Deplatformed, er, retired Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has advice for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for dealing with the Chicago Teachers Union’s refusal to work in person in the face of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2:

Only a small handful of Chicago public school students, most with serious co-morbidities, have died from the pandemic. But about 230 kids have been victims of homicide in Chicago, according to wirepoints.org

Who weeps for that 15-year-old South or West Side boy who was already academically behind, that boy who was cut adrift during last year’s failed remote learning?

Now, after one year already lost and CTU shutting schools again, that boy is again cut loose by a morally indefensible system.

He’s lost out there. A few of his friends may get lucky and find a productive future, perhaps join the Marines or the Army and realize structure in discipline.

But that lost boy? His future is all about fear and prison and pain. He’ll become a statistic floating away in Chicago’s river of violence, where the names of the dead are forgotten by a city already numb.

And who’ll weep for that boy?

CTU leaders won’t weep. Neither will hard left progressives who love their virtue signaling and back the CTU’s illegal work stoppage. Randi Weingarten–president of the American Federation of Teachers that serves as the shock troops for the Democratic Party–won’t weep. And neither will Chicago’s silent, frightened business community.

CTU president Jesse Sharkey, the angry man in red in the photograph above, piles on Lightfoot. As does Weingarten.

And the left continues devouring its own.

As I typed that last sentence, I was reminded of an iconic photo of the George Floyd riots in Chicago. You may remember it. It was in the Sun Times, taken as the left began to devour administrations of liberal black mayors across America, including Lightfoot’s, in those “sometimes fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”

The photo was of an angry white woman facing off against two black Chicago police officers. I didn’t see any identification, she could have been an incognito Republican secretly hell-bent on discrediting the raging neo-Marxists, but I doubt it.

I figured her for a CTU member teaming up with Black Lives Matter rioters out on Michigan Avenue, or one of those angry suburban female leftists, just before all the Boul Mich storefronts were shattered and looted.

The photo shows her masked, her face a foot or so away from two black cops. The veteran officers were calm. She was not calm, with both of her beefy pink arms upraised, giving the officers the finger from each hand. It was an image beyond words:

Angry white woman of the left up in the faces of two unmasked black cops, her two middle fingers up, her political rage boiling through that mask that protected her identity. You could almost hear her screams.

Some 35 years ago, then Secretary of Education William Bennett pronounced Chicago’s Public Schools as the “worst in the nation.” Now, it’s even worse than Bennett could have imagined.

Over the last few years, as more and more parents—black, brown and white—began pulling their children from Chicago Public Schools in droves, the CPS budget kept growing even as the CPS student population shrunk. Yes, the system is morally bankrupt, but flush with cash, spending about $27,000 a year per student only to fail them.

To those of you wise in the Chicago Way, the muscle flexed by militant CTU leaders is clear:

They’re measuring the drapes in the mayor’s office. CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates has been floated as a mayoral contender. Sharkey isn’t the power. He’s the front man. Gates is the one with the real juice and the nerve.

And the 2023 mayoral campaign proceeds in a dying city.

Lightfoot opposes CTU’s move toward remote learning. She has responded by locking CTU teachers out of remote learning platforms. She’s threatened to withhold their pay. She deserves credit for talking tough, but then, she’s talked tough many times before. Each time she’s caved to the CTU.

She hasn’t had a win since her inauguration day, when she shamed the City Council. Now she struggles in her mayoral fundraising efforts, flailing.

The other day she made a speech, trying to reboot on fighting the crime wave. But her rhetoric isn’t nearly enough, especially not after she failed to stand up to rioters and looters that savaged the city during the BLM George Floyd riots, as Chicago began its plunge into lawlessness.

She talks of “positive police interactions” with communities, even as murders in those neighborhoods go uncharged, as crime goes unprosecuted, as violent career criminals charged with more violent crime are released back on the streets through low or no bail, or electronic home monitoring, to victimize others even as they await trial.

Much of the blame for this goes to Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx and Foxx’ patron Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Yet Lightfoot dares not mention Toni’s name. And Lightfoot endorsed Foxx for re-election.

As troubled parents flee with their kids–some running to Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin, some to private/parochial schools they can’t afford–we should remember what former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said about crisis.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.”

What is that thing Chicago couldn’t do before?

Real School Choice.

Real School Choice is the only way out for Chicago and the nation. It is the only way to break the militant teacher union leadership’s hold on the most vulnerable families. It is the only way to stop the left’s radicalizing of children in the cities and the suburbs.

Let tax money follow the students. Give families a choice. In Chicago, the money is there. $27,000 a year can pay for private school tuition.

This is called freedom. And not freedom only for those with means, but hope for low-income black and brown and poor whites who’ve been left behind by a corrupt system controlled by corrupt political actors.

which I feel confident she will not take.

I also don’t think that would be quite as effective as Mr. Kass seems to believe. It would require parents who are willing to abandon their local public schools in favor or more distant and less convenient alternatives and I suspect those are a minority in Chicago.

It would, however, be effective in ensuring that Mayor Lightfoot has at least one well-funded primary opponent in her re-election bid.

Last month was a recordbreaking one for raises offered by small firms. James Freeman reports at the Wall Street Journal:

The fierce competition for workers among U.S. employers has inspired another record-setting month for wage hikes at small firms. That’s according to the latest monthly employment survey from the National Federation of Independent Business, due out later today.

NFIB Chief Economist William Dunkelberg reports on the December numbers from member companies participating in the survey:

Seasonally adjusted, a net 48 percent reported raising compensation, up 4 points from November and a 48-year record high reading. A net 32 percent plan to raise compensation in the next three months, unchanged from November’s record high reading.

Maybe I should start looking for a new job. I’ve had my present one for a year now. I’d hate to leave my present employer in the lurch (I would leave a very large hole)

The iconic actor Sidney Poitier has died. Variety reports:

Sidney Poitier, whose dignity and self-assertion ushered in a new era in the depiction of African-Americans in Hollywood films as the civil rights movement was remaking America, has died, a spokesperson for the Bahamian Prime Minister confirmed to Variety. He was 94. Poitier was the oldest living winner of the best actor Oscar — just one distinction in a career full of distinctions.

“Our whole Bahamas grieves and extends our deepest condolences to his family. But even as we mourn, we celebrate the life of a great Bahamian, a cultural icon, an actor and film director, an entrepreneur, civil and human rights activist and, latterly, a diplomat,” said Phillip Davis, Prime Minister of the Bahamas in a statement. “We admire the man not just because of his colossal achievements, but also because of who he was. His strength of character, his willingness to stand up and be counted, and the way he plotted and navigated his life’s journey.”

Encomia are pouring out from multiple sources:
Los Angeles Times
New York Times
Wall Street Journal

His life was one of tremendous accomplishments and influence. Without Sidney Poitier there would have been no Denzel Washington, no Morgan Freeman, no Chadwick Boseman. He did that. It’s hard to imagine what American cinema would be like today without him. I believe it was more than a case of being in the right place at the right time. He was a man of unique gifts.

I think the first movie I ever saw him in was Something of Value in 1957 but the first movie in which I really noticed him was Lilies of the Field. I believe that’s a movie people will still be watching in a century.

David Brooks’s most recent New York Times column is an interesting exercise. He opens by taking the back of his hand to the Republicans:

When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government.

but after that it’s almost completely devoted to how offbase Democrats are in “defending democracy”. He provides a series of “myths”, debunks them, and then points out what the Democrats are doing. I’ll take them one at a time.

Myth #1: the whole electoral system in crisis

Elections have three phases: registering and casting votes, counting votes and certifying results. When it comes to the first two phases, the American system has its flaws but is not in crisis. As Yuval Levin noted in The Times a few days ago, it’s become much easier in most places to register and vote than it was years ago. We just had a 2020 election with remarkably high turnout. The votes were counted with essentially zero fraud.

The emergency is in the third phase — Republican efforts to overturn votes that have been counted. But Democratic voting bills — the For the People Act and its update, the Freedom to Vote Act — were not overhauled to address the threats that have been blindingly obvious since Jan. 6 last year. They are sprawling measures covering everything from mail-in ballots to campaign finance. They basically include every idea that’s been on activist agendas for years.

Myth #2: voter suppression efforts are a major threat to democracy

Given the racial history of this country, efforts to limit voting, as some states have been implementing, are heinous. I get why Democrats want to repel them. But this, too, is not the major crisis facing us. That’s because tighter voting laws often don’t actually restrict voting all that much. Academics have studied this extensively. A recent well-researched study suggested that voter ID laws do not reduce turnout.

Myth #3: higher turnout helps Democrats

Political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik, authors of “The Turnout Myth,” looked at 70 years of election data and found “no evidence that turnout is correlated with partisan vote choice.”

Myth #4: the best way to address the crisis is top down

Democrats have focused their energies in Washington, trying to pass these big bills. The bills would override state laws and dictate a lot of election procedures from the national level.

Given how local Republicans are behaving, I understand why Democrats want to centralize things. But it’s a little weird to be arguing that in order to save democracy we have to take power away from local elected officials.

He concludes:

The crisis of democracy is right in front of us. We have a massive populist mob that thinks the country is now controlled by a coastal progressive oligarchy that looks down on them. We’re caught in cycles of polarization that threaten to turn America into Northern Ireland during the Troubles. We have Republican hacks taking power away from the brave state officials who stood up to Trumpian bullying after the 2020 election.

Democrats have spent too much time on measures that they mistakenly think would give them an advantage. The right response would be: Do the unsexy work at the local level, where things are in flux. Pass the parts of the Freedom to Vote Act that are germane, like the protections for elections officials against partisan removal, and measures to limit purging voter rolls. Reform the Electoral Count Act to prevent Congress from derailing election certifications.

So, let’s recap. Vote fraud exists but at such a low level it’s not a dire problem. Voter suppression exists but it doesn’t influence turnout or election outcomes. Higher turnout doesn’t provide an advantage of one party over the other. Republicans are worried about “a coastal progressive oligarchy” and the Democratic strategy for improving democracy is to place more control in their hands. Nothing to worry about there, obviously. So, where’s the beef?

It seems to me that the crisis is one of trust. Not only does neither party trust the other they view the other party’s members as enemies rather than as competitors. I think the solution to that is not just one of messaging.

In an op-ed in the New York Times Lilia Shevtsova comments on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans:

So what is Mr. Putin’s endgame? The immediate aim, to be sure, is to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit. But that’s only a brush stroke on a much bigger canvas. Mr. Putin’s design is grand: to refashion the post-Cold War settlement, in the process guaranteeing the survival of Russia’s personalized power system. And judging from the West’s awkward, anguished response so far, he might be close to getting what he wants.

In recent years, Mr. Putin has successfully revived Russia’s tradition of one-man rule by amending the Constitution, rewriting history and clamping down on the opposition. Now he seeks to provide the system with a sturdy Great Power spine, returning to Russia its global glamour. In the past decade, Mr. Putin’s Russia not only demonstrated its readiness to resume control over the former Soviet space, testing its ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine, but also left its footprints all over the world, including through meddling in Western democracies. Yet today’s standoff over Ukraine takes things to a new level.

No longer content with upsetting the West, Mr. Putin is now trying to force it to agree to a new global dispensation, with Russia restored to eminence. It doesn’t stop there, though. Crucially, the geopolitical advance would serve to safeguard Mr. Putin’s rule. So the West, by accepting Russia’s geopolitical position, would effectively underwrite its domestic agenda, too. The United States would become, at home and abroad, Russia’s security provider. It’s quite the gambit.

I don’t know whether this is accurate or not but that’s not my point in this post. The NYT blandly describes Dr. Shevtsova as a “Russia expert”. She’s a Ukrainian Russia expert. I would expect her to have a point of view that might, indeed, be different from that of a Russian. Or an American for that matter.

This is a near-perfect instance of something I’ve been remarking on recently. An enormous proportion of the “Russia experts” cited in American media are either Ukrainians or Poles. It’s as though all of the experts on American politics being cited were Mexican scholars. Or Guatemalans. Their insights might well be true but they would represent a specific point of view which might cause them to skew those insights.

Note that I’m not challenging Dr. Shevtsova’s expertise, merely pointing out potential biases. I wish the NYT were doing that for us.

At MIT Technology Review Antonion Regalado presents his picks for the “worst technology of 2021”. It includes:

• Aduhelm—an anti-Altzheimer’s drug that’s hugely expensive, not particularly effective, and dangerous
• Zillow’s house-buying algorithm that overpaid for houses
• Ransomware
• Billionnaires in space
• Beauty filters

I only disagree with one of them—the spurt of space tourism. I think that anything that encourages interest in space travel is to the good.

Adam Ellwanger has provided the next exhibit in my ongoing search for definitions of democracy in a piece at Human Events. Here’s the kernel of his observations:

What, then, are the essential characteristics of a true democracy? I argue there are four. The first is that the methods for the selection of candidates for office must be fair and cannot allow any particular class of citizens to have significant advantages in earning an appointment to a government position. Secondly, people in leadership positions must recognize an obligation to respond to public concerns in ways that mirror the preferences of their constituents, and they must prioritize their efforts at governance in accord with the most urgent concerns of the public. Third, a very large majority of citizens must have faith that the methods for selecting who will hold public office are fair and uncorrupted. Finally, the core non-governmental institutions that wield enormous power in the public sphere must not use that power to deliberately manipulate public opinion or decisions about politics and the direction of society. I’ll discuss each of these in turn.

A considerable amount of energy has ben expended today expressing concerns about the third “essential characteristic”, the confidence of the citizenry in institutions, but I think that we fail on all four. With respect to #3, I would submit that the decline of voter turnout in midterm elections from 75% immediately following World War II to its present roughly 55% as evidence of a decline in confidence.

I genuinely wish I knew what to make of this study (PDF):

We estimated the number of excess myocarditis events per million persons in the 1-28 days following each exposure for the main analysis and by age and sex (Supplemental Table 5 and
Figure 1). Following the first dose of the ChAdOx1 and BNT162b2 vaccines an additional 1 (95%CI 0, 2) and 2 (95%CI 1, 2) myocarditis events per million persons exposed would be anticipated, respectively. Following the second dose of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 an additional 2 (95%CI 2, 3) and 36 (95%CI 34, 37) myocarditis events would be anticipated, respectively. Following a third dose of BNT162b2 an additional 2 (95%CI 1, 2) myocarditis events per million persons would be anticipated. These estimates compare to an additional 30 (95%CI 29, 31) myocarditis events per million in the 1-28 days following a SARS-CoV-2 positive test.

If the findings prove out it would suggest to me that the model of getting a booster against COVID-19 every few months may not be workable.

Nothing is risk-free and the assessment of risk varies by individual based both on personal circumstances as well as individual tolerance for risk. I haven’t done the math but it would seem to me that there would be a “sweet spot” somewhere at which the risk of myocarditis was so much lower than the risks from contracting COVID-19 it was barely worth considering. It does make one wonder about the 20th or 50th booster shot.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Jeffrey Scott Shapiro covers some of the same ground that I have:

The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are misunderstood, and the failure to correct the record could be damaging to both America’s future and its justice system. Words have to have meaning, and the continuous mislabeling of the U.S. Capitol breach as an “insurrection” is an example of how a false narrative can gain currency and cause dangerous injustice.

Many crimes undoubtedly took place at the Capitol that day. Demonstrators rioted, destroyed government property and in some instances engaged in acts of violence. Many are charged with violating 18 U.S.C. 371, which makes it a crime “to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States,” and with underlying charges of civil disorder, disorderly conduct, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, destruction of government property, and obstruction of an official proceeding.

These are important criminal charges that shouldn’t go unaddressed. But of the hundreds of “Capitol Breach Cases” listed at the Justice Department’s prosecution page, not one defendant is charged with insurrection under 18 U.S.C. 2383. That’s because insurrection is a legal term with specific elements. No prosecutor would dare mislabel negligent homicide or manslaughter a murder, because they are totally distinct crimes. The media has no legal or moral basis to do otherwise.

The events of Jan. 6 also fail to meet the dictionary definition of insurrection, which Merriam-Webster defines as “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” A usage note adds that the term implies “an armed uprising that quickly fails or succeeds.” A closely related term, “insurgency,” is “a condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as a belligerency.”

Other near synonyms include “rebellion,” “revolution,” “uprising,” “revolt” and “mutiny.” All require two elements, neither of which was present in the Jan. 6 breach—the organized use of violent force and the aim of replacing one government or political system with another.

A real insurrection would have required the armed forces to quell an armed resistance. Actual insurrections—apart from the Civil War—include Shay’s Rebellion in 1787, in which thousands of insurrectionists tried to seize weapons from a Massachusetts armory after months of planning to overthrow the new revolutionary government, and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, in which 500 armed men attacked the home of a U.S. tax inspector in Western Pennsylvania. Both events required President Washington to quell the insurrections with thousands of armed troops, who killed several resistors.

The demonstrators who unlawfully entered the Capitol during the Electoral College count were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system or engaging in a conspiracy “against the United States, or to defraud the United States.” On the contrary, many of them believed—however erroneously—that the U.S. constitutional system was in jeopardy from voter fraud, and they desperately lashed out in a dangerous, reckless hysteria to protect that system.

The media’s mischaracterization of these events created a moral panic that unfairly stigmatized Trump supporters across the nation as white supremacists conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government, resulting in the unnecessary mobilization of armed U.S. troops in Washington.

Those who violated the law inside the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced accordingly. But dramatizing a riot as an organized, racist, armed insurrection is false reporting and dangerous political gaslighting.

Note that there is no attempt to diminish the events, exonerate the guilty parties, or otherwise justify them. It’s just a flat assertion that words have meanings.

Question: who is undermining democracy? Those who breached the Capitol, those who justify those actions on specious grounds, or those who insist on misapplying language or, in Mr. Shapiro’s words, “political gaslighting”? My answer: all of the above. Rabid partisanship is undermining democracy.