The first part of John Kass’s Memorial Day post is mostly a lament for decaying values. I’ll spare you that part and focus on the most apt part:

It involves us taking time out to think hard and long about a soldier’s poem and the poppies, row on row.

“In Flanders Fields” is that soldier’s poem, written in World War I by Col. John McCrae, a man who’d seen the devastation of war, and hopelessness. Yet with clear eyes and a clean heart he wrote of poppy blossoms as rebirth of hope, those bright orange/red papery thin blossoms, as delicate as dreams, waving in the breeze over the freshly dug graves of the dead.

The scene was Ypres, Belgium at a farm converted to a military hospital, where McCrae was an Army doctor, doctor, dealing with pain and death and disease. Flanders Fields is particularly tragic. The political leadership had led their citizens into hell, and still the citizen soldiers marched toward death and the trenches and the barbed wire, and the gas.

My mother, 92 years old and born of the United Kingdom, hasn’t forgotten. She was born in Guelph, Ontario, the town where Col. McCrae is from. She knew his family. They all knew of the McCraes, but they did not treat them as celebrities. Instead, they respected them.

My mom would put a book of his poetry on the breakfast table when my sons were little boys, so that we’d remember as we taught the boys. And that is how traditions are maintained.

Unlike most of the countries of the world the people of the United States are united by values and our distinctive traditions. The teaching of those values and traditions don’t happen by accident but are passed from generation to generation. They cannot be delegated to the schools at least not if we expect them to be our values. The schools have enough to do without shouldering that responsibility as well.

So, by all means take a day off today and celebrate it with barbecues (or pizza since meat is so expensive) and ball games. But take some time, too, to teach your children the values and traditions you wish to see maintained. They won’t be maintained otherwise.

For my usual Memorial Day plea see one of my earlier Memorial Day posts. Today is the day on which we remember our soldiers who have died in war. IMO the best way to honor them is for fewer of our soldiers to die in war which can best be facilitated by less war and, especially, fewer wars of choice.

This year I’m going to wish that Turner Classic Movies and other channels specializing in old movies show fewer movies made during World War II and the Korean War on future Memorial Days. Those are overwhelmingly propaganda pictures, intended to foster support for the war effort. The soldiers who fought in those wars are mostly dead. Those who survive are in the 90s or older. Some day I really need to write a post on these propaganda movies. They are very unlike the movies made during the Vietnam War or during the war in Afghanistan.

If you’re going to watch one movie today, I suggest Memorial Day. Not only is it a good movie I think it’s very fitting.

It has been suggested that even if they have no obligation to protect you, your family, or your property the police serve a useful function by deterring crime. While I think that is theoretically true and it may even have been truer once upon a time, I don’t believe it is true now. Let’s just take one crime, homicide as an example. When the Chicago Sun-Times dug into the CPD’s homicide clearance rates here’s what they learned:

There are second things to note about the same year clearance rate. First, it represents a fraction and sometimes a pretty small fraction of the number of murders. Second, “clearance” does not mean anyone was arrested:

Half of those cases —199 —were closed “exceptionally,” meaning no one was charged. Under departmental policy, detectives are allowed to clear a case when the suspect is dead, prosecutors refuse to make a charge or police believe they know who did it but don’t make an arrest.

What’s more, one of every seven cases taken off CPD’s books last year was actually committed more than 10 years ago, including one that happened a half-century ago, which CPD attributed to providing extra resources to the department’s Cold Case team. Since those cases were officially cleared in 2021, they are counted against the 797 murder total, further improving last year’s clearance rate even though they happened years before.
When all is said and done, the department actually made arrests in fewer cases than in 2020, when 209 people were charged, figures show.

A little back-of-the-envelope calculation tells you that, if the clearance rate was, say, 20% and half of those clearances don’t result in anybody being charged, that means that 10%—1 in 10—homicies resulted in charges being filed.

Third, the Cook County States Attorney’s conviction rate is not 100%. It’s all crime conviction rate is somewhere around 70% and that figure is achieved by not “approving” a lot of cases.

But let’s just use that 70% figure as a rule of thumb. That means that of the 10%-19% of cases on which charged were filed, 70% were convicted, i.e. 7%-14% are convicted.

So, sure, if apprehension, arrest, conviction, and punishment were sure, swift, and certain, I believe that the police would deter crime. But I don’t believe the actual end-to-end performance of our justice system deters anything. If you think it does, IMO the burden of proof is on you to prove it.

Update

In comments some questions have been raised about selecting homicide as an indicator. Here’s the CPD’s overall statistics for 2020:

Note that 2020 was the height of Chicago’s COVID-19 lockdowns. Other than for the homicide statistics I doubt that many conclusions can be drawn. I know that the longer term trend for robberies has been down but the decline is so small IMO it’s meaningless. A 1-2% decline is margin of error stuff. Its explanation could as easily be a decline in reporting as a decline in robberies.

Here is their more detailed breakdown:

I think their statistics for robberies are completely meaningless, not just because of the anomalous circumstances but because of how they’re tabulated. A $500 theft counts as one theft; so does a $100,000 theft. What is presently being reported is systematic looting of high-end retailers. For a really meaningful analysis you’d need to factor in the dollar value of thefts A graph perhaps? As it is I think it’s meaningless.

One more point. Chicago has the highest ratio of police to population of any major city. If police were a deterrent to crime wouldn’t Chicago have a lot less crime than, say, New York or Los Angeles? It doesn’t. The simplest conclusion is that police are not in fact a deterrent to crime.

This report from Windward, the maritime software company, and Sea-Intelligence which provide maritime research and analysis, should cause some eyebrows to rise:

In January 2022, the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Oakland were still dealing with the much-discussed congestion crisis that started towards the end of the previous year. According to Windward’s AI-driven insights, the impact of the congestion could be felt by the unusual average length of port calls by container vessels to these ports, which stood at 10.9 days during the first week for 2022, nearly twice the average for 2021.

The congestion can be seen more clearly when looking at the transit time to these ports for container vessels from their previous port of call. January 2022 saw an increase of 99% in transit time compared to January 2021, and some voyages experienced a much higher average increase, such as those originating in Tacoma, U.S. (8.9 days vs. 2 days), Manzanillo, Mexico (28.8 days vs. 11.5 days) or Busan, South Korea (29.9 days vs. 18.5 days).

In recent weeks, all eyes were turned towards the congestion throughout China, due to the strict Covid policy across a country that is home to seven of the world’s ten largest container ports. The first significant container port affected in the country was Yantian, when Shenzhen went into lockdown between March 14-20, 2022.

During the week of March 20, immediately after restrictions were lifted in the region, Windward’s AI-driven insights show a spike of 51.25% in the average length of port calls by container vessels at Yantian port. In April, the average transit time from the previous port of call to berthing at Yantian rose by 98%, compared to April 2021, with container vessels arriving from Taiwan and Vietnam spending an additional 81% and 45%, respectively, on the water, before being able to berth at the port.

Through much of 2021 the “supply chain” problem largely consisted of bottlenecks at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. As the graph above illustrates by February 2022 that had nearly been resolved only to run headlong into considerable slowdowns in ships leaving Shanghai. As of April a quarter of all container ships were stuck in Chinese ports. I think it’s a fair assumption that is worse now.

My question is to what degree is what we are seeing a supply chain problem and to what degree a dependence on China problem? Is there an empirical difference between those two? If our supply chain problem is actually a problem of dependence on China, doesn’t that imply that China has a formidable weapon to use against us? Just as we are trying to use the world’s finance system against Russia, are the Chinese in a position to use the world’s transportation system against us? How vulnerable do we want to be?

I stumbled across two conflicting views of NATO expansion yesterday I thought were worth sharing. At Diplomatic Courier former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt avers:

Even surveying the bleak political landscape, one can find the occasional bright spot. For example, Finland’s and Sweden’s applications for NATO membership have renewed the alliance’s credibility and relevance, and strengthened transatlantic relations. And the European Union, having exceeded its own expectations in marshaling support for Ukraine, is now emerging as a critical pillar in the European security order. While major challenges lie ahead, the EU now has a strong foundation on which to build.

More broadly, the democratic West has regained some of its lost vigor and moral clarity in its firm, united opposition to Russia. With Russia continuing to commit the international crime of aggression (as well as numerous atrocities), its support in the United Nations General Assembly has dwindled to just a handful of outlaw regimes.

For the negative there’s Sumantra Maitra at The National Interest:

A fast-track process for Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership is now underway, at the behest of those European states who are taking advantage of the situation and war hysteria to further enlarge an already bloated and diluted alliance. Consolidating an arrangement that has worked well for them in the past few decades is an understandable desire, but it does not correspond that it has worked well for the United States. Policymakers in the United States should ignore the popular currents and encourage open public debates about the limits of NATO’s constantly mutating frontiers and fluid commitments.

Finland and Sweden are in no real danger of any invasion, and neutrality worked well for them. Russia is a shadow of its former self, with a broken military and damaged economy due to an attritional war of choice, and collectively, Europe massively outspends Russia. In fact, Germany, France, and Britain combined are more than capable of providing deterrent forces in the Baltics, and have their own nuclear umbrella. Neither Finland nor Sweden adds enough to the security of the alliance to justify the additional costs. Adding them would mean two more states as protectorates for whom the United States would be treaty-bound to go to a nuclear war.

Can the U. S. afford additional demands on its military? Doing so will require us to expand our military spending in real terms. Are we willing to do that?

In a piece at Bloomberg Matt Yglesias points out the cognitive dissonance in progressives’ emphasis on more laws to restrict gun ownership with their opposition to increased policing and incarceration:

“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” The National Rifle Association doesn’t really use that slogan anymore, but it came to mind last week as I considered a core tension in contemporary progressive thought: strong advocacy of gun control paired with increasing skepticism about law enforcement and incarceration.

concluding:

Fulminating at congressional inaction in the face of spree killers may be satisfying and even necessary. But it is unlikely to persuade them to change the law. Continuing to insist on new rules while shying away from enforcing existing ones, meanwhile, burns credibility with conservative voters, who see a left that’s eager to penalize their hobby and reluctant to punish criminals.

Considerable progress against gun violence is politically and logistically feasible with more quality-of-life policing and vigorous prosecution of illegal gun possession — and the increased levels of incarceration both would require. If progressives want to make guns harder to get but don’t want to prosecute those who have guns illegally, then … it’s almost as if they’re inviting a future in which only outlaws will have guns.

For changes in the criminal statutes to be effective legislators, law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges all need to be rowing in the same direction. The incidence of alcoholism among lawyers is greater than 20%. That may contribute to judges being reluctant to convict people of drunk driving or other alcohol-related infractions. Enacting a law that remains unenforced or when enforced is not prosecuted and those arrested if prosecuted cannot be convicted is only effective at fostering disrespect of the law.

One of the many reasons I am not a progressive is just this sort of “core tension”, as MY terms it. Some problems can only be solved by governments. But not every problem is amenable to a government solution. Governments are people not machines with all of the foibles, prejudices, and weaknesses of people.

For example, police officers respond to social pressures applied by other police officers. Ridicule is a powerful incentive and inexperienced police officers learn what things will cause them to be ridiculed by other police officers pretty quickly. Furthermore, the larger the palette of laws from which a police officer may draw, the more likely it is that at least some police officers will use laws as pretexts for punishing people they don’t like.

The folks at FiveThirtyEight commissioned a poll of Americans to determine what their biggest concerns were. The results are summarized in the chart above. The top five concerns expressed by Democrats were (in descending order): inflation, extremism/polarization, crime or gun violence, climate change, and race or racism. That’s actually pretty closely aligned with what independents and Americans overall.

But it’s not what the Democratic leadership seems to be concerned about. I honestly have no idea what they’re thinking.

I have so many issues with Mohammed A. El-Erian’s piece at Marketwatch, “The people in the global penthouse should worry about the ‘little fires everywhere’ in the basement” I hardly know where to start. Here’s the kernel of the piece:

As Michael Spence, the Nobel laureate economist and an expert on growth and development dynamics, pointed out to me recently, the probability of simultaneous growth, energy, food, and debt crises is worryingly high for too many developing countries. If that nightmare scenario materializes, the effects will be felt far beyond individual developing countries—and will extend well beyond economics and finance.

and here’s his prescription:

It is therefore in advanced economies’ interest to help poorer countries reduce the mounting risk of little economic fires everywhere. Fortunately, there is a rich historical record, especially from the 1970s and 1980s, to draw on in this regard. Effective action today will require policy makers to refine proven solutions and support their sustained implementation with strong leadership, coordination, and perseverance.

For starters, a pre-emptive multilateral debt-restructuring and relief initiative is needed to provide essential space for overly indebted countries and overstretched creditors to achieve orderly outcomes on a case-by-case basis. A multilaterally coordinated approach is also crucial in order to reduce the disruptive—and sometimes paralyzing—risk of free riders, and to ensure fair burden-sharing among official creditors, as well as with private lenders.

Reinvigorating emergency commodity buffers and financing facilities is critical in order to reduce the risk of food riots and famines. Such measures can also play a useful role in countering some countries’ understandable but shortsighted inclination to ban agricultural exports and/or engage in inefficient self-insurance through excessive stockpiling.

Finally, rich-country governments will need to provide more official development assistance to support individual countries’ reform efforts. This aid should be extended under highly concessional terms through long-maturity, low-interest loans or outright grants.

My first objection was best characterized by a former business partner of mine in what I call the “reverse Voltaire”. I agree with what he says but I will deny to the death his right to say it. Mr. El-Erian isn’t just “in the penthouse”—he’s soaring above the penthouse in a floating villa. He can barely see the penthouse from where he is let alone the basement.

Second, I think he’s living in the past. Once upon a time most of the debt of the poorest countries was held by the countries of the Paris Club. Now per the World Bank 37% of the debt of the 74 poorest countries is held by China and China has exhibited very little willingness to engage in the sorts of restructuring and subsidies Mr. El-Erian proposes. They have insisted on full repayment throughout the pandemic, just to provide one example.

So, let’s consider a little thought experiment in which the Paris Club countries do what Mr. El-Erian proposes and China does not. I submit that at the end of the process the members of the Paris Club and the poorest countries will be poorer, China will be richer, and the poorest countries will be more dependent on China than they were at the start of the process.

Finally, I think he means that Uncle Sugar should be addressing this problem. Once again he’s living in the past. By world standards most Americans are in the upper middle class and the top decile of American income earners are in that “penthouse” he talks about but the reality of life on the ground is different. The U. S. just can’t be understood that way. As I’ve been saying for some time the U. S. can best be understood as two countries living side-by-side, intermingled, one a rich, developed country and the other a poor developing country. For the U. S. to address the problem he calls out we would need to ignmore the problems of that poor, developing country who live just down the street and focus on somebody else’s poor. But that’s not what would happen. It has been truly said that foreign aid largely consists of poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries. That’s what would happen.

Earlier this week we took one of our cars to be serviced at the dealership. There were no cars in their lot. We were told they had no inventory. We’re only a month or so from when the major auto manufacturers shut production down for a couple of weeks while they prepare for the new model year. I wonder what’s going to happen with layoffs then.

I’ve also been informed that there’s a nationwide shortage of contrast dye in the country’s hospitals.

With the ongoing and recurring lockdowns in China, these shortages will only get worse.