Speaking of ends we are reaching the end of our tomato harvest for this year. This year we planted Cherokee Purples, Genuwines, Romas, and Midnight Romas. I’m using the last of our Romas along with some of our last Midnight Romas. The Genuwines were an experiment that worked out well. We’ll probably plant all four of those again next year.

This season has been a real wrestling match with the squirrels who refuse to be deterred. They also refuse to eat the tomatoes. They just take a bite and leave the rest which is a waste.

My wife and I have a friend who is in deep mourning. She has been an Oakland Athletics fan her entire adult life and the As have played their last game in the Oakland Coliseum. They will play for three years in Sacramento (!) before moving into their new home in Las Vegas.

As you may recall I rarely post on local events happening outside Chicago or Illinois. However, the reports of the mayor of New York City having been indicted on charges of corruption in office moved me to post a little sympathy card for the people of New York.

Believe me, Chicagoans understand your pain.

On a related note the White Sox are poised on the brink of unseating the 1962 Mets as the worst major league baseball team in modern history.

In his latest Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove is bemused by President Joe Biden’s plans to aid Vice President Harris’s campaign for the presidency:

What does Joe Biden think he’s doing? More important, what do the geniuses running his White House communications shop think they’re doing?

According to Politico, the president will spend the fall on the road doing a tour “that will focus largely on the administration’s accomplishments” in “substantive, higher-payoff events.”

“The schedule will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt promises. Axios reports that the president plans to “communicate directly” with Americans “on how the Biden-Harris Agenda will pay dividends now and 10, 20 and 30 years into the future.”

This strategy may sound smart to West Wing staffers spit-balling how to occupy Mr. Biden’s time. But the Harris-Walz campaign team has to be less than thrilled about the possibility of a Biden valedictory tour in the months before the election.

Among the reasons behind his puzzlement are that President Biden’s communication skills have not improved since June, President Biden going on the road takes eyeballs aways from Vice President Harris, and, worst of all, he’s tying Vice President Harris to his administration as closely as he can and that is rather apparently seen as a liability by the Harris campaign:

If Mr. Biden goes through with this plan, he’ll be making his economic record even more central to the election. Though Ms. Harris has worked hard to close the gap, she trails Mr. Trump in the NBC poll on who’s better at “dealing with the economy” by 41% to 50% and “dealing with inflation and the cost of living” by 40% to 48%. Mr. Biden’s insistence on being involved could widen that spread a bit.

It isn’t just Mr. Rove who’s wondering if the president isn’t trying to undermine Vice President Harris’s campaign.

This post by Mark Judge at Chronicle may give you a new perspective on Amazon, the Washington Post, Mark Judge, or all three. Here’s a snippet:

At Amazon, things are very tightly organized. You are given a uniform, training, and very clear guidelines. There is a point system that penalizes you if you are late or absent. You get a point for arriving late or leaving early, even on your 30-minute lunch break. If you hit eight points you’re gone. You are expected to perform with efficiency.

It was reported that Bezos doesn’t mind firing a lot of workers because if they are there too long, the thinking goes, they get complacent. Bezos believes that workers who have been at the company too long get comfortable and their productivity declines. Amazon’s reported goal is to filter out the bottom 6 percent of performers to avoid a “march to mediocrity.”

The number of people who quit or are fired each year at Amazon is higher than the total employment at the company. Seventy percent of those hired leave within 90 days. This is double the turnover rate for similar employers and it costs Amazon an estimated $8 billion every year. When I worked at Amazon, there was a crazy dual emphasis on both working you to death and trying to make sure you didn’t quit.

That sounds remarkably like the workload of a Japanese salaryman and I can’t help but wonder if it is not deliberate. Consider this:

(Extracted from Amazon’s web site.) Mr. Judge has mentioned the high turnover rate at Amazon. I can’t help but wonder if kar?shi (death from overwork) is a phenomenon there. I suspect not.

His main point in the piece is that both Amazon and the post should be reformed by treating Amazon employees the way they treat Post employees and Post employees the way Amazon employees are treated which sounds remarkably vindictive to Post employees to me.

There is a crisis in elementary education. Far too many students are unable to read at grade level. Consider this piece by Hannah Schmid at Illinois Policy:

There is an early literacy crisis nationally, and students’ futures are at risk when they are already behind in fourth grade.

In Illinois, only one-third of fourth-grade students met or exceeded reading proficiency standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Every two years, fourth and eighth grade students across 50 states and District of Columbia take the national reading exam. According to the Nation’s Report Card, it is “the only assessment that allows comparison of results from one state with another, or with results for the rest of the nation.”

Illinois is one of 35 states and the DC in which just one-in-three (or fewer) fourth grade students met or exceeded reading standards in 2022.

Despite a smaller decline in proficiency following the pandemic compared to some other states, Illinois’ early literacy rate is the same as it was 12 years ago, meaning increases in education spending have failed to improve the literacy rate.

Research has pinpointed third grade as a critical reading milestone because students need to have learned to read by then or they will not be able to absorb the rest of their educations.

For more than 30 years we have been told by Republican and Democratic administrations that higher education was the key to a bright future for the United States. Judging by the above it’s no wonder that most of the employment growth over the last five years has been among immigrants. The jobs on offer either require no education or a college education. Young people educated here can’t hack it. Over that period real spending on education has nearly trebled. Here in Chicago on average a CPS teacher earns $70,000—40% more than the national average. That’s about the household income here and the CTU is angling for more.

My question is what’s the resolution? If young Americans aren’t prepared for college work, what good is college to them? Spending more seems to accomplish little.

Does anyone have any remarks about Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s visit to the U. S.? IMO the complaints about his stumping for Harris are not entirely off the mark but overblown.

Presumably, his visit is to make another pitch for striking targets in the Russian interior which if we are prudent we will reject. My understanding is that

1. the Ukrainians cannot do that targeting without the direct participation of U. S. personnel
2. Putin has made it quite clear that he will consider that an act of war by the United States

and to his credit President Biden has resisted that to date.

I think that Walter Russell Mead’s latest Wall Street Journal column is one of his best. It is primarily a critique of the Biden Administration’s Middle East policy. After cataloguing the administration’s many failed overtures, he arrives here:

Mr. Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do. As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.

He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.

However, I think he errs here:

In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China. What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.

Japan invaded China (Manchuria) in September 1931. I honestly don’t know if Americans considered the invasion immoral. What I have read does not reflect that. I suspect that American missionaries in China did but that is not synonymous with Americans. What is unclear to me is whether Americans saw that as damaging to American interests or were largely disinterested. I suspect the latter. Smoot-Hawley had been enacted the year before and what little trade we had with China had been sharply curtailed. IMO during the 1930s Americans were more concerned about survival.

The second Sino-Japanese War began in 1937. I think that Japanese atrocities during that war aroused some humanitarian concerns in the United States. Lend-Lease, considerably more expansive than our support for Britain and France, began in 1941, in significant part a response to those concerns. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was at the end of 1941 and it was a “Hail Mary”on Japan’s part, intended to prevent active U. S. participation in war in the Pacific and at least some Japanese leaders understood that at the time. Note that I do not sympathize with the Japanese. I do think they held a very bad hand and they gambled and lost.

I think that Dr. Mead is not particularly well-informed on pre-WWII U. S.-China bilateral trade. I suspect he’s imposing neoliberal ideas on the 1930s. I also suspect that racism played a role in the U. S. response to Japan’s invading Manchuria and then China proper. I haven’t studied the matter in detail but I think it’s a reasonable presumption.

Dr. Mead continues:

Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.

That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.

I think that Dr. Mead has the diagnosis wrong here. American prestige due completely to

1. American economic might and
2. American military might

with the latter being downstream from the former. We have had multiple military failures since 2001 including

• the attack on 9/11
• invasion and occupation of Afghanistan
• invasion and occupation of Iraq

and how do you characterize actions like removing Qaddafi in Libya? Or supporting Saudi Arabia in its war with Yemen? Were those moral and in our national interest?

I don’t honestly see how the U. S. can retain military and economic preeminence while deindustrializing and reducing our military budget. And that doesn’t even get into the “magical thinking on diplomacy” theme that is Dr. Mead’s main topic.

I’m not sure I see the Biden Administration’s problem as “magical thinking” so much as the strategy it, apparently, learned from the Obama Administration: preconceding what your interlocutor actually wanted. I do not understand the reasoning behind that. The other party will be so grateful it will do what you want in exchange? Now that’s magical thinking.

Yesterday Chicxago’s longest-serving alderman reported to serve his prison sentence on corruption charges. Judy Wang, Angelica Sanchez, and Marisa Rodriguez at WGN report:

CHICAGO — Chicago’s longest-serving alderman reported to federal prison on Monday.

Former Ald. Ed Burke faces a two-year sentence and a $2 million fine. Last year, he was convicted of corruption for using his position to benefit his law firm.

On Monday afternoon, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed to WGN News that Burke is in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution Thomson in Thomson, Illinois. The low-security prison is home to nearly 2,000 inmates and just over 100 inmates in an adjoining camp.

I honestly believe that if all members of the Chicago City Council guilty of corruption were imprisoned the only way a quorum could be convened would be in the prison yard.

The chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party has been indicted on charges of corruption. Whether he will be convicted I can’t say but I doubt that anyone doubts he is guilty.