I wish more people would pay attention to Henry Grabar’s post at Slate than probably will. It has quite a few important revelations. For example:

The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”

And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.

Youngstown’s blacks aren’t Republicans and the Democrats aren’t interested in them:

The bad news is that no one had voted in the city’s recent primaries for local elected office. Turnout was about 10 percent. Helen Youngblood, a longtime leader of the AFSCME local, remembered talking to a friend about this: “When I ask, ‘Why can’t we get these people out to vote?,’ the person says to me, ‘Helen, when you get up in the morning and you don’t know if your baby is going to have milk, then your priority of the day isn’t getting out to vote.’ ” Poverty, she reasoned, was crushing people’s will to participate in the political process.

But several people I spoke to said there is also reason to blame Democrats, or as Sybil West called them when I paid a visit to her east side home on a recent afternoon, “the wimpocrats.” The party has been as absent here as Donald Trump is present, West told me, and the state’s GOP-led gerrymandering and poverty have further sapped people’s enthusiasm. “Most people are feeling apathetical,” she surmised, “because they’re saying, ‘It’s not going to do any good.’ ”

One of the effects of the collapse in manufacturing jobs in the United States is that it has concentrated black people in the cities. Black people moved from the South to Northern cities for jobs. Now that the jobs have vanished they’re more hesitant to move than their white counterparts.

In his newsletter, reproduced at the New York Times David Leonhardt seems surprised that blacks don’t overwhelmingly think that reparations is the measure most likely to help them:

In the poll, people were given a list of 14 economic policies and asked how much they thought each would help the black community. The list was full of progressive ideas: paid leave and better workplace benefits; a higher minimum wage; a federal jobs guarantee; stronger laws against discrimination; reparations for descendants of slaves; and more.

On a straight up-or-down basis, a majority of black Americans favored every one of the 14 policies. But there was a fairly wide gap in how much they thought each would help. At the top of the list were a higher minimum wage, stronger discrimination laws and better workplace benefits and training. About 70 percent of respondents said each of those would help “a great deal.”

At the bottom of the list: Slavery reparations. Second to last: a federal jobs guarantee. Only about half of respondents said each would help a great deal.

What’s going on here? To me, it’s a reminder that black Americans, as a group, don’t have the same political opinions as the most liberal parts of the Democratic coalition. On many issues, black Americans are more moderate — or perhaps more pragmatic.

My own experience has been that blacks are more conservative and more religious than non-black Democrats and that the division is growing.

Quite a number of things disturbed me about the New York Times’s recent article alleging that the U. S. has been inserting malware into Russian power grid control systems. For one thing I question the article’s veracity. For another if true I think it’s irresponsible of the NYT to publish such information. Are we to interpret it that today’s NYT would have been publishing U. S. troop movements in real time to the Axis? Inserting such malware is an act of war. If we are, indeed, doing that it is brinksmanship with incalculable risks.

I found this highly distressing:

But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”

Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.

While I can see the good sense in such a provision to allow for preemption or counter-attack, that does not seem to be the case here. I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that it is a violation of black letter law, not merely the U. S. Constituion but many provisions in the UCMJ. An American general would be bound to reject such a course of action.

Besides, the Congress does not have the power to amend the Constitution by statute. The Congress and the president together do not have that power.

I found this concerning as well:

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

That’s before Russia invaded Ukraine and before DHS began alleging incursions of Russian malware into the U. S. power, before the law mentioned above was enacted and before Donald Trump became president. Did President Obama order this actions? Did he know about them?

I found Andy Kessler’s column in the Wall Street Journal about predictions of the future amusing and maybe a little sad:

Founded in 1867, the Keuffel & Esser Co. commissioned a study of the future for its 100th anniversary. If you’re of a certain vintage, you might have used a K&E slide rule. Their “visionary” study was a huge dud, missing completely the electronic-calculator boom that came a few years later. They shut down their slide-rule engravers in 1976. As Mark Twain said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Or was it Niels Bohr? Maybe Yogi Berra?

My father was a proud member of the Book of the Month Club. Bored on a visit home in 1989, I devoured that month’s selection, “Megamistakes” by Baruch College professor Steven Schnaars, where I read about K&E’s study. The book’s message was simple: Don’t be fooled by prevailing opinion, and don’t extend trend lines into the future. Mr. Schnaars chronicles how 1950s jet-age thinking morphed into ’60s dreams of a space-age utopia. A 1966 study by conglomerate TRW forecast manned lunar bases by 1977, autonomous vehicles by 1979 and intelligent robot soldiers by the ’90s. AT&T ’s Picturephone service, ultrasonically cleaned dishes, cheap energy forever, future shock everywhere—all wrong.

Predictions of the future are highly conditioned by the present. If we can’t agree about what happened in the past how can we possibly predict the future? When the “first draft of history” is hopelessly biased, it isn’t surprising that the future nearly always takes us by surprise.

It has been brought to my attention that today marks Rich Koz’s 40th anniversary portraying Svengoolie on television. From WGNRadio:

Chicago’s own Rich Koz celebrates 40 Years since he stepped into the role of Svengoolie… it all happened on June 16, 1979! Dave Plier, Rich Koz, Josh Plier and Executive Producer Jim Roche talked about Rich’s beginnings in television, ‘Son of Svengoolie’, his favorite monstrous films, history of his set and the return of ‘The Three Stooges’ to ME TV. For more information visit Svengoolie.com.

I guess it dates me but on the rare occasions when I think of Svengoolie, I still think of Jerry G. Bishop.

Anyway, happy anniversary, Rich!

Christopher F. Rulo raises a very interesting point in this article in City Journal on homelessness:

By latest count, some 109,089 men and women are sleeping on the streets of major cities in California, Oregon, and Washington. The homelessness crisis in these cities has generated headlines and speculation about “root causes.” Progressive political activists allege that tech companies have inflated housing costs and forced middle-class people onto the streets. Declaring that “no two people living on Skid Row . . . ended up there for the same reasons,” Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for his part, blames a housing shortage, stagnant wages, cuts to mental health services, domestic and sexual abuse, shortcomings in criminal justice, and a lack of resources for veterans. These factors may all have played a role, but the most pervasive cause of West Coast homelessness is clear: heroin, fentanyl, and synthetic opioids.

Homelessness is an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis. In Seattle, prosecutors and law enforcement recently estimated that the majority of the region’s homeless population is hooked on opioids, including heroin and fentanyl. If this figure holds constant throughout the West Coast, then at least 11,000 homeless opioid addicts live in Washington, 7,000 live in Oregon, and 65,000 live in California (concentrated mostly in San Francisco and Los Angeles). For the unsheltered population inhabiting tents, cars, and RVs, the opioid-addiction percentages are even higher—the City of Seattle’s homeless-outreach team estimates that 80 percent of the unsheltered population has a substance-abuse disorder. Officers must clean up used needles in almost all the homeless encampments.

What is the correct policy response? Provide more homeless shelters? Provide more low-cost housing? Legalize drugs?

Is it just barely possible that we should not only provide more resources for dealing with substance abuse but change our attitudes towards substance abuse?

The New York Times reports on a court case in which a local bakery sued Oberlin College. The jury awarded the bakery a judgment of $33 million dollars, $11 million in compensatory and $22 million in punitive damages. Here’s the NYT’s take:

The dispute began on Nov. 9, 2016, when an Oberlin student tried to pay for a bottle of wine with a fake ID, and the store clerk noticed that the student had hidden two more bottles of wine under his coat, according to court papers.

The clerk, Allyn D. Gibson, a son and a grandson of the owners, chased the student out onto the street and tackled him, according to some witnesses, and two friends of the student, also students at Oberlin, joined in the scuffle. The bakery prosecuted the students, who are African-American and who pleaded guilty to various charges.

The next day, hundreds of students and others gathered in the park across the street from the general store to protest the arrests. The Gibsons accused the college; its dean of students, Meredith Raimondo; and others of actively supporting the protesters. Oberlin officials bought them pizza, authorized the use of student funds to pay for gloves for the cold weather and helped them to hand out fliers urging a boycott of the store, according to court papers.

For just over two months, the college suspended its purchase of baked goods from Gibson’s for the college dining halls. The college said that it suspended buying from Gibson’s in an effort to de-escalate the protests. The store said that the suspension had sent a message to the community that the college believed the store was racist, and that people had stopped shopping there, or went in through a back door, because they did not want to be associated with it.

Though the college resumed buying from Gibson’s it refused to issue an apology, and Gibson’s said its business continued to suffer.

The bakery’s complaint said Dr. Raimondo, had helped hand out fliers saying: “Don’t Buy. This is a racist establishment with a long account of racial profiling and discrimination.”

But the college and the police had no record of prior complaints about racial profiling, the complaint said. Rather, local merchants suffered from students shoplifting, according to court papers, and a college publication had written about how shoplifting was a rite of passage.

The incident and the article bring up a number of interesting issues. The NYT article omits a number of factors that I think are important.

Oberlin, Ohio is a small town of about 8,000 people. Oberlin College is an elite institution and one widely known for social activism and progressivism. The median income of Oberlin students’ families is $178,000. Most of the students’ families are in the top quintile of income earners. The median income of the people of Oberlin, Ohio is $51,117. This divergence provides the basis for a classic “town vs. gown” dispute.

Lorain County in which Oberlin is located is one of the many counties that has never recovered from the Great Recession during which housing values plummeted, indeed, it has suffered substantially from the loss of manufacturing jobs over the last several decades. The punitive damages awarded by the jury in the case were the largest allowed under Ohio law. I don’t think it’s too much of a reach to conclude that the people of Oberlin and Lorain County don’t have a lot of sympathy for how the college handled the situation. The college’s complaint that the judgment would harm students reminds me of the old story about the guy convicted of murdering his parents whose lawyer called for the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

The incident in question occurred the day after Donald Trump was elected president.

The facts of the incident are not in question. The students who shoplifted pled guilty and were convicted of that and a number of other charges. There was no racial profiling involved. The college refused the Gibsons’ request to send out a letter to the students denying that racial profiling had taken place.

Is it really possible for the Dean of Students to take part in a student demonstration without the college’s having de facto endorsed the cause for which the students are demonstrating? That’s the claim that the college has made.

The bakery has lost a half million in revenue, more than half of its typical annual revenue, as a consequence of the incident and the students’ and college’s actions. The college offered $35,000 in settlement of the Gibsons’ suit against it. In the past I’ve mentioned the idea in negotiation theory of an “insult price”, an offer so ludicrous it aggravates the other party rather than encouraging an agreement. That would seem to fill the bill.

I do not know whether the decision was just or unjust or whether it will stand on the appeal which is inevitably coming. I think that the entire matter provides evidence that the concerns about “social justice warriors” out of control and abetted by colleges and universities has actual weight.

I thought that this roundtable at RealClearDefense on the tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf was interesting but ultimately didn’t cast a lot of light on the situation.

My concern about the situation is that Iran is not Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. It is much more populous, much wealthier, and much more cohesive. I think that any half measure military actions against Iran are likely to be counter-productive, inducing a “rally ’round” effect, but I don’t think that we’re politically and emotionally prepared for total war against Iran, either.

I strongly oppose going to war without the commitment to win and I don’t believe we have it.

Update

Anthony Cordesman thinks that this is the beginning of a “hybrid war” with Iran:

For all its talk about closing the Gulf at the Strait of Hormuz, Iran can now use such forces anywhere inside the Gulf, in the Gulf of Oman, in the Gulf of Aden, and in wide parts of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Iran has also shown great skill in exploiting the tensions and divisions between Arab Gulf states, and between the United States and Europe Union regarding the Iran deal.

Yet, Iranian deniability becomes progressively less credible with time. The United States and Arab Gulf states can retaliate at low levels of conflict and choose higher value targets. The risk of escalation on both sides grows with each new incident, and the patience the Iranian people will show as their lives grow steadily worse is problematic. If Iran has chosen the path to hybrid warfare, it is far from clear that it can win.

IMO trying to wage hybrid war with Iran would be ceding the initiative to the enemy, for no credible reason.

I was prepared to disagree vehemently with this article at Visual Capitalist on Bill Gates’s predictions for technological breakthroughs in 2019 but was pleasantly surprised to find that I agree with all of them. Cruise over to the link to see the eye-catching infographic.

The article is ultimately derived from MIT Technology Review which has this numbered list:

1. Robot dexterity—robot hands that can learn to manipulate unfamiliar objects on their own
2. New-wave nuclear power—both fission and fusion reactor designs that could help bring down carbon emissions
3. Predicting preemies—a simple blood test to warn of a preterm birth, potentially saving many children’s lives
4. Gut probe in a pill—a swallowable device that can image the digestive tract and even perform biopsies
5. Custom cancer vaccines—a treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to target only tumor cells
6. The cow-free burger—both plant-based and lab-grown meat alternatives that could drastically cut emissions from the food industry
7. Carbon dioxide catcher—techniques for absorbing CO2 from the air and locking it away that may finally become economic
8. An ECG on your wrist—the ability for people with heart conditions to continuously monitor their health and get early warnings of problems
9. Sanitation without sewers—a self-contained toilet that could tackle disease and unpleasant living conditions in much of the developing world
10. Smooth-talking AI assistants—new advances in natural language processing that make digital assistants capable of greater autonomy

Note what’s conspicuous by their absence: extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence or breakthroughs in battery technology. AI is there but the predictions are modest and achievable.

I’m not as convinced that the benefits predicted from the breakthroughs will actually materialize. For example, I wonder if animal-free burgers will actually result in fewer carbon emissions than the real kind in my lifetime?