Chicagoans are looking forward to this week’s Democratic National Convention with considerable apprehension. What will happen? No one really knows.

The best case scenario is that it will be a joyful celebration, entirely peaceful—an introduction to the coming Harris Administration. The worst case scenario is that it will be a rerun of 1968 and demonstrators, Chicago politicians, and the Chicago Police Department will reveal exactly who they really are—a somewhat less benign introduction to the coming Harris Administration.

Yesterday I read one of the most depressing posts I can recall reading recently from photographer Chris Arnade at UnHerd. In a “road trip around the United States” interviewing people Mr. Arnade found many people expressing despair with far fewer bright spots along the way. He cut his trip short, giving up in dismay:

A decade ago, I had hope that things were so bad that we couldn’t possibly keep ignoring the malaise, the emptiness, the ugliness and we would move to right the ship. Instead, we buried our heads deeper into the sand, allowing life in the US to grow even more banal and isolating. We still haven’t grasped that the problem isn’t economic, it’s spiritual. And the answer isn’t to build another basic housing complex, another road, another shopping mall, but to build more cohesive and meaningful communities. Which isn’t easy, but unless that’s done, little will change towards the good, not in another year or another decade.

I honestly can’t recommend that you read it but I think he’s pointing out things that are real. While I agree that Americans eat junk I don’t attribute the sense of despair to eating lousy food.

To the contrary I think that both the lousy food and sense of despair have a common cause. We’ve spent the last fifty years or so tearing down institutions that have grown up over thousands of years, replacing them with nothing. Marriage, the family, faith, social organizations. The grounds on which these institutions have been criticized has largely been that they aren’t perfect, pointing out these imperfections as proof of inherit viciousness.

People have turned to self-gratification but hedonism has never been the foundation for a happy, fulfilling life. That’s why they’re eating mostly fat and sugar. It’s why we have substance abuse problems, an increased suicide rate, and why life expectancy has plateaued or actually decreased.

or beware of unintended run-on effects. In the Wall Street Journal Andrew Restuccia and Tarini Parti report:

Housing is one of the most stubborn costs facing the country, even as inflation is slowing.

“Costs are still too high and on a deeper level, for too many people, no matter how much they work, it feels so hard to just be able to get ahead,” Harris said.

Mortgage rates are at the lowest level in more than a year, but they are unlikely to soon return to anywhere near the levels before the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in early 2022.

Home-buying affordability dropped last fall to the lowest level since September 1985, and it fell near that level again in June.

Harris proposed a $40 billion fund to help local governments develop innovative solutions to the lack of housing supply. It is an expansion of a similar $20 billion fund proposed by the Biden administration.

No word on how Vice President Harris intends to pay for all of the spending she’s proposing. Presumably, she plans to put it on the cuff.

Unless there is unused productive capacity lying idle (there isn’t) and unless taxes are increased to cover it, that will increase inflation. The Fed will try to handle that by increasing interest rates which will make housing that much less affordable.

Besides we don’t have a housing or even a homelessness problem. We have zoning, mental illness, substance abuse, underemployment, and an admitting-too-many-poor-and-unskilled-people-into-the country problems. Unless those problems are addressed first no housing plan will solve the problem she is presumably trying to address.

Restrictive zoning prevents homes from being built in places like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, etc. People live on the streets for many reasons. Many are mentally ill. Others have substance abuse problems. Some just don’t want to work or have financial responsibilities. Others are employed but don’t earn enough money to pay rent. I could explore that last issue at length but the bottom line is the unemployment rate doesn’t reflect people who are employed but don’t earn enough so politicians aren’t interested in it.

I could also delve into how subsidies will actually increase prices but why bother? You get the idea. She’s trying to move a rope by pushing on it.

In her Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan reminisces, drawing an analogy between George H. W. Bush’s speech at the Republican National Convention in 1988 and Kamala Harris speech in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention next week:

He defined modern conservatism: “An election that is about ideas and values is also about philosophy. And I have one. At the bright center is the individual. And radiating out from him or her is the family, the essential unit of closeness and of love. For it’s the family that communicates to our children—to the 21st century—our culture, our religious faith, our traditions and history. From the individual to the family to the community, and then on out to the town, the church and the school, and, still echoing out, to the county, the state, and the nation—each doing only what it does well, and no more. And I believe that power must always be kept close to the individual—close to the hands that raise the family and run the home.”

He then defined what kind of conservative he was, one who saw the centrality of the individual existing within the connectedness of communities: “I am guided by certain traditions. One, is that there is a God and he is good, and his love, while free, has a self imposed cost: We must be good to one another. . . . And there is another tradition. And that’s the idea of community—a beautiful word with a big meaning.”

Democrats, he felt, had an odd view of it. “They see community as a limited cluster of interest groups, locked in odd conformity. . . . But that’s not what community means—not to me. For we’re a nation of community, of thousands and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary and unique. This is America: the Knights of Columbus, the Grange, Hadassah, the Disabled American Veterans, the Order of Ahepa, the Business and Professional Women of America, the union hall, the Bible study group, Lulac”—the League of United Latin American Citizens—“Holy Name—a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.”

I wonder: Would Ms. Harris ever define modern liberalism? Would she want to define her own?

I don’t think the analogy is as strong as Ms. Noonan seems to think. I don’t believe that speeches, particularly long speeches, are an effective method of communication in the modern post-literate world. You can’t appeal to reason or to, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “the better angels of our nature”.

Catherine Rampell uses her latest Washington Post column to react to the Harris campaign economic plan which includes a proposal for a subsidy for first-time homebuyers and restrictions on “price gouging”:

So what actually happened with grocery inflation, if not “price gouging” (however defined)? Superstrong consumer demand plus major supply disruptions (the coronavirus pandemic, bird flu, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc.) pushed prices and profits up. Once those shocks abated and consumers started spending down their pandemic savings, price growth cooled.

These are the kinds of facts the Harris campaign should be explaining to consumers, not exploiting for demagogic gain because push-polling suggests people are mad about “greed.”

But more to the point: If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls. We already have plenty of economic gibberish coming from the Republican presidential ticket. Do we really need more from the other side, too?

I think this illustrates how much better off the Harris campaign was when it focused on memes, photo ops, and graphics than when it tried to explicate actual policy positions. I’ll have more to say about subsidies for first-time homebuyers in a later post.

I found the video above fascinating. The main informant made a number of interesting points.

First, there is a tremendous opportunity for expanding the amount of electricity being generated in the United States. There are hundreds, even thousands of small dams in the United States that could be retrofitted to generate hydroelectric power. Not doing that is effectively throwing energy away.

Doing that would not be free—it would be expensive but it would probably be less expensive than building a new coal or nuclear power plant.

I doubt that such a project would ever be funded or even undertaken by the private sector unprompted. If you’re interested in federal government infrastructure investment, here it is.

Second, we need more power lines at “choke points”. That, too, is something I think the private sector is unlikely to undertake on its own.

Check it out.

If this report by Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, the mystery of who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline has been solved:

In May of 2022, a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen had gathered to toast their country’s remarkable success in halting the Russian invasion. Buoyed by alcohol and patriotic fervor, somebody suggested a radical next step: destroying Nord Stream.

After all, the twin natural-gas pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe were providing billions to the Kremlin war machine. What better way to make Vladimir Putin pay for his aggression?

Just over four months later, in the small hours of Sept. 26, Scandinavian seismologists picked up signals indicating an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption hundreds of miles away, near the Danish island of Bornholm. They were caused by three powerful explosions and the largest-ever recorded release of natural gas, equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Denmark.

One of the most audacious acts of sabotage in modern history, the operation worsened an energy crisis in Europe—an assault on critical infrastructure that could be considered an act of war under international law. Theories swirled about who was responsible. Was it the CIA? Could Putin himself have set the plan in motion?

Now, for the first time, the outlines of the real story can be told. The Ukrainian operation cost around $300,000, according to people who participated in it. It involved a small rented yacht with a six-member crew, including trained civilian divers. One was a woman, whose presence helped create the illusion they were a group of friends on a pleasure cruise.

“I always laugh when I read media speculation about some huge operation involving secret services, submarines, drones and satellites,” one officer who was involved in the plot said. “The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky initially approved the plan, according to one officer who participated and three people familiar with it. But later, when the CIA learned of it and asked the Ukrainian president to pull the plug, he ordered a halt, those people said.

Zelensky’s commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who was leading the effort, nonetheless forged ahead.

If true, this raises a number of issues. For one thing it illustrates the increase in personal empowerment that modern technology and increasing wealth have produced, a subject I’ve posted on here from time to time. What might have taken a whole navy to do can now be done by a handful of rich guys. That makes the world an increasingly dangerous place. That’s a jinn that cannot be put back into the bottle.

But also the sabotage was an act of war by Ukraine against a NATO country. That’s food for thought.

Meanwhile in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Karl Rove makes a point I wish that both candidates would take to heart:

Every successful modern presidential candidate for change decried the country’s shortcomings while offering a heavy dose of optimism and cheerfulness. From John F. Kennedy (“We stand today on the edge of a new frontier”) to Ronald Reagan (“The American spirit is still there, ready to blaze into life”), the victors’ tones weren’t dystopian but hopeful, uplifting and inviting. The candidate who gets that right this year will look like the true candidate of change. And may well win.

That point is not original to Mr. Rove. I think I first heard it articulated by a prominent Democratic political analyst a couple of decades ago but I suspect the idea goes back much farther than that.

Presently, Vice President Harris’s campaign is being perceived as one of joy. I have seen contradictions, contraindications, and outright refutations of that but the nonetheless that’s how it is being perceived and in politics perceptions are reality.

Today I have seen a number of observations about things pushing in Vice President Kamala Harris’s favor. Those observations are coming from pundits of varying ideologies and political parties. In one of them I think that Ginny Harris, writing at The Nation, has made a very interesting point:

These days, everything Kamala Harris does turns into a meme: her call to ask Tim Walz to join her ticket, an exasperated look at her husband, a past conversation with Mindy Kaling. While the best memes originate with quick-to-the-news and quick-witted Internet users, they wouldn’t stick the way they are if it weren’t for the candidates embracing them. The day Biden dropped out of the election and endorsed Harris, Charli XCX posted “Kamala IS brat” on X, formerly Twitter. The tweet didn’t just go viral—Harris’s team capitalized on the cultural touchpoint. The official KamalaHQ X account used the “BRAT” font in its cover photo and changed its description to “providing context” in an explicit reference to the “coconut tree” meme. Harris’s willingness to embrace memes suggests that she is perhaps as devoted to Gen Z voters as she claims she is. We choose politicians based not only on who we like but also on who we think likes us, so Harris is wise to show admiration for the youth, who in past elections have turned out at varying rates: in 1996, only 39.6 percent of voters aged 18–29 voted, but that figure was 55 percent in 2020. The broad range suggests there’s an opportunity: Young people could turn out, but it’s by no means guaranteed that they will. And while I’m impressed with the Harris campaign, I also recognize that lightheartedness is her only option. As a Black woman, she doesn’t have the luxury of displaying extreme public anger unless she wants to get tagged with racist, sexist labels like “Angry Black Woman” or “shrill.” But luckily, she has a warm laugh, a talent for striking the right tone at her rallies, and a skilled social media team.

While political campaigns are nearly always superficial to date the 2024 campaigns have seemed more facile to me than usual. I’ve posted on it in the past. The 2024 campaign may, indeed, be the “meme election”.