At City Journal Northwestern law prof John O. McGinnis assesses the situation in Chicago:

The sacking of Chicago’s North Side was more than a tactical failure. For months, key officials—the state’s attorney responsible for prosecution, the mayor, and the governor—have failed to condemn criminals sufficiently or act with necessary force against such violence. They have contributed to a culture of impunity that tolerates mobs and hoodlums.

characterizing our major political players like this:

Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, has already become nationally notorious for refusing to prosecute Jussie Smollett, the actor who lied to the police that he was a victim of racial violence. But her offenses against public order are far worse than her condoning of a provocateur who tried to fracture the city with a falsehood. Foxx has dismissed felony cases brought by the police at a rate 35 percent higher than her predecessor. She raised the threshold for felony shoplifting from $300 to $1,000—and as a result, thieves steal brazenly in broad daylight as well as under cover of darkness. Chicago police chief David Brown suggested that Foxx’s failure to prosecute looters from the previous sacking of the city in June was partly responsible for emboldening the current round of looting.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is also responsible. She has hardly been enforcing a zero-tolerance policy against lawless mobs. When crowds assaulted statues of Christopher Columbus, she did not defend these public monuments, instead removing them under pressure in the dead of night. The message was clear: Chicago would not defend its civic order. Lightfoot did denounce the current round of looting, but she still felt the need to make distinctions between these looters and those who had rioted in the wake of the George Floyd killing, as if there were degrees of culpability in the intentional taking of others’ property. Contrast her uncertain tones in calling vandals to account with her schoolmarmish insistence on closing parks to protect against the coronavirus, when epidemiologists agree that the greatest risk comes from indoor activity.

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has been only a bit player in this drama, but even the bits are telling. He has devoted far more energy to denouncing insurance companies for not paying for the value of the stolen goods than denouncing those who stole them. During the first round of rioting, he made an egregious blunder by calling up only enough national guardsman to protect downtown—and only after it was looted. The looters then fanned out to Chicago’s outer neighborhoods and inner suburbs.

I don’t think he’s entirely on base with his subsequent complaints about the “progressive ruling elite”. While they may be on target with respect to Gov. Pritzker and Kim Foxx, Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor as the reform candidate, defeating the Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle who fits the description much better.

Our present situation is that Pritzker and Foxx are third rate talents with first rate political and financial backing while Lightfoot is a third rate talent who is disappointing the voters who put her in office by failing to reform the Chicago Police Department, knuckling under to the CTU, and, apparently, believing that she can run the city based on her identity alone.

Chicago is neither New York nor San Francisco. It’s more pragmatic than that. Lousy candidates are being elected because they’re Democrats, yes, but not because they’re progressives. The voters’ alternatives are really quite limited.

There is a story that is receiving considerable attention in Chicago. Jim Thompson, Illinois’s longest serving governor (from 1976-1991) has died. ABC 7 Chicago reports:

Former Illinois Governor James Thompson is dead at 84.

His family told ABC 7 Chicago he was going through rehabilitation at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab in Streeterville when he suddenly was stricken and passed Friday evening at age 84.

The Republican was Illinois’ longest-serving governor.

Affectionately known as “Big Jim,” the native Chicagoan was elected for four consecutive terms and served 14 years from 1976 to 1991.

Thompson notably helped keep the White Sox Chicago’s South Side team.

Prior to becoming governor, he worked in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and was appointed by President Nixon to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

As a federal prosecutor, Thompson worked to convict former Illinois governor Otto Kerner. And after serving the post himself, Thompson tried to keep his friend and former republican governor George Ryan out of prison.

After leaving office, he joined the Chicago law firm Winston & Strawn. In 1993, he became chairman of the firm.

You can mark the beginning of the decline of the Illinois Republican Party from the end of Gov. Thompson’s tenure in office.

I was vaguely acquainted with him. I sold antiques in the stall next to his at the Kane County Fairgrounds more than 40 years ago. We spent a pleasant afternoon chatting, presumably about collectibles.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of V-J Day, when Japan surrendered, marking the end of World War II, the greatest war the world had or has known. Most of those who fought that war are dead; only a handful remain.

Little mention is being made of the war now. We have other things to worry about: an impending presidential election, COVID-19, a major recession precipitated by state and local government strategies to control the spread of the virus, and whether or how public schools will re-open.

Little mention is being made of the war in the pages of the major news outlets. The only mention of it on the digital front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the Chicago Sun-Times was an NYT story about Japan’s commemoration of the event. It was far, far down on the page, the equivalent of a back page story.

On the 75h anniversary of the American Civil War, people were already starting to re-enact its battles. There were notable commemorations of its start, some of its battles, and its end.

The BBC and the online editions of various British news outlets have substantial coverage of the event.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. Ignorance is strength.

There’s an interesting story from NPR on the New Zealand government’s determination to learn how new cases of COVID-19 managed to emerge there:

After more than three months without any known community spread of the coronavirus in New Zealand, a new outbreak in Auckland has upset the fragile normalcy that had returned in the nation.

It was just Tuesday that the government said it had its first cases from an unknown source in 102 days, all within one family. By Friday, the outbreak had grown to 30 cases, including in other cities where members of the household had traveled.

Now, a hunt is on to find the source of the outbreak — a search that shows how difficult it is to stamp out the virus, even on an island nation that has taken quick and decisive steps to eliminate it.

The theories being considered include via surface contagion of shipments coming into the country and an incoming traveler breaking quarantine. However, the theory I suspect is most likely is that the virus has actually been circulating quietly in New Zealand all along, with those contracting it showing no symptoms. Here are some interesting piece of the puzzle: all of the new cases are occurring within a single family and the strain of the virus they have contracted appears to be different from strains previously detected in New Zealand.

If a containment strategy cannot be maintained in New Zealand, it could not have been maintained anywhere. There is nowhere in the world isolated enough, detached enough, or perfect enough to maintain the strategy long enough. Its use was as a delaying tactic rather than a mitigation strategy.

At Newsweek law prof John Eastman questions whether Kamala Harris is eligible to be Joe Biden’s running mate on Constitutional, 14th Amendment, and legal grounds. Apparently, the issue of whether the child of non-citizen, non-permanently resident aliens is automatically granted U. S. citizenship when born in the United States has never been ruled on by the courts:

Were Harris’ parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.

Before you dismiss this as so much conspiracy-mongering, we are a nation of laws and the laws matter. I don’t know the answers to Mr. Eastman’s questions but I suspect a lot of people think they do.

Update

At Reason.com Eugene Volokh presents a counter-argument, citing the common law and precedent:

The 14th Amendment does have a narrow exception for people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. at birth, but the Court made clear that this was a narrow exception for “children of members of the Indian tribes,” who were at the time not citizens, “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation” and “children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign State.” Children born to noncitizens living here are certainly subject to the jurisdiction of American courts—no one thinks, for instance, that they are immune from criminal prosecutions or civil lawsuits. They are likewise “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States for citizenship purposes.

Now, this view had not been universal. For instance, the 1797 edition of the English translation of Emer Vattel’s treatise on The Law of Nations (a book that had some influence on the Framers), did say that, “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” But that was describing the European civil law rule, not the English common law rule; and in any event, the earlier editions that the Framers would have read didn’t use here the phrase “natural-born citizens,” but instead spoke of “indigenes” (borrowed directly from the French original “Les Naturels, ou Indigènes”). The Framers, when they were writing the Constitution, likely mentally linked the “natural-born citizens” phrase to the “natural-born subject” in Blackstone’s very familiar explanation of the common law, rather than to “natives, or indigenes” in Vattel’s somewhat less familiar discussion of the civil law.

Just be prepared for this argument to continue. As I’ve warned before I expect this to be particularly tough, nasty election season, waged not only on the stump and at the ballot box but in the courts as well.

You might think that police arresting offenders for whom there is probable cause of their having committed a crime, prosecutors prosecuting these individuals, and judges trying them on the crimes for which they are charged would not be controversial. Apparently it is as noted by Charles Love in City Journal:

The mayor has consistently said that mass looting, vandalism, and violence are unacceptable, but Chicago’s police seem confused about what is expected of them.

Protests have been going on in the city for 50 days now. The Chicago Police Department is not equipped to handle this level of continued, high-stress confrontation. Officers have had their workdays extended and off days canceled on several occasions. They are tired and overworked.

Foxx openly admits to ignoring “nonviolent” offenders. But where “nonviolence” used to mean “peaceful,” the new, more expansive definition of the word includes property crime, public disturbance, and looting. Under these terms, most of the people causing the mayhem are technically “nonviolent.” But under any definition, nonviolent crimes are not victimless crimes.

The solution here is simple: the police must arrest offenders, and the prosecutor must prosecute them. Foxx should put her personal feelings about drug offenses and “nonviolent” crimes aside and do her job. If Chicagoans want to ease criminal penalties for some crimes, they can push their legislators to do so, via statute—but having a state’s attorney openly ignore current law is destructive to the community.

Elected officials also need to call out bad behavior for what it is, without qualifying their views by saying that such behavior detracts from “the movement.”

Something else that should not be controversial but apparently is: these determinations should not be made be protesters, demonstrators, rioters, or however you’d like to designate them. When that happens let’s call it for what it is. It is not “anarchy”. It is mob rule.

Here are a few of Peggy Noonan’s remarks from her Wall Street Journal column about Kamala Harris:

If commentators are now struggling to define Ms. Harris, it’s because she offers little that is truly defining. The party establishment quickly closed ranks around her 2016 Senate race, allowing her to run a standard liberal campaign that the Los Angeles Times described as “carefully orchestrated” and “overly cautious and scripted.” In her 3½ Senate years, she’s done little by way of legislation, preferring to showboat at hearings. The lack of an animating agenda helps a explain a presidential campaign in which she bounced from left to far-left position, whatever she thought most helpful at the moment. She twice called to eliminate private health insurance—and twice reversed herself the next day after backlash. As Vox noted, the “combination of policy reversals and botched rollout . . . undermined faith in her ability to govern on the issue Democrats rate as most important.”

The campaign was a mess, rocked by infighting, leaks, restarts and financial problems. After the campaign announced layoffs in early November, its veteran Iowa operations manager wrote a scathing resignation letter in which she said she’d “never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly” and expressed dismay at its ability to make “the same unforced errors over and over.” Ms. Harris didn’t even make it to the first contest, dropping out—broke and with embarrassing poll numbers—two months before the Iowa caucuses. The only other “top tier” candidate to implode as quickly or spectacularly was Beto O’Rourke. The Washington Post campaign obituary bluntly called Ms. Harris an “uneven campaigner” who was “engulfed by low polling numbers, internal turmoil and a sense that she was unable to provide a clear message.” The Post this week lauded Ms. Harris as “vibrant and energetic” and a “vessel for Democratic hopes.”

VP Biden has a challenge ahead of him. Sen. Harris is most useful to his campaign as a symbol and that does not appear to be a role she is by temperament suited to play. The more the campaign becomes about her, the more votes he will lose. There’s plenty of room for substantive criticism of her and accusations of racism and sexism in response to those will ring hollow. Keep in mind that 99% of Democratic primary voters voted for any candidate other than Kamala Harris in the primaries. Mr. Biden is fortunate that substantive criticism is not Mr. Trump’s strong suit. He’s more predisposed to feces-flinging, more likely to benefit the Biden/Harris campaign.

In his most recent New York Times column David Brooks tries to fight the light at the end of our present tunnel:

Radicals are good at opening our eyes to social problems and expanding the realm of what’s sayable.

But if you look at who actually leads change over the course of American history, it’s not the radicals. At a certain point, radicals give way to the more prudent and moderate wings of their coalitions.

In the 1770s, the rabble-rousing Samuel Adams gave way to the more moderate John Adams (not to mention George Washington, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton). In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln. In the Progressive era, the radicals and anarchists who started the labor movement in the 1880s gave way to Theodore Roosevelt.

Radicals are not good at producing change because while they are good at shaking up the culture, they don’t have practical strategies to pass legislation when you have to get the support of 50 percent plus one.

They also tend to divide the world into good people and bad people. They think they can bring change if they can destroy enough bad people, and so they devolve into a purist, destructive force that offends potential allies.

The people who come in their wake and actually make change are conservative radicals. They believe in many of the radicals’ goals, but know how to work within the democratic framework to achieve them.

IMO characterizing these individuals as “conservative radicals” is a futile exercise in rebranding. They are pragmatists and at this moment in history pragmatists are in bad odor. People who can actually get things done because they’re willing to accept half a loaf rather than none are viewed as class, race, or ideological traitors. Heresy is unforgiveable.

Here’s his view of events:

To some, this feels like a revolutionary moment. In Commentary, for example, Abe Greenwald argues that the radicals have seized control. They are pushing radical agendas (No police! No rent!). Worse, they undermine the liberal fundamentals of our democracy — the belief that democracy is a search for truth from a wide variety of perspectives; the belief that America is a noble experiment worth defending.

Many people smell in today’s radicalism the whiff of revolutions past: the destructive brutality of the French Revolution, the vicious thought police of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the naked power grabs of Lenin’s Soviet revolution.

I am not as alarmed. I’m convinced that the forces that brought Joe Biden the nomination are far more powerful than a few extremists in Portland and even the leftist illiberals on campus. I’m hopeful that if given power, Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer will forge a new conservative radicalism.

I suspect the Mensheviks were saying the same thing about the Bolsheviks back in 1917. 70 years later the heirs of the Bolsheviks had been looting, retarding Russia’s progress, and spreading their ideas all over the world for three generations.

I think he has forgotten Shakespeare’s advice that “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” The “forces that brought Joe Biden to power” are some combination of hatred of Trump and the raw desire for power. I don’t see Biden, Harris, Pelosi, and Schumer as prospective “radical conservatives” but as survivors. They will tack in whatever direction they perceive the winds of the Democratic Party are blowing.

In what direction will they be blowing in 2021? I find it hard to imagine they will be blowing in the direction of moderation, liberal democracy, and the thoughtful consideration that leads to good policies.

I wonder if anyone will pay attention to Faye Flam’s remarks at Bloomberg?

There are some weird things going on in the coronavirus data. It’s curious that cases dropped so fast, and have stayed pretty low, in the spring hot zones — New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. And why did cases remain so low in Idaho and Hawaii until recently?

The mainstream narrative is that it’s all about good behavior when cases go down — mask wearing and giving up our social lives for the greater good. And conversely, bad behavior must be what makes them go up. We talk about certain regions having the virus “under control,” as if falling cases are purely a matter of will-power. A sort of moral reasoning is filling in for evidence.

But why, then, have cases plummeted in Sweden, where mask wearing is a rarity?

This is the time to use scientific methods to understand what’s happening. The pandemic has gone on long enough to reveal patterns in the way it spreads. If it’s all about behavior, that’s a testable hypothesis. If, as a few speculate, dramatic drops in some places have something to do with growing immunity in the population, we can also turn that into a testable hypothesis.

I’m afraid it’s a complicated problem. Mask-wearing in County A might still reduce transmission in County B later on because people travel from County A to County B. I think that perfectly implemented and perfectly conformed with mask-wearing would probably reduce the rate of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 but I’m not so sure about mask-wearing when, where, and how it’s actually practiced.

Political polarization coupled with the instinct to suppress ideas that deviate from Established Orthodoxy impair our ability to arrive at or try strategies that deviate from that orthodoxy. I don’t see a simple way out of that fix.