Chicago’s 2019 aldermanic elections will take place in two rounds, the first round to be held just about a month away on February 26 and the second on April 2. Our aldermanic elections are notionally non-partisan but practically single party. In the ward in which I reside, Chicago’s 39th Ward, all of the candidates running are Democrats.

Since the incumbent alderman of the 39th Ward, Marge Laurino, has elected not to run for re-election, for the first time in 50 years no member of the Laurino family will be running in the election. There are presently three candidates: Robert Murphy, Samantha Nugent, and Casey Smagala.

The Chicago Tribune asked a number of questions of the candidates:

• What do you see as the city’s number one challenge in the next four years?
• Do you favor or oppose a city-owned casino in Chicago?
• Do you favor or oppose electing Chicago’s school board?
• How should CPS respond to shrinking enrollment?
• What’s your game plan for reducing violent crime?
• What’s your strategy for dealing with the city’s pension crisis?
• Should the use of TIFs continue or should they be phased out? Explain your reasoning.
• How would you address the city’s problems with lead in drinking water?
• If you believe Chicago needs new tax revenue, where do you think it should come from?
• What should the city council do to make itself more independent from the mayor’s office?
• What’s the most pressing issue facing the people of your ward and how would you address it?

Their answers may be found here. You’ll need to scroll down to the 39th Ward. Alternatively, they allow you to filter to just the 39th Ward. Apparently, their web designers are unaware of local anchors.

There was substantial agreement among the candidates on the issues. All mentioned public pensions as a major issue if not the #1 challenge. All favored a city-owned casino. All opposed increasing property taxes. Several mentioned marijuana legalization (in the context of increasing city revenue). None had a good answer for a more independent city council. A graduated state income tax was frequently mentioned.

I thought the best answer to the last question came from Robert Murphy:

What I hear most from residents of my ward is that they are not getting the services they pay for, and that they feel locked out of major decisions and have no voice. The other issues are strong local schools, fixing the city’s financial crisis and making sure we are investing in our neighborhoods, in our infrastructure and in our local businesses. I am running to bring better services to the ward and to create a transparent ward office and process.

Here in the 39th Ward we’re not opposed to paying taxes. If we were we wouldn’t be living in Chicago at all. We do think we should be receiving value for what we pay and, presently, that is not the case.

I have substantial disagreements with all of the candidates. For example, I wonder if they’re aware that every study of the effects of legalized casino gambling has shown that most of the revenue comes from local residents and that they function as a steeply regressive tax? Or that the revenue effects of marijuana legalization have been disappointing? Here’s the Kansas Fed’s assessment of Colorado’s experience:

As detailed above, much of the tax revenue collected from the marijuana industry goes toward costs incurred by the state related to the expansion of the marijuana sector. The additional revenue primarily funds education and the general fund. To put those revenue amounts in perspective, in total, the Colorado Department of Education received $90.3 million in marijuana tax revenue for the 2017-18 school year, or 1.6 percent of the state’s total K-12 education budget.xxii Revenues from the special sales tax on recreational marijuana have totaled about $108.4 million to date in fiscal 2018. Starting next year, the general fund will receive 15.56 percent of those revenues, which if applied this year would have equaled about 0.2 percent of general fund revenues to date in fiscal 2018.

Chicago cannot depend on gambling or marijuana tax revenues to solve its fiscal problems. The only thing that can do that is economic growth and that must be fostered by reducing corruption and crime, improving the regulatory environment, and holding the line if not reducing taxation. Doing those things simultaneously would be no mean feat—it would require a complete re-engineering of city government.

As the late Mayor Daley once said, regardless of how things look now somebody will be elected. I thought that Samantha Nugent’s CV was impressive and I was also impressed by Casey Smagala’s command of the details. At this point I’ll probably vote for Robert Murphy. I thought he had the best and most practical views. Sadly, I’ll believe in his independence from City Hall when I see it.

It has long been observed that a baby’s first word is typically “mama”. Infant language and child language have been studied in considerable detail for more than a century. As revealed in this piece at Atlantic by Michael Erard the last utterances of the dying have been much less studied:

Felix’s 53-year-old daughter, Lisa Smartt, kept track of his utterances, writing them down as she sat at his bedside in those final days. Smartt majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the 1980s and built a career teaching adults to read and write. Transcribing Felix’s ramblings was a sort of coping mechanism for her, she says. Something of a poet herself (as a child, she sold poems, three for a penny, like other children sold lemonade), she appreciated his unmoored syntax and surreal imagery. Smartt also wondered whether her notes had any scientific value, and eventually she wrote a book, Words on the Threshold, published in early 2017, about the linguistic patterns in 2,000 utterances from 181 dying people, including her father.

Despite the limitations of this book, it’s unique—it’s the only published work I could find when I tried to satisfy my curiosity about how people really talk when they die. I knew about collections of “last words,” eloquent and enunciated, but these can’t literally show the linguistic abilities of the dying. It turns out that vanishingly few have ever examined these actual linguistic patterns, and to find any sort of rigor, one has to go back to 1921, to the work of the American anthropologist Arthur MacDonald.

There have been records of dying utterances for millennia. Onw my favorites is what Charlie Chaplin was alleged to have said just before dying. After a priest performed the last rites, saying “May the Lord have mercy on your soul”, Chaplin is said to have responded “Why not? After all it belongs to Him.”

I think that most of the reported last words of the famous are fictions—words put into their mouths by others. As it turns out, hospice nurses have reported that what many people say at the end is “mama”.

Nearly a century ago when asked if he were a member of an organized political party, Will Rogers responded, no, he was a Democrat and what I’ve been seeing today on the Sunday “talking heads” programs completely supports that view. We’ve seen it before: surrogates fan out to answer the press’s questions about one thing or another and that’s happening today. What I’m seeing today just reminds me of Casey Stengel’s lament about the 1962 Mets: can’t anybody here play this game?

One after another they’ve acknowledged agreement with every single one of the Trump Administration’s talking points while continuing to blame everything on Trump. They should get their stories straight.

One of the points on which the most spectacularly wrong statements have been made is the necessity of the Trump Administration’s going through the Democrats’ House leadership. They absolutely do not have to do that. All they need to do is get 25 House Democrats to vote with them. Unless they are very careful the House Democratic leadership may sideline themselves.

Read this article at The National Interest by Tanya Goudsouzian, “Middle East Mayhem Will Skyrocket Following the Departure of the Americans”, and then tell me whether you think “mayhem” will increase, decrease, or stay the same following our removing our militaries from Syria and Iraq. I think it will either decrease or stay about the same.

What I think is incontrovertibly true is that fewer American soldiers will die in Syria and Iraq once we’ve left and there are better ways of defending the “homeland”, a phraseology I detest, than invading Middle Eastern countries and replacing their governments.

There’s an article I found highly informative on the “yellow vest” movement in France at Politico Europe which I want to commend to your attention.

I also wanted to comment on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s impending divorce from his wife, MacKenzie. So far the commentary I’ve read has been tremendously lacking in insight and narrow, mostly musing over whether MacKenzie would sell the Amazon stock she will inevitably end up with (Washington is a community property state and they’ve been married since 1993, when Amazon was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye). I will not comment on the implications of that or the implications of his being off chasing a bimbo.

Anyone who’s ever been a manager knows that the most valuable and scarce asset of any company is management time and that management time and attention are indispensable. There is only so much of them. For the next months or years Jeff Bezos’s time will be even more divided than it has been. Divorce is painful and exhausting and every second he devotes to it he won’t be devoting to Amazon.com.

If you think that Amazon just growed (like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), that won’t be of concern to you. If you think it became what it has become because of Jeff Bezos that should worry you a lot.

I will also predict that there will be a stockholders suit claiming that the lack of a pre-nuptial agreement between Bezos and his wife should have been disclosed. That will be another darned thing to deal with.

I think the U. S. should turn a cold eye on the offer by the Chinese authorities reported by Bloomberg on Friday:

China has offered to go on a six-year buying spree to ramp up imports from the U.S., in a move that would reconfigure the relationship between the world’s two largest economies, according to officials familiar with the negotiations.

By increasing goods imports from the U.S. by a combined value of more than $1 trillion over that period, China would seek to reduce its trade surplus — which last year stood at $323 billion — to zero by 2024, one of the people said. The officials asked not to be named as the discussions aren’t public.

The offer, made during talks in Beijing earlier this month, was met with skepticism by U.S. negotiators who nonetheless asked the Chinese to do even better, demanding that the imbalance be cleared in the next two years, the people said. Economists who’ve studied the trade relationship argue it would be hard to eliminate the gap, which they say is sustained in large part by U.S. demand for Chinese products.

A trillion dollars in trade sounds like a lot but I think we should view it skeptically. The Chinese authorities have a long history of making great announcements that somehow never seem to materialize. Because of our gullible news media announcements are too frequently treated as facts.

Furthermore, a trillion additional dollars over such a short period would introduce serious distortions into our economy. While additional trade would be welcome, additional trade from a command economy is enough to purposefully distort our economy and society in damaging ways. I’d welcome that trade from Britain or France or even Germany because I’d be confident it wasn’t being structured purposefully including with the use of insider knowledge obtained by state-sponsored industrial espionage.

Quite to the contrary I think we should settle for nothing less than that China live up to the commitments it made 20 years ago and immediately end its import quotas and export subsidies, privatize its banking sector, and conform completely with the many WTO judgments against its trade practices. While we’re talking about it we should also get on the back of the WTO to impose serious sanctions on China for its decades of non-performance. Think hundreds of billions or trillions. The penalty should be proportional to the crime.

And while we’re at it why not throw abandoning its armed sand bars, shutting its re-education camps for Uighurs, and ending its Sinification of Tibet into the mix?

Now that would be the art of the deal.

For those of you who don’t believe me when I say that federal regulations are an impediment, consider this story from Popular Mechanics about a Liverpudlian living in Texas who’s trying to make new (replica) DeLoreans:

In December 2015, Congress passed the FAST Act, which included a provision allowing for “low-volume manufacturers” to produce up to 325 turnkey replica cars a year that would not need to be subjected to today’s safety and production standards and could be built conforming to the production year’s requirements.

For a DeLorean, that’s 1981 at a time, for example, when airbags were not yet required. This was a massive victory for those wanting to own their replica Cobra, Morgan, or even 1955 Corvette. It was also a huge deal to builders like Wynne. The company immediately made plans to go back into production on the iconic automobile, looking to bring in ex-Lotus staff to help reengineer the car (just like the original) and swapping out the original 130-horsepower engine with a new, modern 300- to 400-horsepower one.

They had enough original parts to build 350 to 400 cars. For missing parts, they had all the schematics and drawings to reproduce new ones. It was a nearly ideal situation. In the fall of 2016, DeLorean started accepting applications “from those with an interest in being placed on a reservation list” to purchase a car. “It was a pre-intent to intent to maybe buy a car,” chuckles Wynne. The list, according to Wynne, is now up to 5,000 people. Everyone was excited for a brand-new replica DeLorean.

Except there was one problem.

Buried in the act, the provision says that the Department of Transportation, more specifically the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), has 12 months to issue specific regulations and processes around how the low-volume manufacturers go about making these replicas. Three years later, this still hasn’t happened yet and it’s a source of extreme frustration.

“They basically need to approve a one-page document with a bunch of checkboxes on it. It’s like, ‘Come on.’” He doesn’t know the reasons for the holdup, but speculates it’s due to change of administration in 2016 and that it took a while for NHTSA to get a chief counsel and a director. And, of course, there’s now the weeks-long government shutdown.

The answer probably is that no one’s pushing it and it’s just not a priority. Any notion that the federal government operates smoothly, efficiently, or impersonally is, shall we say, an exaggeration.

I just finished watching A Quiet Place. There is no doubt in my mind that it is the best “creature” movie ever made. John Krasinski and Emily Blunt give excellent performances. They should give John Krasinski an “Orson Welles Memorial Most Hats Worn in the Making of a Production” award (he produced, directed, wrote, and played the male lead).

I won’t say much more about it other than that I suspect it was inspired by the many complaints that Michael Bay’s movies were too loud (Bay co-produced).