The recurring theme I have encountered today is commenters relying on empirical measures that aren’t really as empirical as one might think. One example of that is William Galston’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. In it he’s complaining about what actually may be a problem—enduring truancy after the COVID lockdowns:

About 15% of students nationwide in 2019 were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of the school year, or about 18 days, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Full data aren’t yet available from the 2023-24 school year, but fragmentary statistics from local jurisdictions aren’t encouraging.

Students from poorer families are more likely to be chronically absent from school, but even in the nation’s richest districts, chronic absenteeism was nearly twice as high in 2023 as in 2019. Surprisingly, the length of time a school was closed isn’t a reliable predictor of absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism in 2023 stood at 28% of students for districts that remained closed the longest, not far ahead of 25% of students for districts that reopened the fastest.

A district’s racial makeup is a better predictor of what percentage of students miss school, but even in majority-white districts, chronic absenteeism rose significantly, from 13% in 2019 to 22% in 2023, compared with 17% to 30% in majority nonwhite districts.

That sounds pretty alarming but how serious is this issue really?

The problem is that “chronic truancy” is not consistently defined or applied. In Illinois “chronic truancy” is defined as nine days per academic year of unexcused absences. In Washington, DC it’s ten days. But there is no distinction between nine days per year, nine days per month, or never attending school at all.

I think we should be able to agree that outright avoidance of school is a problem. How serious is just not going to school for one day per month? That’s all that DC’s definition of chronic truancy requires.

A real chronic truancy problem has all sorts of implications among them that it calls into question the entire strategy of individuals improving their prospects in life through education. If you won’t go to school, that’s not going to happen. I should add that for the last 50 years teachers have been complaining about being saddled with addressing every social problem rather than just “readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic”.

I found Jonathan Russo’s proposal at The Hill for dealing with the federal debt by imposing a wealth tax on members of the Baby Boom generation interesting:

To avoid shackling the post-Boomer generations with the onerous task of paying off the national debt, the Boomers’ wealth needs to be on the table.

In his book, “A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America,” Bruce Gibney argued that “generational plunder” was their economic legacy. Through tax cuts and deficit financing of several wars, the Boomers left America in shock. “Plunder” is a strong word. In the corporate legal world, it is enough to justify a clawback of the plunderers’ assets.

That the rich and powerful owe something to the government that gave them the ability to amass so much wealth is not unheard of. The group Patriotic Millionaires and its most visible member, Abigail Disney, argue that they themselves should pay more in taxes. They claim that American tax codes are riddled with loopholes that often make the rich pay lower average rates than working people — something Warren Buffet has spoken about for years and which was recently brought up in President Biden’s State of the Union speech.

I was unaware that the Baby Boomers had been conspiring to enrich themselves at the expense of the generations that preceded them and follow them. Or that they had used their control of the legislative and executive branches of government to do it.

As it turns out there has never been a time during which the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority Leader, and the president were all Baby Boomers. Such a time may never come. Furthermore, the author is looking at a snapshot of national wealth when he should be looking at a movie. Courtesy of Statista here is a graph illustrating the distribution of wealth by age cohort over time:

Find more statistics at Statista
As you can see the Baby Boomers’ holding of the majority of national wealth didn’t start until 2005 and it’s already beginning to decline. Meanwhile the Silent Generation held the majority of national wealth for a full fifteen years (at least)—you can’t actually tell how long due to the limitations of the graph. Most of the debt has been racked up by the Silent Generation.

Shorter: as Willie Sutton put it he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. Don’t worry. The Baby Boomers won’t have their wealth for long.

As you might suppose I do not hold with the Batman theory of American foreign relations. That is the view held by progressive interventionists (“responsibility to protet”) and neoconservative (“spread democracy”) interventionists alike. One of the things I do not understand about that view is how you reconcile shrinking defense budgets and industrial sectors with the ever-increasing need for interventions. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on that.

There are many things about the contours of the present U. S. policies that I do not understand. I do not understand how an infinite number of low-skill migrants will help the United States. I don’t even know how we’ll pay for them. I’ve published the numbers before. A family of four migrants without highly desirable skills, e.g. one in which neither of the two adults is a physician or other highly compensated worker, has a maximum household income of around $60,000. In Chicago the cost of such a family (two adults, two children) to the city is right around $60,000. Said another way you lose money on every such household. And that doesn’t even include their housing. Just school for the kids, healthcare subsidies, and safety.

I also don’t understand how we will produce senior engineers when junior engineers can’t get jobs here. Or how we’ll pay the ever-increasing interest on the public debt on which we already spend more than we do on defense.

There are times when I feel fortunate that I am unlikely to live to see these flawed policies come to their fruition. I’m not planning on dying in the next year or so but the likelihood of my living another, say, 20 years is pretty low.

I’m afraid I disagree with the point that John Limbert is making at Responsible Statecraft. I think it’s far too early to negotiate with Iran.

Sooner or later, if the U.S. and the Islamic Republic are going to avoid such a lose-lose conflict, the two sides will need to stop shouting and start talking. Forty-five years of exchanging empty slogans, accusa­tions, threats, and denunci­a­tions have accomplished little beyond furthering a few political careers and feed­ing a sense of self-righteousness. For suc­cessive U.S. adminis­trations, Iran remains a problem that will not go away.

To para­phrase Trotsky, “You may have no business with Iran; but Iran has business with you.” For Iran, the U.S. remains an obsession. The more Iran’s hated rulers denounce it, the more attractive it becomes — as both a role model and a destination — to a savvy popula­tion suffering from inflation, unemployment, and the stern, miso­gynistic dictates of an aging and ossified ruling elite.

The Islamic Republic, despite the wishes of many Iranians and their friends, is probably not going away soon. In the first months after the fall of the monarchy, the most-asked question in Tehran was, “When are THEY leaving?” (Inhaa key mirand?). Forty-five years later THEY are still in charge and show no signs of packing their bags.

Two comparisons come to mind: Russia and Cuba. The Russian Revolution took place in 1917. Forty-five years later was 1962—just about the time of the Cuban missile crisis. We would still be dealing with committed revolutionaries until the 1980s and the Soviet Union collapse in the 1990s, a full 75 years later. The Cuban Revolution overthrew Batista in 1959. Forty-five years later Fidel Castro still ruled Cuba and would until his death in 2016. Cuba’s present ruler is no committed revolutionary—he hadn’t even been born in 1959. Negotiating with him might be effective; negotiating with either of the Castro brothers would have been a waste of breath and plane fare.

Ali Khameini, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is a committed revolutionary. We won’t get a damned thing from him.

It doesn’t make any difference how urgent the need is. Some things can only take place in the fullness of time. Regardless of how much we might like to think otherwise negotiating with Iran at this point would be an exercise in futility.

It’s been hard to find anything worth writing about lately. So much is just partisan bickering with little real substance. Let’s consider the pro-Palestinian student protests for a moment.

I have three observations. First, I think that those who characterize the protests as “LARPing activism” or “cos-playing radicalism” have it about right. Fortunately, I remember the student protests of the 60s and early 70s pretty vividly. I can say with confidence that most student demonstrators really didn’t give a damn about the Vietnam War. They were vitally interested in not being drafted. I would submit as proof of that assertion that the demonstrations were greatly muted long before the war ended but just about at the time that the draft ended in 1973.

My second observation is that IMO Tom Cotton’s remarks about the protests on the talking heads programs yesterday were pretty devastating. If the protesters were really pro-Palestinian they’d be demanding that Hamas surrender. There are a lot of things they may be demonstrating about but it’s not in support of the Palestinians.

My final observation on the subject is that the right strategy for addressing them is quite straightforward. People definitely have freedom of speech and a right to protest but they don’t have a right to bullhorns or disorderly conduct and they don’t have a right to conduct protests or camp on private property. The police should be called in the moment a protest strays from speech or one of these encampments is created on private property. When protesters are arrested clear distinctions should be made. Non-students should include charges of trespassing and, possibly, criminal property damage. If they are non-U. S. citizens they should be deported. While non-citizens have the same freedom of speech as citizens while on U. S. soil, they don’t have a right to raise hell here. Consider it a teachable moment.

At Brussels Signal Ralph Schoellhammer argues that Americans are being misled into thinking that Arabs in the Middle East support Hamas when the reality is that they actually support Israel because they recognize that Iran, for which Hamas is a proxy, is the greater danger:

If one views the Arab-Israeli conflict through the ongoing campus protests at US universities, one could easily get the impression that Israel might be winning militarily, but it is losing the battle for global public opinion. However, anyone who has the slightest understanding of the Middle East knows that the language spoken there is one of power, not popularity.

Contrary to popular belief, the fate of Palestine and its people is not the number one issue for most Arab States, and despite the rhetoric of their propaganda there is a growing willingness to find a lasting arrangement with the state of Israel.

This has been clear since the signing of the Abraham Accords in September 2020 normalizing relations between Israel on side and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on the other. A few months later, Sudan and Morocco joined the accords, marking what has been a tectonic shift in the region – and if it would not have been for the deep-seated prejudice against Donald Trump in the media, should have secured the US President a Nobel Peace Prize.

While I think he has a point I don’t think he’s got it quite right. I think there is a broad gap between popular opinion among Arabs in the Middle East, sometimes referred as the “Arab street”, and the views of the leaders of Arab countries in the Middle East. I think that Mr. Schellhammer interprets the views of the Middle Eastern leaders correctly:

Certainly, public opinion in Saudi Arabia and other places remains staunchly anti-Israel, as recent polling has shown: “Only 14% of respondents agreed to allow Israeli civilian airplanes to fly over Saudi Arabia, and just 13% would permit Israeli sports teams to participate in events in Saudi Arabia, and a mere 7% would welcome Israel’s prime minister to an international conference in Saudi Arabia.”

These views notwithstanding, the reform oriented Arab leaders from Jordan to Saudi Arabia are well aware that the potential peace dividend that could come from the combination of Arab capital and Israeli high tech could be a key element in their modernization plans, and they refuse to make everything contingent on the question of Palestinian statehood.

There is a reason for this and it is not rooted in economic interest as the author avers but in the threat that Islamist radicals pose to the leaderships of Arab countries. Consequently, the basic question is less one of what Arabs believe but of whether the leaders of authoritarian Arab countries will remain in control.

If they do you can expect some modernization of Arab countries in the Middle East somewhat along Chinese lines. If they don’t I suspect we will see increased support for Islamist radicals like Hamas and Hezbollah at the expense all else.

There’s a wisecrack in journalism going back to the late 19th century, attributed to many. “‘Dog bites man’ is not news but ‘man bites dog’ is news.” That’s what I thought of when I read the headlines this morning about a Texas Congressman and his wife being charged with accepting bribes for official actions from a foreign country. “Congressman accepting bribes” is not news but “Congressman charged with accepting bribes” is news. And it’s not just any Congressman, either, but one with ten terms worth of seniority and positions on significant committees and subcommittees.

I wasn’t shocked by the report for reasons I’ve explained before. I think that practically all Congressmen are engaged in illegal or unethical activities and those who aren’t know about the actions of the rest which makes them guilty, too. It did surprise me that the DoJ was charging him. I can only speculate that some rogue news organization or another was about to reveal the facts (or, worse, hold the facts until releasing them could do the most harm) that prompted the action.

You can’t blame the voters. The Congressman has been running unopposed for quite a while. That’s true in a remarkable number of districts.

I could propose reforms that would reduce the scale of the problem but why bother? They will never be adopted and Constitutional amendments restraining Congressmen would just move the problem from members of Congress to staffs and the civil bureaucracy. The only thing that could really eliminate the problem would be to restrict the scope of Congressional action and that’s impractical.

The question above is what this article in Foreign Affairs by Christian Caryl struggles with. Most of the article is devoted to how hard it is to be confident about Russian public opinion but this passage is the best assessment the author could come up with:

The data from Levada and other independent pollsters, such as Russian Field and the Chronicle Group, show that general support for the war remains strong—77 percent, according to the latest Levada poll, published in March. Yet Levada also noted that more respondents (52 percent) favored peace negotiations than the continuation of hostilities (40 percent), which doesn’t square with the Kremlin’s desires. And a whopping 66 percent of those surveyed agreed that Russia is paying too high a price for the invasion.

I agree with the author that making a realistic assessment of Russian public opinion is a critical need. However, I doubt that we’ll manage it especially in the near term. All I can advise is take what our news media are saying with a grain (maybe more than a grain) of salt.

I wanted to call this investigation by Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations to your attention. It chronicles how involved the United States has been in Ukrainian politics since 2014. It relies heavily on information from Andrii Telizhenko:

Although he once welcomed Washington’s influence in Ukraine, Telizhenko now takes a different view. “I’m a Ukrainian who knew how Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today,” he says. “For me, it’s a total failed state.” In his view, Ukraine has been “used directly by the United States to fight a [proxy] war with Russia” and “as a rag to make money for people like Biden and his family.”

The State Department has accused Telizhenko being part of a “Russia-linked foreign influence network.” In Sept. 2020 it revoked his visa to travel to the United States. Telizhenko, who now lives in a western European country where he was granted political asylum, denies working with Russia and says that he is a whistleblower speaking out to expose how U.S. interference has ravaged his country. RealClearInvestigations has confirmed that he worked closely with top American officials while they advanced policies aimed at severing Ukraine’s ties to Russia. No official contacted for this article – including former CIA chief John Brennan and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland – disputed any of his claims.

Whether fomenting “proxy wars” with Russia is in the U. S. interest or not, just as I do not care for other countries interfering in U. S. politics, I do not care for the U. S. interfering in the politics of other countries.