What I noticed most about David Brooks’s report card for the Baby Boomer cohort in his latest New York Times column was the “extra credit” question at the end:

Special Bonus Question: Who is the quintessential boomer and what does he or she say about the generation?

Here are the nominees:

• Bill Clinton: Hugely talented, high achieving, sometimes self-indulgent.
• Steve Jobs: Design genius; lacked some interpersonal skills.
• Madonna: Scraped her way to the top; became the emblem of self-reinvention.
• Bob Dylan: Entered the stage with a burst of genius that seemed as if it was going to change everything, but somehow didn’t.
• Steven Spielberg: Preserved human values in an age of technology; looked back admiringly to earlier generations.
• Donald Trump.

Bob Dylan was born in 1941. He’s not a Baby Boomer at all. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both born in 1946—they’re just barely Baby Boomers and actually have a lot more in common with the Silent Generation than with Baby Boomers.

It’s not as though there weren’t many more figures who were solidly Baby Boomers to consider including Barack Obama, David Letterman, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon or any of the others?

Analyzing the developments in Hong Kong in a piece at The American Interest, Jianli Yang and Aaron Rhodes, reflect:

n this precarious moment, Hong Kongers should consolidate their gains by claiming victory and continuing to demonstrate for political freedoms and against Communist Party rule. But they must do everything in their power to prevent these protests from becoming violent, and to avoid playing into the hands of those seeking justification to enact Articles 14 and 18 of the Basic Law. They should participate in September’s upcoming elections for District Legislators, and in the March 2020 elections for the Legislative Council. Several visionary protestors have been calling on young people participating in the protests to register as new voters. The Hong Kong election authorities announced on August 1 that 385,985 have become new registered voters this year, a 47 percent increase from the 2015 election year.

Members of the protest movement must also expand their advocacy in international institutions, national governments, and civil society. They must make the point that their struggle will have consequences of the highest order, not only for the future of Hong Kong and China, but for democracy and human rights globally.

The U.S. government must push back against the hackneyed Communist Party claim that America is the force behind these homegrown protests for freedom, and it should also firmly defend the rights of Hong Kongers to freedom of expression and assembly on the basis of international standards and the principles of universal, individual political rights.

I think the authors are missing something in their analysis. Not everyone takes a strategy aimed at maximizing gain; alternatively, they may attempt to minimize loss. I would speculate that under the circumstances that is the strategy that Xi will adopt which suggests that a brutal crackdown is his best strategy.

I found these figures, cited in Doug Mataconis’s post about the fallout from the second round of Democratic presidential candidates’ debates at Outside the Beltway, amusing:

In the candidate preference part of the poll, the numbers break down like this:

1. Joe Biden — 33%
2. Bernie Sanders — 19%
3. Elizabeth Warren — 14%
4. Kamala Harris — 9%
5. Pete Buttigieg — 6%
6. Beto O’Rourke — 3%
7. Cory Booker — 3%
8. Andrew Yang — 2%
9. All other candidates under 2%

for a couple of reaons. First, that’s a clear illustration of the “long tail phenomenon”. Second, as I learned back in the graduate level microeconomics course I took all those years ago, that sort of power law distribution is the same distribution as generally emerges in the distribution of market share among the members of a cartel.

As I read the interview with Josh Barro at New York Magazine on the “worst case scenario” in the trade war between the U. S. and China, it struck me that my idea of “worst” is a lot different than Mr. Barro’s. I think the worst case scenario is a return to the status quo ante. In that scenario China retains its position as the preferred vendor of low value-added goods, displaces the U. S. from its present position selling high value-added goods (that’s the purpose of the “Made in China” policy), and the U. S. continues its headlong rush to becoming a country whose economy consists of retail, fast food, and professional services (heavily subsidized by government at all levels). I think that’s a very bleak scenario.

When negotiating, you must consider several interrelated factors. First, what do want to accomplish? Second, what does your interlocutor want to accomplish? What’s the least you will accept? What’s the least your negotiating partner will accept?

I think we’ve been dealing with China wrong over the period of the last 40 years and the very least we should accept is for China to conform to its international agreements and institute a rule of law within China. Changing the balance of trade a little in our favor isn’t nearly enough. It continues to approximate the worst case scenario.

The least that China will accept is continued control by the Chinese Communist Party. Consequently, they won’t accept our sine qua non. That’s why I think that the second best scenario for us is not trading with China at all. If the Chinese people prefer the CCP and poverty over prosperity and being a responsible member of the world community, they’re entitled to their choice.

You might want to take a look at this conversation at FiveThirtyEight about breaking the United States up into different countries. Here’s a snippet:

I think it would depend on how elections go. If Trump wins reelection, it might be within 10 years. If Democrats win and Trumpism dies off and Republicans maybe try to build a bigger tent and try to win with more votes rather than with voter suppression, I think it could be staved off.

I’ve thought this since college and it’s not necessarily something that I want to see happen, but it’s kind of like the Old River Control system on the Mississippi River. It’s a control system — it keeps the Mississippi’s waters going down the Mississippi instead of going down the Atchafalaya River. But the river wants to go down the Atchafalaya, and the more they keep it from trying to do what it wants to do, the more pressure it puts on the Old River Control system. Eventually, it is going to go down the Atchafalaya. They can either slowly do it over the course of 20 to 30 years, and they can allow people to move their houses that are going to be underwater. Or they can just let it burst and watch the end of the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, Louisiana, be completely flooded and watch the Mississippi from about Baton Rouge on down completely dry up. So, the longer they put it off, the worse it’s going to be, and that’s how I feel about this. The longer we take the U.S. for granted and it’s too big to fail, the worse the failure.

This topic rears its head every so often. I think that what is really being asserted is the argument for federalism. As I’ve said before, I think that the House of Representatives should be greatly increased in size and there should be a systematic way of dividing states when they get too big.

It also reminds me of those who want to divorce Chicago from the rest of Illinois. They are presumably unaware of the fiscal realities of the state. Were such a thing to happen the rest of the state would immediately become insolvent. Chicago supports the rest of the state not the other way around. It isn’t just that Mississippi needs New York and California. California and New York need Mississippi in very much the same way that Germany needs Greece and Portugal.

I grew up within walking distance of a Civil War battlefield. You could still see bullet holes in walls and, if you dug down a little, could dig bullets out of the ground. I knew people whose great-great-grandfathers literally shot at each other during the War. Three, maybe four of my great-great-grandfathers fought in the war, all for the Union.

We really don’t want the states to go their own ways. It would be disastrous.

I want to draw your attention to a snippet from this column at the Chicago Tribune from John Kass:

In other, saner times, leveraging the political persuasions of absolute madmen against a political opponent would be a signal for a gentleman to rise from the table and leave the room without comment. But now it is the blood of our politics.

Yet whenever I feel that our politics and culture are beyond redemption, someone comes along to prove me wrong, like U.S. Army Pfc. Glendon Oakley Jr. He was at that Walmart in El Paso when the shooting began. Oakley, who has a concealed carry license, ran toward the sound of gunfire, to save as many children as he could. Later, talking about what happened, he sought to direct the media spotlight away from himself and toward the grieving families. And he began to weep.

“I want to look out to the families that were lost and families that lost their children,” he said in El Paso, “because the focus should not be on me, it should be on what happened in Ohio, and what happened in Chicago and what happened yesterday.”

But the focus is not on them. And unfortunately, it is not on the moral courage of Pfc. Oakley.

I wish I had a solution to the problem infecting the United States today. I don’t. I suspect that Trump is a symptom more than the disease. I don’t understand the thinking of anyone who believes that winning an election by 50%+1 votes will cure the disease.

If we ever had one. I am finding it difficult to comment on anything I’m reading today because a) I don’t want to defend Trump; and b) I will not defend real white supremacists.

Yes, mass shootings are sometimes domestic terrorism. Sometimes they’re just crazy people, of whom we appear to have a bumper crop these days. DAESH murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of people, burned cities to the ground, beheaded, and enslaved people. Sheesh.

In the wake of the most violent weekend year-to-date in Chicago in her column in the Chicago Tribune Kristen McQueary declaims:

In addition to millions spent annually in local, state and federal budgets on crime reduction, taxpayers in Illinois fronted more than $50 million toward anti-violence programs in 2010, right before the gubernatorial election during a time when the state couldn’t pay its existing bills. Gov. Pat Quinn scraped together millions in taxpayer resources, and repeatedly during the next four years, to combat violence in Chicago.

That effort resulted in no measurable reduction in violent crime — and a federal criminal probe — after an audit revealed the money went wildly unaccounted for. It was largely misspent and wasted. It went to political cronies and clouted organizations. Today, the state and the city of Chicago still spend millions on anti-violence efforts. How’s it working out?

Without getting to the root causes of violence — poverty, abuse, family breakdowns, addiction, lack of personal responsibility and illegal use of guns — Chicago will continue to be a city thrashing. Lightfoot can’t snap her fingers and solve it. But enough has been studied to point her in the right direction. She needs Pritzker’s help. The state still has more heft to drive existing resources to some of these communities than the city can alone.

Through data-driven information-gathering, the experts know where the violence persists, where gang members loiter, where mental health services are nonexistent, where foreclosures abound, where schools are underperforming, where violence is life. If the city wants change, it could start by microtargeting those ZIP codes. Break down the silos of government that make it impossible for the most vulnerable to access existing programs. Get state and city resources under one roof or at least on the same block for mental health services, for job training, for trauma counseling, for help.

Pick a ward. Pick a five-block radius. Try.

Gary MacDougal is a mostly-retired, successful businessman and onetime leader of the Illinois Republican Party who has spent years studying the causes of violence and trying to get government to be responsive and efficient. His advice is a full-throated effort with the mayor and the governor tasking it as a top priority, every day. Every. Single. Day.

I can’t say I know a better idea. I can’t say we need more money or higher taxes or more cops or more marches.

What I can say, living on Chicago’s South Side for nearly 20 years, is that what we’re doing is not working. It’s not even close.

J. B. Pritzker and Lori Lightfoot chased the car and they caught it. They won their elections. Now it’s their turn to take ownership of what’s going on in Chicago. They can’t solve Chicago’s problems by throwing money at them. For one thing the cupboard is already bare. For another Chicago already has more police officers relative to population of any other major U. S. city, a typical Chicago cop gets a total of more than $100K per year, and previous increases have not reduced violent crime.

Chicago already had among the nation’s toughest gun laws. They were struck down by the Supreme Court.

Not to put too fine a point on it but Rahm Emanuel’s apparent strategy was to drive as many poor blacks from Chicago as possible while funding amenities for well to do Millennials. We’ll know just how well he succeeded when the results of the 2020 census are made known. I’m betting it will reveal that Houston has overtaken Chicago in population.

China perma-hawk Gordon Chang, observing the escalating situation in Hong Kong, declaims at The National Interest:

Sefying stern warnings from both the local government and Beijing, people in seven districts in Hong Kong—most notably teachers, airport workers, and civil servants—participated in a general strike Monday, shutting down portions of the territory. For instance, more than a hundred flights were cancelled.

The strike followed weeks of sometimes violent protests in the territory, a semi-autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. Youthful demonstrators over the weekend surrounded and attacked police stations, and enraged residents drove riot police from their neighborhoods.

Roving protesters, dressed for urban combat, created a series of confrontations across the territory, even closing the main tunnel linking Hong Kong Island with the rest of the territory. A beleaguered police force, demoralized and fatigued, was unable to keep up with the mobile bands of radicalized youth.

Some of the protest messages were impossible to miss. In Wanchai’s Golden Bauhinia Square, a magnet for tourists from other parts of China, kids spray-painted a statue with provocative statements such as “The Heavens will destroy the Communist Party” and “Liberate Hong Kong.”

In Hong Kong, revolution is in the air. What started out as an unexpectedly large demonstration in late April against a piece of legislation—an extradition bill—has become a call for democracy in the territory as well as independence from China and the end of communism on Chinese soil.

Here are my questions. How long will the Chinese authorities tolerate the situation in Hong Kong? For that matter how long will they tolerate “one country two systems”? What should the U. S. position be? What will the U. S. position be?