The editors of the Wall Street Journal think Los Angeles teachers are being unrealistic in asking for higher pay:

‘Here we are on a rainy day, in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state as blue as it can be and in a city rife with millionaires, where teachers have to go on strike,” United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl declared Monday. Here we are with another teachable moment in the failures of public union governance.

The 33,000-strong L.A. teachers’ union went on strike Monday as the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) slouches toward insolvency due to unaffordable labor contracts. Despite a putative $1.8 billion reserve, the district is spending about $500 million more each year than its annual revenues and will be broke within two years, which could prompt a state takeover and bankruptcy.

Los Angeles teachers earn on average about $75,000 per year—about $6,000 less than the statewide average—though compensation including health and retirement benefits exceeds $110,000. One problem is the region’s high housing costs make it harder to retain teachers while more and more money is diverted to benefits and pensions.

In this case the editors are wrong. I have said before that my opinion is that there should be some relationship between the pay of civil servants and income in the communities they serve. Consider the chart above. Median income in LA County has been rising sharply. It is not unreasonable for LA’s teachers to think their pay should rise as well.

I think that LA’s problem is that Prop 13 limits property tax revenue, the city cannot impose an income tax, and sales taxes are severely regressive. Incomes are very unequal in Los Angeles—it is the fourth worst metro area in the U. S. after New York, Miami, and New Orleans (Chicago is 15th). There are costs associated with the decisions that Los Angeles and California has made over the years. Pony up.

CNN reports that the Chinese government has sentenced a Canadian to death for drug-dealing:

Beijing (CNN)Relations between Beijing and Ottawa are at crisis point after a Canadian man was sentenced to death by a Chinese court, a former Canadian ambassador to China told CNN.

Canada’s foreign ministry issued a travel warning late Monday to its citizens in China over “the risk of arbitrary enforcement of local laws.” It came in the wake of the death sentence handed to Robert Lloyd Schellenberg during a one-day retrial in the city of Dalian.

Schellenberg had initially appealed a 15-year prison sentence for being an accessory in a plot to smuggle more than 222 kilograms (489.4 pounds) of methamphetamine from the northeastern port city to Australia in November 2014. But during the retrial, the court sided with the prosecution, which claimed to have uncovered new evidence proving Schellenberg’s principal role in the case.

I point this case out not to highlight how awful the Chinese regime is but as yet another example of different countries being different with different values and different laws. When you travel to another country, you should expect the laws and customs of those countries to apply to you and, in the case of countries in which the rule of law may be somewhat capricious, their arbitrary decisions apply to you, too.

That doesn’t just apply to Americans or Canadians travelling abroad. That pertains to Chinese and Saudis here in the United States as well. If you want your own country’s laws to apply to you, stay home.

There is a story I once heard about Frederick II, called “the Great”, of Prussia. According to the story in the midst of battle Frederick, who unlike many military commanders rode at the head of his army, and while wearing a uniform without identifying insignia, rested in a haystack. Next to him in the haystack was a sergeant. As they got to talking the sergeant proposed a game. He asked Frederick if he could guess his rank. “Private?” said Frederick. “Higher yet” replied the sergeant. “Corporal”. “Higher yet” replied the sergeant. “Sergeant?” “That’s it” said the sergeant, satisfied. Frederick then asked the sergeant to guess his rank. “Corporal?” “Higher yet”. “Sergeant?” “Higher yet”. “Lieutenant?” “Captain?” “Major?” “Higher yet”. “General?” “Higher yet”. The sergeant began to tremble. “Your Excellency is, a, a, Field Marshall?” “Higher yet”. The sergeant threw himself to the ground. “Your majesty! Forgive me! I did not recognize you”.

You may recall that back in 2017 there was a collision between the guided-missile destroyer Fitzgerald and a private vessel off the coast of Japan that took the lives of seven sailors. At the time I suggested a greater lapse of discipline. Well, the report has leaked out and it confirms what had concerned me about the story. From the Navy Times:

Obtained by Navy Times, the “dual-purpose investigation” was overseen by Rear Adm. Brian Fort and completed 11 days after the June 17, 2017 tragedy.

It was kept secret from the public in part because it was designed to prep the Navy for potential lawsuits in the aftermath of the accident.

Unsparingly, Fort and his team of investigators outlined critical lapses by bridge watchstanders on the night of the collision with the Philippine-flagged container vessel ACX Crystal in a bustling maritime corridor off the coast of Japan.

Their report documents the routine, almost casual, violations of standing orders on a Fitz bridge that often lacked skippers and executive officers, even during potentially dangerous voyages at night through busy waterways.

The probe exposes how personal distrust led the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, to avoid communicating with the destroyer’s electronic nerve center — the combat information center, or CIC — while the Fitzgerald tried to cross a shipping superhighway.

When Fort walked into the trash-strewn CIC in the wake of the disaster, he was hit with the acrid smell of urine. He saw kettlebells on the floor and bottles filled with pee. Some radar controls didn’t work and he soon discovered crew members who didn’t know how to use them anyway.

Fort found a Voyage Management System that generated more “trouble calls” than any other key piece of electronic navigational equipment. Designed to help watchstanders navigate without paper charts, the VMS station in the skipper’s quarters was broken so sailors cannibalized it for parts to help keep the rickety system working.

Since 2015, the Fitz had lacked a quartermaster chief petty officer, a crucial leader who helps safely navigate a warship and trains its sailors — a shortcoming known to both the destroyer’s squadron and Navy officials in the United States, Fort wrote.

Fort determined that Fitz’s crew was plagued by low morale; overseen by a dysfunctional chiefs mess; and dogged by a bruising tempo of operations in the Japan-based 7th Fleet that left exhausted sailors with little time to train or complete critical certifications.

To Fort, they also appeared to be led by officers who appeared indifferent to potentially life-saving lessons that should’ve been learned from other near-misses at sea, including a similar incident near Sasebo, Japan that occurred only five weeks before the ACX Crystal collision, Fort wrote.

LtJG Coppock has already been found guilty of dereliction of duty. The trials of the commanding officer and the officer responsible for the operations room of the Fitzgerald are still pending.

My reaction on reading this story was “higher yet”.

I haven’t commented on Mike Pompeo’s speech in Cairo last week, which provided an ironic contrast with President Obama’s speech in Cairo a decade earlier. I may consider it in detail later but I want to focus on one statement. From the transcript provided by Haaretz:

I’ll be very blunt and direct today: America is a force for good in the Middle East.

I’m skeptical. Considering only our actions rather than our intentions has America been a “force for good in the Middle East”? Please show your work.

Consider just Libya and Iraq. Since we connived at the Qaddaffi’s overthrow, there has been a return to open air slave markets in Libya. Is that what happens when America is a force for good? Is the decimation of the Yezidis in Iraq by DAESH (that also included slavery) an artifact of America’s leaving Iraq or a consequence of our ouster of Saddam Hussein? I think the latter. The moral is that there are worse things than dictators and we unleashed those things by removing dictators. Good intentions are not enough.

Politico’s Bill Scher summarizes the basics of the debate over Trump’s wall succinctly in a piece at RealClearPolitics:

Those who are eager for both sides to compromise, like center-right New York Times columnist David Brooks, describe “a wall for DACA” as an “obvious deal” that only doesn’t happen because of “a massive leadership vacuum in Washington.” But it’s not because of a lack of leadership. It’s because the two camps have opposite views on immigration itself.

The Democratic opposition to a complete wall or barrier, running the entire length of the southern border, is not strictly because it would be “ineffective,” but because of the desired effect: to send a stark message that immigrants from Mexico and Central America are not welcome here (unlike immigrants from Canada, where a border wall has not been proposed). Democrats do not want to send that message.

And they don’t need to. The “Dreamers” who get work permits through the DACA program are not facing imminent deportation, thanks to court rulings that have indefinitely shelved Trump’s attempt to scrap the program. Democrats, in turn, feel no urgency to make concessions to codify DACA. They can still play for time.

A wealth of polling indicates that most Americans view immigration positively. In a September NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 61 percent of respondents said immigration “helps the United States more than it hurts.” And Trump didn’t help the Republicans keep the House by campaigning on “the caravan” in the run-up to the midterms. So you can see why Trump may not want to advertise what he’s doing to clamp down on legal immigration, and have “the wall” then be viewed as part of that restrictionist strategy.

However, while Trump’s hard-line immigration rhetoric didn’t help Republicans, the Democrats who flipped red districts didn’t spend much time talking about immigration at all. They felt voters wanted to hear more about issues that directly impact their pocketbook, like health care. Today, Democrats may feel politically safe opposing the wall, but not every Democrat may want to fully engage Trump on the larger question of how welcoming our immigration policies should be. Therefore, Democratic leaders tend to emphasize a less polarizing, more pragmatic message about effective border security.

But if we are to ever achieve comprehensive immigration reform, at some point we will need a real debate about what kind of immigration system we want: Do we want to make it easy to come to America, or do we want to make it hard?

I have made no secret of my views. Immigration to the United States should be hard. We should emulate the policies of the countries we most closely resemble, e.g. Canada and Australia, impose substantial requirements on prospective immigrants, and enforce them.

It isn’t the 1880s. Wages for unskilled workers have been declining for decades. Wages for tech workers, those admitted under H1-B visas, have been flat for at least a decade. The instances of native-born workers being forced to train their immigrant replacements are too numerous simply to be dismissed. Whatever purpose immigration served in the past today it serves primarily to keep wages low and afford American companies the luxury of not automating.

Higher education is no solution to the employment problem in the U. S., at this point largely a problem of underemployment, for the simple reason that it is not applicable to between half and two-thirds of the U. S. population who do not thrive in colleges and universities.

A tighter immigration system would allow wages to rise in the U. S. and change the areas that U. S. businesses engage in towards what we can do effectively rather than trying to compete with the low wages that prevail in Asian countries. In my opinion if you favor making immigration to the U. S. easy, you have a moral obligation to do something about the workers that will be displaced or whose wages will be kept low that extends beyond rhetoric.

At Medical Xpress there’s a recommendation that your parents, aunts, and uncles are a fair guideline for your own life expectancy:

(HealthDay)—Your chances of inheriting genes linked to longevity are highest if you come from a family with many long-lived members, researchers say.

And that includes aunts and uncles, not just parents.

Using databases at the University of Utah and in the Dutch province of Zeeland, investigators analyzed the genealogies of nearly 315,000 people from over 20,000 families dating back to 1740.

“We observed . . . the more long-lived relatives you have, the lower your hazard of dying at any point in life,” said study lead author Niels van den Berg. He is a doctoral student in molecular epidemiology at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

My reaction to that was maybe, maybe not.

I’m already 20 years older than my dad was at the time of his death so that’s not much of a model and, although my mom was nearly 90 when she died, she had smoked since she was 14, ultimately dying of lung cancer. What killed my dad wasn’t communicable or heritable (as far as anyone knows) and it wasn’t a “lifestyle disease”. I have no aunts or uncles so no help there, either.

When you go back to my grandparents’ generation, I’ve already outlived all of them. My paternal grandparents were chronic alcoholics and, basically, died of complications of alcoholism. My maternal grandmother died in her 40s of a brain aneurysm. My maternal grandfather basically just decided to die. He died of a medical condition that was readily treatable 80 years ago. He refused treatment. My parents’ aunts and uncles died fairly young but most frequently they died of conditions which today are readily treatable with antibiotics, TB being a biggie. Those who did not succumb to infectious diseases tended to be fairly long-lived. My mom’s Uncle Ed, for example, was in his 90s when he died.

I think I’m in unknown territory.

What do you think of the ongoing defenestration of James Watson, one of the scientists who receive a Nobel Prize 50 years ago for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA? Here’s the background:

James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning DNA scientist who lost his job in 2007 for expressing racist views, was stripped of several honorary titles Friday by the New York lab he once headed.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said it was reacting to Watson’s remarks in a television documentary aired earlier this month.

In the film, Watson said his views about intelligence and race had not changed since 2007, when he told a magazine that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — where all the testing says not really.”

In the 2007 interview, Watson said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”

My take is two-fold. On the one hand I suspect his observations about race and intelligence are incorrect because the effects of the non-genetic factors underpinning IQ overwhelm whatever genetic component there might be, IQ is only of limited use as a gauge, and “average IQ” is completely useless in dealing with individual human beings. Additionally, the actions by the labs and other organizations stripping him of honors appear opportunistic to me. He’s been saying stuff like that for decades. Many of the awards bestowed on him were conferred after he had already made comments along these lines by institutions that bestowed them for their own purposes. Any shame is on the institutions as well as on Dr. Watson. They’re acting now because the wind has changed and he’s no longer of any use to them. I don’t think they’ve escaped responsiblity for their actions. If they’d done due diligence they’d’ve known. I think they’re doubling their guilt by shaming an old man in his dotage.

There are also larger issues. Can only good people make great discoveries? Do you honor the discovery or the individual? Should these honors be conferred at all?

This is just something I’ve been musing about lately. Who would you say was the most important American composer of popular music of the first half of the 20th century? There are a number of good candidates including Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and Jerome Kern but I think the best candidate is Irving Berlin.

Now, who would you say was the most important American composer of popular music of the second half of the 20th century? Candidates range from Brian Wilson to Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. I would say that Carole King would be a very solid pick.

Reuters reports that Brazil has recognized Juan Guaido, President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, as the president of Venezuela:

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazil’s government on Saturday issued a statement saying it recognized Venezuela’s Congressional leader, who opposes President Nicolas Maduro, as the rightful president of Venezuela.

Maduro, who started a second term as president this week, has found himself increasingly isolated as countries around the world have called his continued leadership illegitimate.

Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela’s opposition-led Congress, said this week he was prepared to assume the country’s presidency on an interim basis and call elections.

Over the last several years nearly 4 million Venezuelans of a population of 32 million have fled Venezuela to Brazil, Colombia, and Guyana, disrupting those countries. Neither the shutdown of the federal government nor the flood of refugees at our southern border is the gravest emergency in the Americas. The situation in Venezuela is and Brazil is stirring the pot.