There are a number of Chicago stories that are receiving national attention. One of them is the ShotSpotter saga. ShotSpotter, somewhat ungenerously described by our mayor as a “walkie-talkie on a stick”, was installed in Chicago. The mayor decided it wasn’t worth paying for. The City Council decided to strip the mayor of the authority to approve or disapprove it. The mayor says that’s not legal. The company has terminated service and is starting to dismantle it in Chicago.

Now the editors of the Wall Street Journal have weighed in:

ShotSpotter uses acoustic technology to detect gunfire and dispatches law enforcement to scenes of violence before 911 calls come in. Chicago has deployed the technology since 2012, mainly in its south and west sides. The University of Chicago Crime Lab found it likely saves about 85 lives a year.

The system has detected more than 200,000 gun shots in the 13 months ending in August. Even Mr. Johnson must think the technology works since in February he extended the contract through the summer, which is when gun violence typically peaks and the city hosted the Democratic National Convention.

But last week he said he’d let the ShotSpotter contract expire, calling it a waste of money. He may be taking his cues from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who charged in May that ShotSpotter perpetuates “over-policing and unjustified surveillance” in minority neighborhoods.

The City Council disagreed and voted 33-14 to give Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling the power to override the mayor’s office. “If one life is saved with gunshot detection technology, then it is absolutely worth having,” Alderman Ray Lopez said.

It is true that Chicago has a nearly $1 billion hole in its budget. Chicago has spent $57.4 million on ShotSpotter since 2018. It spent $300 million housing, feeding, etc. migrants in 2023.

I don’t believe budgets have anything to do with the mayor’s opposition to ShotSpotter. I suspect the “over-policing” is his complaint (I would like to see a definition of “over-policing” that is not circular).

The population of Chicago is one third white, one third black, and one third Hispanic. Chicago homicide victims are three-quarters black, 20% Hispanic, with the balance being “Other”. In other words of the 85 lives the UoC says ShotSpotter saved, 64 were black lives.

Lately I have experienced something distressing. I am getting wildly varying results from different search engines. I am not entirely sure why that might be. It might be due to increased use of “artificial intelligence”. It might be because the search engine providers have different policies, particularly with respect to source they consider unreliable for one reason or another.

In other words they might be protecting me.

What I want in a search engine is a reliable and complete index of the information that is available on the Internet. I don’t want to be protected from knowledge that is bad for me from a search engine. I rely on online security companies for security and search engines for indices of information.

I’m starting to use multiple different search engines to do cross-comparisons which is a time-sucker. One of the challenges is that different search engines are not necessarily different search engines. Some search engines are actually frontends for Google or Bing.

I have noticed a lot of comments by regular commenters going into spam—not even into moderation but into spam. It’s nothing I have done. I suspect it’s due to a change in AKismet, the service I use to screen comments.

I have approved all non-repetitive comments. Hopefully, that will reduce the number going into spam.

I was interested in the observations of John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs’s on Dick Cheney’s support for Kamala Harris, quoted in this post at RealClearPolitics By Tim Hains:

MEARSHEIMER: When we talk about the ‘Deep State,’ we’re really talking about the Administrative State. It is very important to understand that starting in the late 19th and early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop — and this is true of all Western countries — a very powerful central state that could ‘run the country.’ And over time, that state has grown in power.

Since World War Two, the United States has been involved in every nook and cranny of the world, fighting wars here, there, and everywhere. And to do that, you need a very powerful administrative state that can help manage that foreign policy. But in the process, what happens is you get all of these high-level, middle-level, and low-level bureaucrats who become established in positions in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the intelligence community — you name it. And they end up having a vested interest in pursuing a particular foreign policy.

That particular foreign policy that they like to pursue is the one the Democrats and the Republicans are pushing. That’s why we talk about tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum with regard to the two parties. You could throw in the deep state as being on the same page as those other two institutions.

SACHS: There’s a very interesting interview of Putin in 2017 where he says, “I’ve dealt with three presidents now. They come into office with some ideas, even. But then the men in the dark suits and the blue ties,” he says, “I wear red ties but they wear blue ties. They come in and explain the way the world really is and there go the ideas.”

I think that’s Putin’s experience. That’s our experience. That’s my experience. Which is that there is a deeply entrained foreign policy that has been in place, in my interpretation, for many decades.

I do not believe that U. S. interests have much to do with the interests of that “administrative state”. They have their own goals and objectives.

One last point: doing anything about that will require much more than a single president. It will require civil service reform of a type and scale I cannot realistically envision.

The graph above was sampled from this post at The Dialogue by Manuel Orozco and Patrick Springer:

Over the past few years, Mexicans have sent money back home to their families, friends, and others. Between 2017 to 2022, remittances sent to Mexico from the US have experienced double-digit growth, and during pandemic times (2020-2022) they nearly doubled in absolute numbers to 41 percent. In 2022, remittance volume reached a 20 year high at nearly US$59 billion. In 2023, over US$63 billion was remitted representing a growth rate of eight percent year over year (YoY). While remittance growth rates are showing signs of deceleration, volume is estimated to reach over US$65 billion by the end of 2024.

In the current context, remittance volume will continue and play a central role in US-Mexico relations. As was the case in 2023, remittance growth this year can be attributed to simultaneous increases in migration to the US, transfer frequency, number of senders, and the annual principal amount. Based on available data and current trends, remittance volume will grow by approximately three percent in 2024. This growth rate is lower than rates forecasted for the top 10 recipient countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

I suspect that the sharp increase in remittances is due to a combination of inflation and the sharp increase in new migrants. I further suspect that new migrants are more likely to send remittances back to Mexico than long-term migrants.

A number of matters are addressed in the post including not just the increase in remittances but the role of remittances in Mexican economy, the relationship between the U. S. consumer price index and remittances, the relationship between the Mexican consumer price index and remittances, etc.

One last point. Remittances regardless of their destination country represent disinvestment in the United States. $63 billion is quite a bit of money but it’s a minuscule percentage of U. S. GDP—less than 1%. It’s a couple of percent of domestic investment.

At RealClearScience Ross Pomeroy points out something that should be obvious but, apparently, isn’t. Human beings did not evolve to consume calories in liquid form:

Humans have existed as a distinct species for roughly 315,000 years, and for all but a fraction of that time, we drank just one liquid after weaning: water. Boring, flat, calorie-free, water – with any flavor and texture coming from sediments, bacteria, or excrement.

Now, faced with a sudden explosion of calorically-dense beverages in the evolutionary blink of an eye, our bodies are outmatched. Put simply, we are not meant to drink our calories, and it shows in elevated rates of obesity around the world.

Humans started drinking the equivalent of very, very light beer 13,000 years ago. And we may have consumed milk from livestock as many as 20,000 years ago. But this isn’t very long on an evolutionary timescale. Our naïveté´ with beverages is apparent in our physiology today.

His observations are fine as far as they go. However, there’s something he does not consider. There are lots of things that human beings did not evolve to do but nonetheless have done for the last 10,000 years or so. One of them is live together in groups larger than a few dozen related people or, indeed, live in close proximity to people to whom we were not related at all.

Then, just a little over 10,000 years ago, a number of things happened more or less all at once. Human beings began domesticating and husbanding livestock, they began to cultivate grains, they began fermenting various things to make beer and wine, and they began adopt a sedentary habit, i.e. to live in towns and cities. And those cities and towns included people who were not closely related to one another.

The only ones of those things it is quite difficult to do while nomadic are brewing beer and making. It has been suggested by some anthropologists that human beings adopted a sedentary habit expressly to allow them to make beer and wine. And the evidence supports them.

I suspect that as we become wiser in identifying when people began consuming cows’, sheeps’ and goats’ milk the time when each of those began will be pushed back in time. The notion that consuming milk has not changed human evolution is far-fetched. My ancestors adapted to consume milk probably considerably more than 10,000 years ago. Have I mentioned that milk is also fermented into alcoholic beverages, e.g. kumiss, blaand, etc.

Consequently, there is some evidence that, indeed, beer did invent civilization.

After describing his visit to a military rehab center in Ukraine in his latest Washington Post column, David Ignatius declaims:

Listening to their stories, you realize that Ukraine is bleeding out. Its will to fight is as strong as ever, but its army is exhausted by a ceaseless drone war that’s unlike anything in the history of combat. The Biden administration’s rubric of support — “as long as it takes” — simply doesn’t match the reality of this conflict. Ukraine doesn’t have enough soldiers to fight an indefinite war of attrition. It needs to escalate to be strong enough to reach a decent settlement.

He then turns to a conference he attended there:

A recurring theme of the conference was that President Joe Biden should remove current limits on Ukraine’s use of American ATACMS long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia. A procession of speakers said Biden should stop worrying about the danger of Russian escalation — and implied he was weak for even considering the issue. That strikes me as wrong; a primary responsibility of any American president is to avoid war with a nuclear superpower.

But I came away from the conference thinking the United States should take more risks to help Ukraine. It matters how this war ends. If Putin prevails, it will harm the interests of America and Europe for decades.

He concludes by arguing that U. S. national interest requires “deeper American support for Ukraine”. What I do not understand is how deeper support would change the fundamental realities he calls out earlier in the column. How strong would Ukraine need to be to “reach a decent settlement”? There is no depth of support that will create more Ukrainian soldier.

I wanted to call attention to this post by economist Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate:

Lately, another trilemma has preoccupied me. This one is the disturbing possibility that it may be impossible simultaneously to combat climate change, boost the middle class in advanced economies, and reduce global poverty. Under current policy trajectories, any combination of two goals appears to come at the expense of the third.

He goes on to describe the conflicts in more detail. The Biden Administration has focused, at least nominally, on the first two. Dr. Rodrik observes:

This new focus on climate and the middle class is long overdue. But what US and European policymakers see as a necessary response to neoliberalism’s failures looks, to poor countries, like an assault on their development prospects. The recent crop of industrial policies and other regulations are often discriminatory and threaten to keep out manufactured goods from developing countries.

concluding:

Climate change is an existential threat. A large and stable middle class is the foundation of liberal democracies. And reducing global poverty is a moral imperative. It would be alarming if we had to abandon any of these three goals. Yet our current policy framework imposes, implicitly but forcefully, a trilemma that appears difficult to overcome. A successful post-neoliberal transition requires us to formulate new policies that put these trade-offs behind us.

I think that Dr. Rodrik understates the degree to which the three goals are in conflict. For example, as long as the U. S. middle class is the consumer of last resort for the entire world, developing economies require a strong U. S. middle class.

Choosing one goal over another is not a challenge at which American politicians excel. For example, maintaining U. S. global hegemony, blithely described as “primacy in every theater”, requires increased real defense spending. Continuing to spend money we do not have without increased aggregate product creates inflation. We must choose.

A report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, “Examining Widespread Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs”, considers fraud in the unemployment benefits program put in place during the pandemic:

[T]he U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that about 11 to 15 percent of total benefits paid during the pandemic were fraudulent, totaling between $100 to $135 billion.

Unofficial estimates place the loss rate at as much as 40%.

I think there’s almost no end of directions in which to point the finger of blame. Clearly, the program was not well-designed or administered. I recognize the complexities the circumstances presented. Those are no excuse. That’s a black spot against the Trump Administration.

However, the blame doesn’t stop there. Equally clearly, the program was conceptually flawed. That’s a black spot on the Congress.

Finally, those who perpetrated the frauds share a lot of the blame. I’m reminded of John Adams’s observation about the then newly-written Constitution:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

What sort of government will be needed to maintain order among the sort of people we are becoming?

One last observation. The estimates of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government have long been between 3% and 7%. What if it’s actually 11% to 15%? What if it’s actually 40%?

Given the evidence presented by the House committee I think the burden of proof lies on the federal government. Low levels of waste, fraud, and abuse can no longer be assumed.