Yesterday Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker was elected to a second term. I listened to part of his victory speech.

It is very clear, at least to my ear, that he is running for president. In the unlikely event that President Biden chooses not to run, it looks to me as though every Democratic governor, which includes Newsom, Bennett, and Pritzker, will be seeking the nomination.

Well, I voted this afternoon. Mostly to vote on the referenda but also to vote against Pritzker and several others.

The election judges told me that roughly 2/3s of those registered in the precinct had voted in person. When you add absentee and early voting I’m guessing that the total turnout will be something like 80%. That’s pretty high for a midterm election.

I found this interesting. An archive has been created of the more than 300,000 faces that have appeared in Time magazine from 1923 to 2014. From the analysis:

Our first investigation looked at the relationship between the representation of women in the magazine, and cultural attitudes towards women. Focusing on the period between the 1940s and the 1990s, we found that the percentage of women’s faces found in Time between the 1940s and 1990s correlates with attitudes towards women in both the larger historical context as well as within the textual content of the magazine.

and

An interesting pattern emerges in the smoothed data, notably an increase in the proportion of female faces from the 1920s to 1945, a post-Second World War dip, a rebound beginning in the mid-1960s, followed by a decrease in the 1980’s, and a final rebound beginning in the early-1990s.

We found that this trend was very consistent with the attitudes towards women expressed in the text of the magazine, and also with larger historical trends. Women increased their participation in public life as they entered the workforce during the Second World War, were ushered out of public life during the post-war period until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. In the 1980s, we saw a backlash against feminism and a return to feminism starting in the early 1990s. These trends in cultural attitudes toward women tend to track well with the extent of their representation in the news magazine.

A lot of the women are smiling since so many of the faces appear in advertisements and advertisements are more likely to depict smiling people, presumably happy with their consumer behavior.

The graph above was sampled from this post at the Center for Immigration Studies by Andrew R. Arthur. I would like to say that it is a balanced description of the problem but, honestly, it isn’t. The Biden Administration inherited a complex problem that was more or less under control and made it worse. The problem is exacerbated by the large number of unaccompanied children crossing the border and by the internationalization of illegal entry into the United States.

The reason it’s a problem is that there is not a growing need for workers who can’t read, write, or speak English and adding to that population pushes the wages down for workers in that cohort already here. The chickens is done come home to roost. We can’t kick the can down the road any longer.

The graph at the top of the page caught my eye. Alarming as it is, it doesn’t tell the whole story. We’re spending three times as much in real terms on K12 education as we did 30 years ago.

Our problem isn’t that we’re not spending enough. We spend more than any other developed country. Our problem is that we aren’t getting enough bang for our buck.

We’re not just in competition with ourselves anymore. We’re in competition with every person with a laptop with an Internet connection anywhere in the world.

At Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman post their final analysis before the midterm elections. As is their custom they have changed all of the elections formerly listed as toss-ups to leaning one way or the other. The TL;DR version is that they predict that the Republicans will carry the Senate 51-49 and the House 237-198. Although that carries both houses of the Congress it falls short of a veto-proof 2/3s majority in either one of them so there’s a pretty fair likelihood of very little being accomplished in the next Congress other than investigations. A lot will depend on how angry the incoming Congress is.

I think I’ve touched on this in the past. My wife and I eat well but not in enormous quantity. Here’s what we ate for dinner last weekend, for example. The following are per person.

Friday

3 oz. salmon teriyaki
4 oz. string beans gomae
1/2 cup short grain brown rice

Saturday

3 oz. lean filet mignon
1/2 baked potato
1 Tbsp. sour cream
5 oz. frozen Brussels sprouts braised in
1 tsp. butter

Sunday

Chicken soup made with
2 oz. boneless skinless chicken breast
3 cups low sodium chicken stock
1/2 potato
1/2 carrot
1 stalk celery
1/2 plum tomato
1 Tbsp. whole wheat orzo
thyme
black pepper

I make just about everything from scratch.

I eat the same thing for breakfast every morning:

1/2 cup Egg Beaters
1 link chicken breakfast sausage (no sugar)
1/2 cup steelcut oatmeal
6 berries (strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries)
2 Tbsp. unsweetened almond milk

I average 1,500 calories per day. Since I walk more than 10,000 steps a day plus climbing stairs at least a half dozen times a day in theory my calories expended should be substantially greater than my calories consumed but that’s a maintenance diet for me. Go figure.

Tomorrow I will got to my polling place and vote. I won’t be voting for the candidates of my choice because they aren’t on the ballot. I won’t even write in candidates.

The candidates are not of my choice because only the candidates that successfully ran the gauntlet of the primaries are on the ballot. I won’t write in because Illinois law makes that effectively useless. Only candidates that have filed official letters of intent to be a write-in candidate in every jurisdiction in which they will be written in will have their write-ins counted.

But I’ll vote anyway if only to vote for and against referenda.

At Military.com Alia Shoab lists six ways the war in Ukraine might end:

1. Cease-fire
2. A peace deal
3. Russian victory
4. Russian retreat, Ukrainian victory
5. Long-term war
6. Nuclear war and/or NATO intervention

while at 1945 Daniel Davis says there’s only one way it will end:

The stark, cold realities of modern warfare, however, reveal that to the contrary, there is no end to the war in sight, and the most likely case remains – however unpopular in the Western world – a negotiated settlement.

The only question that remains: how many more Ukrainians must die before this harsh reality is grasped by the leaders of both warring parties?

concluding:

Each time the opportunity for a peaceful end was rejected by the two sides, more people died and more cities were destroyed. That vicious cycle will continue, as I project we’ll be in the same no-win position this summer when the next opportunity comes to find a negotiated settlement – after God-only-knows how many more people have been killed or maimed in a pointless striving for the unattainable. Wisdom says the parties should end the war now, on the best possible terms for each side.

But wisdom is an attribute in frighteningly short supply among today’s senior leaders.

I lean more towards Lt. Col. Davis’s view. However, if the U. S. genuinely thinks that a negotiated settlement is inconsistent with its values and sticks to that, I would hasten to suggest that the six possible outcomes are not equally likely. A cease-fire would not be a resolution. The peace deal is identical to a negotiated settlement so we’re ruling that out. Russian victory is possible but unlikely as long as the U. S. is willing to keep supplying Ukraine and/or escalate its involvement. IMO outright Ukrainian victory is even less likely.

That leaves long-term war or nuclear war.