Yesterday President Donald Trump spoke in Chicago before a conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. WGN reports:

CHICAGO (WLS) — For the first time since taking office President Trump visited Chicago on Monday morning.

Trump spoke at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference at McCormick Place, addressing a wide range of topics, including efforts to reduce crime and paying respect to Chicago police officers wounded in the line of duty.

ABC7 Political Reporter Craig Wall spoke exclusively with the president, and asked him why Chicago had been such a frequent target.

“Well, all you have to do is take a look at your numbers, where you have 500 and 600 murders over the year,” Trump said. “You have all the problems that you’ve had. It can be straightened out with proper management.”

The president blamed the murders and shootings on Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city.

Whatever Police Superintendent Johnson’s problems Chicago’s homicide rate cannot be laid at his door and Mayor Lightfoot has only been mayor for a few months. The homicide rate has actually declined a bit since she took office. Its peak was under her predecessor, Rahm Emanuel.

And any tolerance of illegal immigration is only tangentially related to Chicago’s high homicide rate. Most of Chicago’s homicides are young black men killing one another or people caught in the crossfire, take place in a half dozen of the city’s neighborhoods, and are gang-related.

The reasons for the gangs are complex. It doesn’t help that they have been hand in glove with corrupt city, county, and state governments. One of the reasons for the rise of black gangs is a collapse of the family structure among urban blacks. The young men need social support and protection from somewhere so they turn to gangs.

Judging from the FBI’s statistics the high homicide rate among young urban black men cannot be explained purely by appealing to race. The rural black homicide rate is just about the same as the rural white homicide rate.

Illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico and Central America, is, indeed, tangentially related to the lack of economic opportunities for young black men since entry level jobs which they might have taken are now being done by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them illegal.

In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead comments on the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi:

The Washington Post may have hastily changed its embarrassing headline for its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—“austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State”—but that won’t be the end of the West’s difficulties in understanding and responding to the multifaceted crisis in the Middle East.

Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.

Arabs of the Middle East should not be offered any solace on his passing. For nearly a millennium they were ruled by non-Arabs, first by Turks and then by European colonizers. They will not achieve what they presumably consider their rightful place in the world by nurturing vipers like Abu Bakr in their collective bosom but by dint of effort, industry, and practicing the virtues that Islam teaches rather than the hate spread by takfiri like Abu Bakr.

Is it my imagination or has the entire world lost its mind? Some people are attacking Trump unjustly; others are defending him unjustly. They do so with equal vehemence. I don’t see how they presently have enough information to do either.

The Washington Post’s announcement of the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi can only be described as unhinged. My religion prohibits me from rejoicing in anyone’s death but he was clearly an unspeakably evil man. He won’t be the last. He won’t even be the last head of DAESH.

I’m seeing a lot of scrambling around by European companies, trying to prepare for a Brexit they aren’t even sure will materialize and whose contours they don’t know.

People are using dangerous drugs to turn their 7 year old boys into girls and, presumably, vice versa. At 7 being curious about your sexuality is normal. Wearing Mommy’s high heels is not a sign of gender dysphoria. One of the most manly young men of my acquaintance ran around in a pink tutu at that age.

Chicago’s teachers have been on strike for eight days. The longest teacher’s strike in Chicago history was, I believe, 19 school days back in 1987. At this point no one appears to be really sure what will resolve the strike. They appear to be striking to prove something to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Rather than summarize Lizzy Francis’s article about what it means to be middle class at Fatherly, which I found rather uninsightful, I’ll give you my thoughts on the subject. The difference among the social classes is the amount of risk you bear, some due to your circumstances and family connections, some due to the behaviors in which you engage and the choices you make.

My favorite definition of our social classes is that being upper class means that, no matter how badly you screw up, you will not be allowed to fail. You should be able to think of people who may be characterized that way easily, e.g. Teddy Kennedy or George W. Bush. If I had engaged in the behaviors they did and made the choices they made, I’d’ve been ruined or, at least, my life would have been greatly impeded. They, on the other hand, became a U. S. senator and president of the United States, respectively.

I am decidedly middle class. My grandfather and grandfather’s grandfather back as far as anyone can reckon were middle class. If someone of the lower classes were to engage in the behaviors which Teddy Kennedy and George W. Bush did, his or her life would have been permanently blighted. They’d’ve been imprisoned. That’s what it means to be lower class.

One of the markers of social class is how you perceive risk. Pursuing anthropology as a career, as Ms. Francis has, is an incredibly risky proposition. Being able to prosper in it depends on a large number of very iffy factors. That she did not perceive it as such either tells us she’s a dope or middle class.

It is being reported that the leader of DAESH, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has been killed during a raid by U. S. Special Forces. I will repeat what I said when Osama bin Laden was assassinated. It is of symbolic significance but don’t exaggerate its strategic significance.

Just as Al Qaeda and its affiliates continue to operate, not only will DAESH continue to operate, there will continue to be radical Islamist terrorist organizations whatever they’re called. Such organizations are endemic in Islam for reasons I’ve outlined previously and will continue to spring up as long as Islam itself exists.

That’s not a call to exterminate Islam—merely acceptance of reality. Modern communications and personal empowerment mean that we will need to be on watch for violent Islamist terrorist attacks with the potential of killing tens or even thousands of people forever.

At Bloomberg Justin Fox recounts the decline and very slight recovery of the bowling business:

In the late 1970s, just over 9 million Americans belonged to bowling leagues. As of 2017-2018, 1.34 million did. This decline has been much discussed, with political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s famous 1995 essay and 2000 book “Bowling Alone” citing it as a symptom and cause of “declining social capital” in the U.S. due to the “social interaction and even occasionally civic conversations over beer and pizza that solo bowlers forgo.”

Putnam admitted in the book, though, that “only poetic license authorizes my description of non-league bowling as ‘bowling alone.’” Instead, bowling was shifting from something that blue-collar workers did after their shifts to something that kids did at birthday parties and adults as part of a night out with friends.

That’s really just the tip of the iceberg. In 1980 there were about 10,000 bowling alleys in the United States with the average bowling alley having 8 lanes. Now there are as third as many alleys and the average store has 26 lanes. Throughout the Midwest there were thousands of bars which had a couple of lanes of bowling attached. Most of those are gone now.

Contrary to what you might conclude from reading Mr. Fox’s piece, bowling alleys have always derived most of their revenue from their bars. Selling upscale mixed drinks might be new but the importance of their bar business is the same.

Some other tidbits. String pinsetters began to catch on in the United States in the early 1990s when Brunswick began selling a Swiss pinsetter here. I think they may eventually have acquired the Swiss manufacturer. And, as the graph Mr. Fox includes in his piece suggests, labor productivity in bowling alleys actually began to rise in the 1990s after years of stagnation when proprietors began automating their operations. Important factors in that were bar management systems, point-of-sale systems, automatic scoring machines, and backroom computers that tied it all together.

I would also suggest that changing demographics has a lot to do with with bowling’s decline. Also average hours worked per worker per year may have something to do with bowling’s decline and rise.

I agree with the slug of Nobel award-winning economists Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s op-ed in the New York Times:

On their own, markets can’t deliver outcomes that are just, acceptable — or even efficient.

but their broader claim, that incentives don’t work at all or work very little, is obviously overblown. How else do you explain the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are fleeing high tax states for low tax ones? Or that changes in tax policy result in easily measurable changes in behavior? Or, frankly, that people don’t just routinely blow through red lights on the street?

I would like to see a more extensive treatment of the conditions under which incentives work or do not.

As to whether tax incentives are good policy I would much rather see tax policy be limited to raising money than changing behavior if only because it’s hard to measure the effects of anything along multiple planes simultaneously.

A “straw man” argument is one in which, rather than directly criticizing something with which you disagree, you construct an extreme version of it and attack that, the “straw man” instead. In a piece at the Wall Street Journal Yaroslav Trofimov makes a straw man argument against pulling U. S. troops back in Syria (as of this writing they have not even been withdrawn):

Ever since the national trauma of the war in Iraq, both winning presidential candidates have run on pledges to extricate the U.S. from costly Middle Eastern entanglements.

Barack Obama promised in 2008 to end the war in Iraq launched by President George W. Bush, and during his 2012 re-election campaign, he touted America’s withdrawal from Iraq as a striking achievement. By the time Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, Mr. Obama had been forced to send some U.S. troops back to Iraq to prevent a takeover by the newly arisen Islamic State. Still, Mr. Trump campaigned on plans to finally end America’s “endless wars” and to cease nation-building abroad.

“We have done them a great service, and we’ve done a great job for all of them, and now we’re getting out,” Mr. Trump said this week. “Let someone else fight over this long bloodstained sand.”

He proceeds by arguing against complete withdrawal of the U. S. military from the Middle East. To the best of my knowledge neither President Obama nor President Trump have proposed such a thing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has, yet another reason I’m skeptical of a possible Warren presidency.

The map above illustrates our many military bases in the Middle East. Has any president announced plans to remove them? Not to my knowledge. Mr. Trofimov is making a strawman argument.

I opposed our participation in the first Gulf War for any number of reasons including that I thought it was none of our business, Saddam Hussein would sell us oil as eagerly as the Emir of Kuwait did, and we would not possess the coldbloodedness to force the war to its conclusion and remove Saddam Hussein entirely. There is a direct connection between the Gulf War and the two attacks on the World Trade Center, the second of which impelled two decades of war by the United States and has not rooted out violent Islamist terrorism.

I opposed our invasion of Afghanistan on the grounds that there was quite literally nothing that would be accomplished by an invasion that couldn’t be accomplished from 50,000 feet and putting “boots on the ground” would legally impose certain obligations on us that we could not reasonably satisfy. Both of those have proven true.

I opposed our invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it was illegal, immoral, and, heinous as Saddam Hussein was, a strong Iraq was more in our interest than a weak one. The rise of DAESH following our exit from Iraq demonstrates why that might be.

I opposed our engagement in the civil war in Syria on the grounds that it is illegal and immoral and, heinous as Bashar al-Assad is, his successor was unlikely to be any better and at least his administration is secular, multi-confessional, and multi-ethnic. Additionally, neither supporting violent radical Islamists nor supporting the Marxist YPG is in our interest. The Kurds are not our allies but the Turks are and supporting the YPG aggravates the Turks.

I do not support dismantling all of our Middle East bases or complete withdrawal from the Middle East.

As to Mr. Trofimov’s argument about the rise of DAESH, whatever they are called violent radical Islamist movements are endemic in Islam. In discussing this issue with genuine Middle East experts they have generally agreed with my assessment that such would be true in any sola scriptura religion whose scripture may be interpreted as advocating spreading the religion by the sword and that does not have a magisterium. Shorter: there will always be violent radical movements in Islam. The only way we have to eliminate them entirely is to abolish Islam itself. Since I do not advocate that, the only alternatives that are left are containment and being willing to accept episodic mass terrorist attacks. We have chosen the latter alternative.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune wonder what the heck the striking teachers want:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot was going to get a strike no matter what. That’s the undeniable take-away as 300,000 Chicago school children lose crucial instructional time and athletes miss out on their playoff and college scholarship dreams.

Here’s what should infuriate Chicagoans: This strike is about power and relevancy for leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union. It always has been.

How else do you explain this walkout even as Lightfoot continues to offer a generous pay and benefits package while committing to the union’s demands for additional support staff, smaller class sizes and a social worker and nurse in every school? The parameters of those arrangements are in writing. Lightfoot bent to most of CTU’s key demands.

Yet teachers still were marching on sidewalks and street corners Thursday instead of teaching in classrooms. CTU members participated in “civil disobedience training” and planned a rally for Saturday. Union leaders Jesse Sharkey and Stacy Davis Gates in media interviews continued to push the false narrative that Lightfoot was resisting their student-focused contract demands at the bargaining table.

That assertion wasn’t true. But in their group-think hive, teachers are failing at the critical thinking skills they so often request of their students. It should be clear now to everyone that the strike is about nothing more noble than a CTU power grab.

From the get-go Lightfoot has given all she can, arguably more than Chicagoans can afford. Yet the teachers won’t take “yes” for an answer.

Not to mention that Mayor Lightfoot’s offer to the teachers consisted of money she didn’t have. Her proposed budget, as I have pointed out, is a prayer rather than a plan.

An important objective of the strike is and always has been to show Mayor Lightfoot who’s boss while demonstrating enormous disdain for the people of Chicago. As I’ve said before she has been much more conciliatory than I would have been in her position.