I believe I’ve mentioned it before but we still have panhandlers on just about every street corner, mostly migrants. That was Phase 1. I think that the cold weather may have motivated what may be the next phase. This week, our first really cold snap, I saw panhandlers going into restaurants and stores and plying their trade there.

Our restaurants and retail trade are still recovering from the lockdowns. Many have closed, some to be replaced with new restaurants or stores, some stand empty, “For Rent” signs on their windows. Panhandlers are about the last thing our restaurants and stores need.

I wonder if the panhandlers realize how much colder it’s going to become here?

This year we made the same menu as we have for many years for Thanksgiving—I smoked the turkey, mashed potatoes, a variation on my wife’s family’s stuffing, braised Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, the cranberry sauce we’ve made for many years, rolls, pumpkin chiffon pie. Next year I’ll need to start earlier, making what I can in advance. My pain level was incredibly high, just about as high as I can tolerate it.

There were six of us. A dear friend who’s been sharing Thanksgiving with us for decades (she always brings her homemade cranberry bread) and two longtime friends we’ve known just as long.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

The editors of the Washington Post tell us that we should be thankful for artificial intelligence in medicine:

If you’re struggling to come up with something you’re grateful for this Thanksgiving, here’s a development all feastgoers can celebrate regardless of their political leanings: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing medicine, making health care more accurate and less expensive for everyone.

They provide a number of example. I found this one particularly interesting:

A recent study out of Boston comparing the performance of chatbot-assisted physicians in diagnosing patients with that of chatbots alone found that the bots performed considerably better. Given a patient’s case history and symptoms, the chatbot alone scored an average of 90 percent in correctly diagnosing their condition. Physicians using the technology scored only 76 percent on average — just marginally better than the 74 percent average for humans with no AI help at all.

This process will accelerate and advance faster than can be imagined. All of the incentives point that way.

There are many implications for that which I don’t believe have been fully appreciated, particularly in medical education. Who is selected to become a doctor and how they are trained will inevitably change. The traits that will make a physician effective in 2030 will be much different than those that made a physician effective in 2000.

In his column in the Washington Post Fareed Zakaria asks a very good question. The Democrats used to be an “optimistic, forward-looking party”.

What changed? The left wing of the Democratic Party argues that Obama and his ilk got in bed with business and tech, embraced right-wing economics and, over time, lost the working-class vote.

The problem with this argument is that the facts point in the opposite direction. As Ezra Klein, one of today’s shrewdest observers of economic policy, notes, “Since Bill Clinton … the party’s economic policy has become relentlessly more left. Barack Obama was well to Bill Clinton’s left. Hillary Clinton ran on an agenda well to Barack Obama’s left. Joe Biden ran on an agenda — and governed on an agenda — to Hillary Clinton’s left.”

And over those decades, the Democratic Party’s support among working-class voters has cratered. Bill Clinton won the noncollege vote by 14 points in 1996. Kamala Harris lost it by 14 points in 2024 — a 28-point drop. And yet every time they lose blue-collar voters, Democrats decide they must go even further left on economic policy.

concluding:

The Democratic Party has become a party of urban, educated, middle- and upper-middle-class voters, allied with minorities and young people. Apparently, the only major group with which Harris gained vote share in the election was White college educated voters. And yet the party remains deeply uncomfortable with its new base, still pining for its working-class roots. And so it turns on business, technologists, risk-seeking young men — who after a while, having begun to notice that the party doesn’t like them, are now returning the favor.

There’s a factor I think that Mr. Zakaria should consider. There has been a very notable geopolitical and economic development since Bill Clinton was president. China has gone from being a poor country to an upper middle income country. Could the Democratic leadership be seeking to emulate China?

There are many reasons the Chinese model may be attractive to them including the influence the party has on the economy and the wage premium of party membership. However, there are also many reasons that China is a poor model for the United States, most notably its very high degree of homogeneity and attendant social cohesion.

Is President-Elect Trump’s saber-rattling on tariffs sincere or a negotiating tactic? Both?

I support tariffs on goods imported from China for the simple reason that I see no way that we will begin to rebuild our industrial productive capacity without them. But tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods? I oppose those.

I wish Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy well in their efforts to find efficiencies in the federal government but I’m afraid I’m materially in agreement with Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times:

So it’s worth examining just why the goal is a mission impossible, and why the actions they say Trump will take are unlikely to significantly reduce federal debt. In fact, if we subtract Trump’s promised tax cuts from the projected revenue, annual deficits and the debt could well increase — just as they did during his first term, when his actions caused the national debt to balloon by $8.4 trillion over a decade.

A little fiscal math: The federal budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 is $6.8 trillion. Musk proposed to cut 30% of that. Which would be hard enough if the whole amount were on the chopping block. But roughly three-quarters of the $6.8 trillion is either politically untouchable (especially Medicare and Social Security, which Trump has vowed to leave unscathed) or legally off-limits (interest on the debt).

That leaves just over a quarter of federal spending: $1.9 trillion in so-called “discretionary spending” that Congress controls annually through its budget process. But discretionary programs account for just about everything that the government does and that Americans expect it to do — including domestic spending and funding the military.

A few examples: air traffic control, agriculture programs, disaster aid, education, courts, highways and other infrastructure, immigration, homeland security, law enforcement, national parks, the Pentagon and scientific research. (For those America First-ers who like to trash foreign aid: It’s less than 1% of spending, not the roughly 25% that many Americans tell pollsters they think it is.)

In short, Musk’s aim to cut $2 trillion would require wiping out not just supposed waste, fraud and abuse but also all discretionary spending — even though Trump has said he wants to increase the defense portion. And still the cuts would come up short. Musk conceded “temporary hardship” would result, but Bloomberg News wrote that slashing so much “would require a level of austerity unprecedented since the winding down of World War II.” That’s probably an understatement.

That’s as good a summary as any of why I have opposed cuts in personal income taxes, the revenue side of the ledger, whenever they have been proposed for the last 20 some-odd years. There isn’t as much to cut from the expense side of the ledger as people seem to imagine which means that we will borrow to make up the difference but there is empirical evidence that public debt overhang impedes private sector growth so taking the time-hallowed approach of outgrowing our debts is much harder than it was thirty years ago.

I’ve supported cuts in the corporate income tax rate both for reasons of competitiveness as well as corporate income taxes being inefficient—they are invariably passed on either to companies’ employees in the form of wage cuts or to consumers in the form of price increases.

Not too long ago I saw a piece from David Stockman in which he announced that he was going to post his plan for cutting spending. I’ll pass that along when it actually appears. I don’t believe that Mr. Stockman feels bound by President-Elect Trump’s campaign promises not to touch Social Security or Medicare.

I think there is plenty of room to introduce efficiencies in the federal government. Maybe Mssrs. Musk and Ramaswamy will propose some. Just don’t overestimate how much room there is for economization.

At RealClearInvestigations John Lott challenges the common claim that illegal migrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives:

These gaps have led to broad claims that illegal immigrants have less involvement with the criminal justice system than native-born Americans. A review of the available data, however, shows that the criminal records of millions of migrants – the ones President-elect Trump vows to prioritize for deportation – remain unknown due to illegal crossings, lax enforcement, and lax data collection by federal and “sanctuary” jurisdictions.

In addition, an analysis of the available statistics by RealClearInvestigations suggests that the crime rate of noncitizens is vastly understated. A separate RCI analysis based on estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests that crime by illegal aliens who entered the U.S. by July 21, 2024 cost the country some $166.5 billion. These criminals disproportionately entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.

It’s an interesting piece and I recommend it.

In addition it highlights what appears to be an increasing problem which might be called the tree falls in the forest fallacy from the well known thought experiment “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it make a sound?” If the result wasn’t published in the media outlet you favor, is it true? There’s a sort of corollary: can you reduce crime by repealing the statutes against the crimes?

On Friday I attended Chicago Lyric Opera’s product of Jeanine Tesosi’s opera, Blue, libretto by Tazewell Thompson. I don’t usually give synopses of the operas I hear but I’ll make an exception in this case.

The first scene of Blue is devoted to a young black woman giving birth to her son. She is attended by a sort of chorus of her black women friends, counseling her that black boys are unwanted and hated. She is joined by her husband, a police officer. Both rejoice in their new parenthood. The second scene skips forward 16 years. The Son is an angry young man, disgusted that his father is a police officer. The scene consists of an extended conversation between Father and Son. They disagree. Act I ends.

In the first scene of the second act, we learn that the Son has been shot and killed by a police officer while protesting peacefully. The Father is extremely distraught. The second scene consists of the funeral of the Son. The chorus intones that all black boys have targets on their backs. Father and Mother are consoled by their faith community. The opera ends.

I thought there was a lot not to like in this opera and very little to like. I think it was an actual expression of the fears of black elites, cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates. As such it was already dated (it was written in 2019). I thought it static and flat and the production lackluster. I found it weak and woke. It violated the “three unities” (unity of place, unity of time, unity of action). All action takes place off-stage. I found it self-consciously modern, i.e. more twelve-tone than melodic. Let’s put it this way. You didn’t leave the theater humming the themes. My seatmates, also veteran opera-goers, remarked that it carefully avoided any hint of actual engagement or drama in favor of preaching at you.

I’ll close my remarks by pointing out a couple of statistics.

Population of the United States: more than 330 million
Black population of the United States: 48 million
Number of blacks killed by police officers in 2023 (the most recent year for which there are complete statistics): 249

I would suggest that if “all black boys have targets on their backs” the number of blacks killed by police would be several orders of magnitude higher than it actually was. While the number is still tragically high it’s of a completely different order than the opera would suggest. Here’s another little factoid. The number of police officers who died in the line of duty in 2023: 60. My conclusion is that police officers have an irrational fear of being killed by young black men and black Americans have an irrational fear of the police. I’m not sure how those two can be rectified.

I suspect this work will be forgotten in 10 years.

On the surface, the opera “Blue,” which opened Saturday night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is about a police shooting of a Black teenager. But you never see the event at the heart of the story of the Harlem family it rips apart and thus this opera, composed by Jeanine Tesori with a libretto by Tazewell Thompson, avoids the depiction of any particular circumstances.

So, free of the inevitable debate of who reached for a gun first, or who had the right to fear for his life, or what crimes were or were not being committed at the time, “Blue” is able to focus on parental dread.

Specifically, Black parental dread of an American kid not coming home alive.

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. George Floyd.

Sadly, we all know those names and others like them: Black men who were killed at the hands of police officers.

A 5-year-old opera, “Blue,” tackles this tragedy head-on with a simple yet weighty story about a Black couple in Harlem whose 16-year-old boy dies in similar fashion. The boy is given no name. He is simply known as “The Son” — a young everyman.

concluding:

The big question, of course, is whether an opera that is so much of its time can transcend its time. Only the future will tell.

Mr. MacMillan read the code.

The title is “Worthy cast and music buried by ramshackle libretto, heavy polemics in Lyric Opera’s ‘Blue'”

Delayed four years by the pandemic, Jeanine Tesori’s Blue finally arrived at Lyric Opera Saturday night, having already appeared at the Glimmerglass Festival and Washington National Opera (co-producing companies with Lyric), as well as making the rounds in Detroit, Seattle, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

Tesori’s career is on an upward fast track. Originally a composer for musical theater, her most recent opera, Grounded, about a woman Air Force drone pilot, opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall (to mixed notices) following its world premiere at WNO in 2023.

Premiered at Glimmerglass in 2019, Blue tells of a Harlem family that is torn apart by politics and family conflicts. (The unnamed characters are portentously called The Father, The Mother and The Son.) The opera begins with the Mother telling her girlfriends that her new husband is a policeman to which they react negatively. She then informs them that she is pregnant and having a boy to which they respond by singing that the U.S. is so irredeemably racist that she should abort the child since it is not safe for a black male to grow up in this country. Eventually the girlfriends come around.

With a massive jump cut 16 years later, the teenage Son is now an angry activist and petty criminal who is resentful towards his father for being a cop in addition to what he views as the racist white establishment. After a heated violent argument, there is a reconciliation with the son breaking down in tears.

Act II picks up the action after the Son has been shot and killed by a policeman at a demonstration. (The details are left unexplained except that the protest was “peaceful” and that the shooting officer was white.) The Father suddenly does a 180 and becomes as vengeful and filled with hatred as his dead son, telling The Reverend of his plan to shoot the cop that killed his son. In an extended dialogue the Reverend preaches forgiveness and Christian charity. After an extended funeral church service an uneasy solace is reached. The opera ends with a flashback of the previous family argument and a fantasy sequence of the family sitting down happily together for a prayer and meal.

There are worthy things in Blue, not least Jeanine Tesori’s music. The style is derivative at times with near-cribs from Barber, Bernstein and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess flitting by. A loud chord or high vocal note ends nearly every number as if to cue an invisible “Applause” sign.

Still, at its best, Tesori’s score is attractive and almost defiantly tonal and traditional. There are luminous swelling chords and quasi-minimalist rhythms at dramatic peaks and the arias and ensembles have undeniably beautiful moments.

While the story is compelling and topical, the opera is most successful in the scenes of high family drama. The extended Act I confrontation between father and son is intense, riveting and hard to watch as the resentful youth unleashes his hatred and vitriol on well, virtually everything—his father, the police, white people, capitalism, and the country.

There are two main problems that ultimately prove fatal to Blue: the dubious nature of its main argument and the ramshackle narrative by librettist and director Tazewell Thompson.

Though only created five years ago, Blue already feels like a dated period piece. The central conceit, repeated ad infinitum, is that white cops are evil and bent on killing black males and all of white society is responsible. (The Greek chorus of Girlfriends repeat “We see you” five times while pointing at the audience.)

Come on, man. While there have indeed been some horrific incidents of police shooting blacks, most seem to be due to poor training and fatal incompetence rather than racial hatred as a motivation. Most police, of all ethnicities, just want to do a decent job, make it through their shift alive, and get home to their families. Repeating a simplistic false narrative ad infinitum doesn’t make it true.

Some of Thompson’s text is offensive and incendiary. Outside of prime time on MSNBC, one will rarely hear the word “white” repeated so many times and with such hostility and venom as in this opera’s two-hour span. After the son is killed, the Girlfriend trio refers to police as “The uniformed and packing great white hunter” and “Butchers sharpening their knives/Hunting the dark meat” as well as “These sons of bitches. These indifferent men hacking our children to pieces like a squealing pig.”

Consider the dystopian state of Chicago in 2024 when all citizens are captive to epidemic violent crime and people are getting carjacked at gunpoint in the middle of the day on Michigan Avenue. Having to deal with that constant threat on a daily basis, even progressive opera-goers have reached their capacity for self-flagellation over social justice issues and are unlikely to agree that the police are the enemy.

The other issue is that Thompson’s libretto is poorly structured and convoluted with a crucial lack of convincing character development. Moments of gloppy Hallmark Channel sentimentality alternate with unfunny comic bits (the goofy Nurse) and tepid scenes that go on forever. The second act in particular seems interminable with an extended funeral church scene and two or three possible endings followed by a jarringly dissonant dream sequence. The Mother sings joyfully of the food she is preparing and the son suddenly becomes a smiling Ricky Nelson-like model son. Hateful as his vitriol was, the kid was more credible and engaging when he was an angry Commie.

Ultimately, the positive musical elements in Blue are weighed down by the awkward narrative, problematic libretto, and bludgeoning polemics

It continues in that vein. Mr. Johnson heard the same opera I did.

What good is it to post on the complaints that Karl Rove, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the editors of the Washington Post, etc. have made about the nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General when Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his name from nomination?