As Greg Hinz notes at Crain’s Chicago Business, things are unfolding exactly as I have predicted:

Remap at best is a contentious and nasty process, a zero-sum game in which someone wins and someone else loses But add race and ethnicity into it—and a little bit of Chicago-style hardball politics—and the potential for some real nastiness is apparent.

That’s one of the clearest conclusions to be drawn from the U.S. census figures released yesterday, results that confirmed Latinos in Chicago now outnumber Blacks.

The figures have been expected, at least in general terms. African-Americans continue to move out of the city, with their population now down nearly 85,000 over the past decade, to 788,000. Meanwhile both the Latino and Asian populations continued a steady uptick, hitting 820,000 and 190,000, respectively, with the white population increasing just a bit to 864,000.

What arguably wasn’t expected was the vehemence with which Latino political leaders have seized on the now-official figures to demand increased representation in the City Council—representation that, as my colleague A.D. Quig reported last month, likely will result in fewer wards dominated by Blacks.

“Latinos suffer from a disproportionate underrepresentation in city leadership that has real-life consequences,” City Council Latino Caucus head Ald. Gil Villegas, 36th, wrote in a guest column in the Chicago Tribune today. Be it street violence or the impact of COVID, “Chicagoan have the right to elect people who can change these realities because they understand them,” Villegas wrote.

On the other side of the coin not all Hispanics are eligible to vote, they aren’t registered to vote as greatly as blacks, and even when registered don’t show up to the polls as regularly as blacks do. In the final analysis demographics don’t matter. What matters is who shows up at the polls. 90% of life is showing up.

Let’s see if the next part of my prediction holds true: the infighting between blacks and Hispanics will redound to the benefit of whites.

President Biden is receiving criticism from many quarters over the situation in Afghanistan.

For President Biden, who had hoped for an orderly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the chaos in Kabul carries echoes of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — precisely the image he wanted to avoid. And the Taliban’s drive for military victory — ignoring pledges to negotiate a transition of power — will raise questions about whether its promises to prevent al-Qaeda from rebuilding safe havens in Afghanistan can be trusted.

and

The Taliban will have difficulty swallowing Afghanistan, for all its success on the battlefield. Afghanistan has become an increasingly urban and modern society since the U.S. invasion in 2001. The Taliban’s military forces number only about 80,000, in a country of about 39 million. For millions of Afghan women, who have been attending schools and universities the past two decades and sharing in a freer country, the prospect of a Taliban return to power is especially bleak.

The beneficiaries of the American occupation will undoubtedly be those who suffer most under a return to Taliban rule. That’s just stating the obvious.

A disastrous Taliban takeover wasn’t inevitable. President Biden said his hands were tied to a withdrawal given the awful peace deal negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban. But there was still a way to pull out American troops while giving our Afghan partners a better chance to hold the gains we made with them over the last two decades.

Mr. Biden chose otherwise. The way he announced the drawdown and eventual departure of American troops — at the start of the fighting season, on a rapid timeline and sans adequate coordination with the Afghan government — has in part gotten us into the current situation.

Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of keeping American military forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, even at very low numbers. I and others have argued that the investment, including the risk to American personnel, is worth it to prevent militant groups from once again overrunning the country.

Mr. Biden believes that further expending U.S. resources in Afghanistan is “a recipe for being there indefinitely.” He rightly notes that President Trump had left him few good options by making a terrible deal with the Taliban. That’s a fine argument, but it explains neither the hastiness nor the consequences we are now observing: the Taliban overrunning swathes of the country, closing in on Kabul, pushing the Afghan security forces and government to the brink of collapse and prompting the Pentagon to prepare for a possible evacuation of the U.S. embassy.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously wrote that President Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign-policy issue in his long career. The world is getting another example as Mr. Biden’s hell-bent, ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan is turning into a strategic defeat and moral debacle.

The Taliban march to Kabul continues with the fall of more provincial capitals each day. The last count was 12 capitals, including Ghazni City on the road between the major cities of Kandahar and Kabul. Reinforcing Afghan forces defending Kandahar will become harder if the road is blocked.

The Afghan government is trying to mount a counterattack, and President Ashraf Ghani has sacked another army chief. But the Taliban now controls at least eight entire provinces, according to the Long War Journal, and its reach includes areas in the north that the Taliban didn’t control when it ruled the country before 9/11. The city of Herat also fell Thursday, and Kandahar could be next.

and

The White House has failed to understand what’s happening, with leaks saying the Administration is surprised by the Taliban assault. Surprised? The military warned Mr. Biden and so did U.S. intelligence. The Taliban began this offensive on May 1, two weeks after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal, aiming for the symbolic date of Sept. 11.

For the umpteenth time, back in 2001, recognizing that some forceful response was politically necessary after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, I advocated the most ferocious punitive raid in history, harsh and destructive enough to discourage any country entertaining the prospect of playing host to terrorists. I argued against “boots on the ground” and occupying the country because I envisioned this day.

All of those criticizing the withdrawal clearly want a permanent occupation of Afghanistan since that’s the only strategy that would have prevented what will happen. Some are explicit in their aims; for all they are at least implicit. All point to consequences for withdrawing. None point to the consequences of a permanent occupation of an otherwise strategically meaningless landlocked country in the middle of Asia. Those would be extremely dire.

I voted for Barack Obama in 2008, hoping that he would have the sense and the courage to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan. He didn’t. I presume he was persuaded otherwise by the general staff and political advisors. I don’t know what has given Joe Biden the spine to go through with it. I don’t agree with those who see him as a doddering ancient, so demented he is not responsible for his own policies. In the unlikely event that he’s entertaining the notion of a second term, withdrawing from Afghanistan and the consequences of that withdrawal will undoubtedly be arguments wielded by his political opponents against him. That doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do under the circumstances.

Update

James Joyner has a roundup of reaction as well.

I agree with Clarence Page’s proposal for ending the carnage on the South and West Sides of Chicago. From his most recent Chicago Tribune column:

What to do? The most glaring and long-running issue in my view as a former Chicago police reporter may be the city’s low clearance rate, meaning crimes that have led to at least one arrest. After some improvement in recent years, CPD’s clearance rate dipped in 2020 from 50.3% the previous year to 44.5%.

That shortfall in arrests sounds even worse when you count by race.

An analysis of murder investigations in Chicago by WBEZ radio in 2019 found that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved. … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.”

In other words, the killer of a Black victim has more of a chance of getting away with it — and overwhelmingly most of those killers are also Black. As an African American, I have seen much too often how too little policing in your neighborhood can be just as dangerous as having too much. As the mayor says, we Chicagoans have met our common enemy — and to a shocking degree, as Pogo might say, it is us.

but I don’t think he has thought it through all the way. To what does Mr. Page attribute the difference in clearance rates? He doesn’t and I don’t think it’s due to racism or, at least, not just to racism. I think it’s more due to the bad relationship between the police and the people in the most affected neighborhoods. For the people in those neighborhoods to get more effective protection they need to trust the police more than they do now—more than they trust the thugs who are killing their children. The problem is that many of those thugs are their children.

There’s something about Rick Kriseman’s recent post at RealClearPolitics about recycling which reminds me suspiciously of the underpants gnomes.

First, steal underpants:

One of the biggest challenges facing our current recycling infrastructure is that materials recovery facilities (MRFs) are overwhelmed with a growing amount of recyclable material, much of which cannot be salvaged because of inbound contamination. What’s needed is updated recycling equipment and technologies that would improve the sorting and processing of these materials. This would make the system more efficient and strengthen our domestic market for recycled materials. This added capability will reduce pollution, conserve natural resources, and decrease the amount of recyclables that end up in landfills. However, to move this vision along, we will need the help of Congress to invest in it.

Then ?

Third, profit!

The benefits to this investment are clear. Recycling helps control future waste costs and increases the lifespan of materials that would otherwise end up in regional landfills. This in turn reduces the cost of transportation to landfills outside local regions and the stress of this transport on our traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges. In addition, recycling provides marketable goods, which reduces costs of packaging for consumers.

Recycling also has real economic benefits. According to the EPA, recycling in the United States contributes approximately 700,000 jobs, $37 billion in wages and $7 billion in tax revenues per year. Recycling is having a positive economic impact in the states too. For example, a 2017 study in Texas found an overall economic benefit of more than $3.3 billion from recycling.

Yeah, new equipment will definitely solve the problem. Both Mr. Kriseman’s post and the EPA’s paper from which its figures are derived are a bit too “from 50,000 feet” to assess how realistic any of this is.

Let’s summarize how we got where we are. Modern retail packaging, publishing, apparel, and other sectors result in an enormous amount of waste. Some of that waste is recyclable. Starting the late 1960s and accelerating during the 1970s and later, there was a major push to recycle. I was part of that push in the late 1960s. The first curbside recycling program that I know of started in 1974. In 1990 Wisconsin imposed a statewide mandatory recycling program. Recycling had typically been thought of as at least a “break even” if not money-making program.

Most of that waste was shipped to China. In 2017 China stopped accepting “foreign garbage”. Since then we’ve pretty much been stuck with our own trash.

Like all Chicagoans we have been dutifully sorting out our recyclables: aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles, clean paper, putting them in our blue recycling cans and hauling those to the curb every two weeks to be picked up. Unlike all Chicagoans, presumably, I am aware that most of that will go into a landfill. That isn’t true merely in Chicago. It’s true in many if not most places. My understanding is that the labor costs are too high to make recycling practical, there’s too much trash, and there aren’t enough customers for the trash.

I honestly don’t believe it’s an equipment problem. I think it’s a packaging problem which is being solved far too slowly, a too much waste problem which may actually be getting worse, and a plain old supply and demand problem.

I wish I knew how many of the jobs in recycling are related to hauling. If that’s where the jobs are, we’re talking about a “cat and rat farm” situation, a perpetual motion scheme, which won’t work.

The preliminary results of the 2020 decennial census are in and I’m not really sure what they mean or what the implications will be. From Yahoo News:

The U.S. became more diverse and more urban over the past decade, and the non-Hispanic white population dropped for the first time on record, the Census Bureau said Thursday as it released a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw the nation’s political maps.

The new figures offered the most detailed portrait yet of how the country has changed since 2010, and they are sure to set off an intense partisan battle over representation at a time of deep national division and fights over voting rights. The numbers could help determine control of the House in the 2022 elections and provide an electoral edge for years to come. The data will also shape how $1.5 trillion in annual federal spending is distributed.

The figures show continued migration to the South and West at the expense of counties in the Midwest and Northeast. The share of the non-Hispanic white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record, driven by falling birthrates among white women compared with Hispanic and Asian women. The number of non-Hispanic white people shrank from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million.

White people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group, though that changed in California, where Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group, growing to 39.4% from 37.6% over the decade, while the share of white people dropped from 40.1% to 34.7%.

From the Census Bureau’s web site:

• The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone. Overall, 235.4 million people reported White alone or in combination with another group. However, the White alone population decreased by 8.6% since 2010.
• The Two or More Races population (also referred to as the Multiracial population) has changed considerably since 2010. The Multiracial population was measured at 9 million people in 2010 and is now 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276% increase.
• The “in combination” multiracial populations for all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category.
• All of the race alone or in combination groups experienced increases. The Some Other Race alone or in combination group (49.9 million) increased 129%, surpassing the Black or African American population (46.9 million) as the second-largest race alone or in combination group.
• The next largest racial populations were the Asian alone or in combination group (24 million), the American Indian and Alaska Native alone or in combination group (9.7 million), and the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone or in combination group (1.6 million).
• The Hispanic or Latino population, which includes people of any race, was 62.1 million in 2020. The Hispanic or Latino population grew 23%, while the population that was not of Hispanic or Latino origin grew 4.3% since 2010.

all of which supports what I’ve been saying about race in the U. S. for decades.

The reality is that, except for a handful of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, all “blacks” in the U. S. are mixed race while, except for a handful of pure-blooded Spaniards or Portuguese who’ve emigrated from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Central, or South America or even fewer full-blooded Native Americans who’ve emigrated from Mexico, Central, or South America nearly all “Hispanics” are mixed race as well. I think that what we can conclude is that it has become much more respectable to admit it which I think is a positive development. What it means politically I have no idea.

Note, too, that the number identifying themselves as “multi-racial” in the census is about 10% of the population. That’s smaller than the number of those who’ve identified themselves as “white”, “black”, or “Hispanic” but larger than the number of any other ethnic or racial group tracked by the census.

Update

The Wall Street Journal adds this bit of analysis:

Texas will gain two House seats and five states will gain one each: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon. Seven states will lose one each: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

That change in the Electoral College will be in effect for the 2024 election.

And, as I said before, New York should thank its lucky stars. If the census were taken today, the state might well lose two seats.

If, as Adam Smith said, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, how much is there in a world? Rather than responding to Daniel Henninger’s most recent and rather harsh Wall Street Journal column:

The currently observable reality is that progressives, who have now captured the Democratic Party at all levels of government, don’t seem able to run anything anymore—not cities, not Covid, not a national border. Why would letting them run climate policy be different?

Whatever one thinks about the “root causes” of the rise in violent urban crime or the more than one million migrants apprehended at the southern border in the current fiscal year, both stand as significant case studies in political mismanagement.

The nonresponse to the overrun border by the Biden administration and to urban violence by progressive mayors in Chicago, New York, Washington and Portland, Ore., suggests this high-probability scenario on climate: They will make mistakes, the world will go to hell, and then they will deny we are in hell—and what’s worse, insist that we keep doing the same manifestly wrong things.

He concludes:

It was not always this way with Democrats. After it became clear that Vermont’s three-year experiment in a single-payer healthcare system had manifestly failed to control costs, its then- Gov. Peter Shumlin admitted as much and ended it in 2014. Still, single-payer advocates dismissed Vermont as too small to disprove their idea, and progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have persisted.

With climate regulation, we have the test case of California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. Progressive-run California for years has been the most climate-correct state in the union, and the most screwed up.

By suppressing the use of fossil fuels and natural gas while elevating solar and wind, California has created an electrical grid that performs poorly under stress, causing statewide power outages. Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to shut down the state’s only nuclear power plant, which is emissions-free, in 2025.

New York’s defrocked Gov. Andrew Cuomo closed the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant in April. This Wednesday, amid a heat wave, the Con Edison utility text-messaged residents that if the power goes out, “Reply HELP for help.”

If only life under progressive misgovernance were that easy.

I’m going to solicit comments on what will happen. Is Mr. Henninger’s assessment correct?

My interpretation of events is that my original assessment of Joe Biden was correct: he’s moved to the center of the Democratic Party and, since that center has moved left, so has he. I also think that we need more pragmatists and fewer ideologues in office in both parties but I see no way of making that happen until things get much, much worse. Even then I suspect it’s more likely that the present ideologues would be supplanted by even worse ideologues.

While the media remain steadfastly focused on the weather (remember what Sam Clemens said), Cuomo, and the regular political infighting, I strongly suspect that the most significant news of the day will come from the Census Bureau. UPI reports:

Aug. 12 (UPI) — The government on Thursday will unveil detailed data from the 2020 Census that will have a significant impact on federal elections for the rest of the 2020s, beginning with next year’s midterms.

The Census Bureau will release key population data that will begin a political redistricting process — redrawing congressional districts — that occurs once every decade.

he data includes how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods across the United States have shifted since the last Census in 2010.

“The U.S. Census Bureau will hold a news conference to discuss the release of the first local level results from the 2020 Census,” the bureau said in a statement earlier this month. “States use these data on race, Hispanic origin, and the voting-age population to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts.

“The news conference will provide initial analysis of the first local level results from the 2020 Census on population change, race, ethnicity, the age 18 and over population, and housing occupancy status.”

The results will be released at the news conference, which is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. EDT Thursday.

That’s just about an hour from now. The data that will be released will be “raw data” which I interpret as meaning that it will take a while for the news outlets and most politicians to figure out what happened.

If you think there has been a lot of bitching, moaning, complaining, and finger-pointing over the last 18 months, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The complaints, particularly from places like New York, Illinois, and California, will be deafening. They should count their lucky stars. I strongly suspect that were the census to be redone today they would fare much worse.

The delays in the release of this information will necessitate a mad dash to redistricting. In some places incumbents will be pitted against incumbents of the same party. The inevitable court challenges will only make the problem worse.

The most recent Labor Department report has not assuuaged the concerns about inflation on the part of the editors of the Wall Street Journal one bit:

The meaning of “transitory” is getting longer all the time. That’s one conclusion from the Labor Department’s report Wednesday for July that consumer prices rose 5.4% over the last 12 months. That’s two months in a row, after a 5% annual increase in May. When does transitory, in the Federal Reserve’s inflation lingo, become persistent?

White House economists looking for silver price linings can note that the monthly increase in the consumer-price index slowed in July to 0.5% compared to 0.9% in June. But the smaller increase was mostly due to used car prices stabilizing somewhat after months of astronomical growth. Inflation rose anyway.

Notably, the “core” CPI that strips out volatile energy and food prices increased 0.3% in July and 4.3% over the last 12 months. Prices last month rose for most goods and services including toys (0.4%), pet products (1.4%) and haircuts (2.2%). Rents climbed (0.4%) and have been accelerating.

Food prices surged 0.7% while restaurant meals rose 0.8%, the most since 1981. None of this is any surprise to Americans who have visited a supermarket or eaten out lately. Labor costs are rising as businesses have to raise wages to attract workers who can make more unemployed. The result: Higher prices.

Based on the conflicting reactions I’m seeing in various media outlets I suspect that reactions, based on party and ideology, are largely of the glass half empty vs. glass half full sort. I think some of the analysis is what you find when the innumerate (journalists) meet people who see things entirely in terms of numbers (the Fed governors).

What the numbers tell me is that inflation is continuing but it’s proceeding at a slower rate than before. Prices are still going up but they aren’t going up as fast as they were at one point. What will happen next month? Beats me. If I knew I’d be a commodities trader.

What I do know is that the administration’s preferred strategy, spending more money, would actually exacerbate the problem.

What the situation on the ground tells me is that those with incomes below the median are already hurting for basics like food and rent. What that portends for the mid-term elections, again, I have no idea.

I wish we had more bankers at the Fed and fewer econometricians.

William Galston analyzes Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in his most recent Wall Street Journal column. Citing facts and figures he summarizes:

Mr. Biden prevailed because he made enormous gains in suburban America, increasing the Democratic vote share from 45% to 54% in a part of the country that is home to a majority (52%) of the electorate. Mr. Biden’s performance in the suburbs accounted for more than 100% of his 3-point improvement in the Democrats’ national vote share, easily swamping Republican gains in urban and rural America.

It also wasn’t a progressive victory:

Despite liberals’ steadily increasing share of the Democratic Party and of the electorate over the past two decades, moderates contribute more votes to winning Democratic presidential candidates than do liberals, as they have for half a century. Moderates made up 52% of Jimmy Carter’s winning coalition in 1976—and 48% of Joe Biden’s in 2020.

and concludes:

The gains that led to Mr. Biden’s win were broad, a tribute to his ability to balance the interests and beliefs of a diverse coalition. Progressives contributed to this outcome, but they were neither its sole nor even its predominant author. They represent only one of many equities Mr. Biden must consider as he works to pass legislation and help his party in 2022 and 2024. The progressive tendency to equate balance with equivocation and compromise with betrayal is, paradoxically, both self-serving and self-defeating.

I have two question and, sadly, answers for neither of them:

1. Is he delivering for his winning coalition?
2. Will the same coalition carry Democrats to victory in the mid-terms?

I simply do not have an ear to the ground in the suburbs.