districts, sanitary districts, and many other entities have independent power to levy taxes.

My question is how did any Chicagoan expect Mr. Johnson to do anything else? He has not even attempted to economize.

And how does the CTU expect to boost the incomes of Chicago teachers into the top 10% of income earners while teaching fewer students and evading scrutiny?

While I’m reflecting on delusion what has Gov. J. B. Pritzker accomplished that he promised when he first ran for governor? Illinois’s credit rating is only slightly better than that of New Jersey—it’s the second worst in the nation. Also, Illinois’s contribution to public education is among the lowest of any state.

It hasn’t always been this way. Chicago’s credit rating used to be pretty good and the state of Illinois’s credit rating used to be quite good. The last twenty years have been disastrous.

This memo from the Democratic polling organization Impact Research (PDF) for the progressive activist organization End Citizens United provides some advice for Democrats that I wish they would take but doubt that they will. Here are some of their takeaways:

1. Keep the focus on Congress, more than Trump or Elon. For these swing participants, their views on Trump and Elon are complicated and still forming. Trump retains some inoculation on corruption issues. His longstanding “drain the swamp” rhetoric combined with the way he’s messaging DOGE through the framework of ridding waste and corruption gives him some credibility. Likewise, while participants had real concerns about Elon’s role, they were ill-formed, and they saw some positives from his cuts. They are not positive towards either person, but candidates should note that only utilizing corruption framing against Trump and Musk will present some barriers. However, members of Congress are ripe targets for corruption messaging – voters view all (nameless) politicians as corrupt, focused on self-enrichment and gaining power. They attach a lot of the problems facing the country to these ills, and while they are not necessarily able to articulate specific examples of corruption, they are certain that corruption is rampant in Washington.

and

2. Focus on self-enrichment and the influence of special interests and lobbyists as the leading examples of corruption in Washington. More so than past cycles, these participants were fluent in ways that members of Congress use the office for personal gain – they cite examples of members who go into office “with no money” and come out “millionaires.” They are aware that members make less than $200k and assume their net worths increase due to self-dealing. Relatedly, they see lobbyist influence on behalf of special interest as corrupting – buying off politicians to get their own deals. They see this as connected to their own problems – when elected leaders are focused on lining their own pockets, they make decisions based on that, not what is best for people. They want to see action to address this.

When there is no such thing as real privacy and everyone is carrying a videocamera, it’s a lot harder to get traction by complaining about the other guy’s corruption while engaging in corrupt practices yourself than it used to be.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an article at The Daily Wire before let alone linked to one. But if this piece there by Luke Rosiak on the abuses revealed by going through the books of the African Development Foundation unit of the USAID is even approximately accurate it’s not merely an outrage and a scandal but a crime and calls the probity of the entire federal government into question. Here’s a snippet:

By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based groups. But to keep more of that money for its own employees and officials’ friends, while concealing how much money actually went to overhead, it would require Africans to send money back to the United States at its direction, employees said.

Until shortly before DOGE gained access to the building with the assistance of U.S. Marshals, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a stint at USAID as a Joe Biden political appointee. An assistant to Adkins said that after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that the remainder would be coming from an overseas account.

I have been calling out official corruption at the federal, state, and local level for a long time. That’s why I think, for example, that even if Mr. Trump’s solicitation of a new 747 from Qatar to be used as Air Force One be legal and necessary it is certainly unseemly and provides the impression of corruption. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.

It also calls into question Democrats’ full-throated defense of the shuttering of USAID. It’s no accident that the anti-insider trading bill making its way through Congress is called “the PELOSI Act”.

I encourage you to read Yascha Mounk’s post at The Dispatch. Here’s the opening passage:

Largely unnoticed by the general public on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is a particular way America has pulled away from Europe: The average American is now vastly more affluent than the average European. The difference is not only reflected in the overall sizes of their respective economies but by the much more practical metrics of disposable income, living space, and accessibility to basic services.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, though, the idea that Americans are better off than their European counterparts is an unpopular sentiment. I casually mentioned on a recent episode of Paul Krugman’s interview show that, whereas both continents were similarly affluent a few decades ago, America is now nearly twice as rich as Europe. Cue a flood of outraged emails.

The strength of this reaction may have had something to do with Krugman’s audience, which skews progressive and American. But I’ve had similar reactions from very different audiences in the past. When I cited the same stat to a center-right member of the European Parliament a few months ago, he insisted that such stats just weren’t meaningful; in all of the metrics of life quality that truly mattered, such as disposable income and access to good housing, Europeans were surely doing at least as well as Americans. But they are not.

The discrepancy cannot be explained away by claiming that American prosperity is a statistical fiction produced by some people being extremely wealthy:

America is indeed somewhat more unequal than Europe. But the difference is not nearly as stark as some people on both sides of the continent seem to assume. Indeed, the GINI coefficient (a standard metric economists use to measure inequality) for the United States, at 0.39, is only modestly higher than that of Britain, at 0.36, and only moderately higher than that of Germany, at 0.29. As a result, metrics that aren’t skewed by outsized wealth at the top, like household income at the median, still show a vast divergence between the two continents.

or by appealing to quality of life issues:

Since home prices are very expensive in the United States, many Americans might imagine that Europeans can afford to live in nicer apartments despite their nominally lower incomes. But the figures paint a different picture. The average home size in the United States is about 2,200 square feet. In Germany, it is 1,200 square feet. In the United Kingdom, it is 800 square feet. This extra space translates into all kinds of everyday amenities: Americans, for example, have about double the number of bathrooms per resident, enjoy much bigger refrigerators, and are much more likely than Europeans to have a dryer or a dishwasher in their home.

Dining out tells a similar story. The numbers are a little less exact, but estimates suggest that Americans eat out at a restaurant, have food delivered to their home, or order takeout about twice a week on average. According to a 2022 Gallup poll focusing exclusively on takeout food, for example, about 3 in 5 Americans say that they order food for pickup at least several times a month. Eating out is far less common in Europe, where there is a smaller number of restaurants per capita, and the percentage of income people are able to devote to eating out is significantly lower.

I suspect that throws a certain amount of sand at the claim that our European allies will soon be carrying the weight of their own defense. Even if they’re able to afford it that probably won’t be politically possible.

Although I acknowledge this:

But even on the American right, many have now become convinced that the global system built by America has turned to its disadvantage. They see the country, as President Donald Trump did in his first inaugural address, as the land of American carnage, with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities [and] rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.”

I think I see that a bit differently than President Trump does. I think our prosperity means that we can afford to be taken advantage of a little by our European allies. All the more reason for us to maintain that prosperity which I believe means that we need to produce more of what we consume.