I’m beginning to wonder whether the key trait necessary to be a politician these days is an utter lack of self-awareness. In his Chicago Tribune column John Kass points out the irony in Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s moral posturing about Ed Burke:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel sure was quick to clean up Chicago’s City Hall after that Burke mess.

“An individual has to distinguish between their public life and their private business,” the mayor was quoted as saying, talking about Burke. “And they shouldn’t let those lines ever cross.”

Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, the longtime chairman of the City Council’s Finance Committee, allegedly let those lines cross.

He’s now facing federal extortion charges.

And Rahm, who never wants to let a good crisis go to waste, helped push Burke out as chairman and installed his own floor leader, Ald. Patrick O’Connor, 40th, as boss of the Finance Committee.

“You can do all of what you’re supposed to do in changing the laws, being clear about the laws of what’s black and white,” Emanuel said. “But in the area of gray, you fall upon your moral judgment and your ethical judgment. … It doesn’t require a law to say that your public life is not supposed to be … enriching your private life.”

but

Which brings me to a fascinating series by the Chicago Tribune of a few years ago, in which Ald. O’Connor and his wife, successful real estate broker Barbara O’Connor, had a starring role.

It was called “Neighborhoods for Sale.” The gist of it was that aldermen and developers used the written (and unwritten) rules to lord over a building boom that reshaped Chicago neighborhoods. And some made good money.

One of my favorite stories from June 2008 had this headline:

“He zones. She sells. And it’s legal.”

Left unmentioned: that Rahm himself parlayed his political contacts into a job with an investment banker for which he was otherwise utterly unqualified and received millions.

Kass continues:

They’re not even the slightest bit shamed. Emanuel can spout such nonsense installing O’Connor, talk about Burke and morality, and never blush, because either his skin is made of wood or perhaps he just thinks the people of Chicago are stupid fools.

And the ethics czars at City Hall can say that what the O’Connors do is OK, because, well, he doesn’t have a personal stake in her business. Their arrogance is stunning.

It’s rather like Burke’s arrogance, allegedly using his control of government to withhold permits and other services for business in order to compel that business to hire his law firm.

And, over all these years, did you ever hear Bill Daley condemn Burke? Or Toni Preckwinkle or Gery Chico or Susana Mendoza? They’re all part of that clique, like some beast with interchangeable heads.

We can only hope that Ald. Burke takes some of these figures down with him but I’m not optimistic. Omertà.

It was one thing to back these crooked pols when they were bringing home the bacon but now they’re not even doing that.

Via Stars and Stripes there has been an important development which appeart to have been seriously neglected by major media outlets. The Kurds have captured two Americans fighting for DAESH in northeastern Syria:

Kurdish-led forces battling Islamic State militants in Syria say they captured five foreign fighters, including an American who once sought to become an English teacher in the jihadi group’s Iraqi capital.

The American, a Texan named Warren Christopher Clark, 34, was one of two reputed U.S. citizens captured in a counterterrorism raid near the Iraqi border, where U.S.-backed forces are continuing to battle a pocket of the terrorists, the Syrian Democratic Forces said in a release on Sunday.

The group of jihadis had been preparing to attack masses of civilians fleeing the area, the SDF said. Also captured were two Pakistani fighters and an Irish man.

Considering the treatment of the Yazidis in Iraqi Kurdistan by DAESH, I think the Kurds have shown enormous forebearance in not executing these two summarily.

The word “treason” has been thrown around a lot lately. That these two are guilty of black letter treason can only be denied on the grounds that the U. S. war in Syria is undeclared, a slender reed. I would hope that the Kurds release these two to the Americans, they are accorded their full rights, and they are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

The significance of this is that presently our best public intelligence is that very few DAESH fighters are Americans, possibly fewer than 100. That they cannot be deprived of citizenship means that they could re-enter the United States freely where they would pose a grave risk of terrorism here.

Has there ever been a serious actuarial analysis of what “Medicare for All” would cost? In my cursory investigation so far I’ve found Glenn Kessler’s Washington Post back-of-the-envelope calculation:

The Medicare figure of 2 percent is artificially reduced because some key functions are undertaken by other agencies — and because Medicare’s patients are unhealthier. Meanwhile, the 18 percent figure for private plans appears to be inflated, so it would be more reasonable to rely just on the 12 percent estimate.

But even if Democrats were to be conservative and say Medicare had administrative costs of 5 percent and private plans 12 percent, previous estimates of the administrative costs per patient indicate that Medicare is actually more inefficient than private insurance. We would be interested to see more recent calculations on this issue, but it certainly indicates that single-payer advocates are counting savings that might not materialize.

I’ve seen lots of references to the Mercatus Center’s figures.

I’ve seen Heritage House’s analysis which found that Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary were actually about 10% higher than the administrative costs per beneficiary for private insurance.

I’ve seen a study from a number of years ago at the New England Journal of Medicine that found that on average administrative costs in Canada were about half what they are here (a pretty fair indicator but a far cry from the 5% figure frequently quoted).

So far the best analysis I’ve found is from Charles Blahouse at E21:

In sum, supporters of M4A are on fairly solid ground when they credit Medicare with having commendably low administrative costs. But in the aggregate, Medicare for All should be expected to drive total costs up, not down.

Dr. Blahouse was also responsible for the widely-touted Mercatus Center analysis.

What I haven’t seen is a serious actuarial analysis. What do I mean by that? What I mean is a complete analysis of the total costs of the program which takes into account all administrative costs for health care, which doesn’t assume putative non-administrative cost savings which may never materialize, and that takes into account the differences among the various populations involved. Simply assuming a linear extrapolation is not a serious analysis.

I don’t know whether you caught the reports of a rather bellicose comment by a Chinese admiral. From Navy Times:

Another Beijing official has sounded off about the communist nation’s perceived dominance of the South China Sea region, this time coming as an alarming threat of inflicting mass casualties on the U.S. Navy.

During a Dec. 20 speech to the 2018 Military Industry List summit, China’s Rear Adm. Lou Yuan, the deputy head of the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, added fuel to the South China Sea fire when he stated the key for Chinese domination in those hotly contested waters could lie in the sinking of two U.S. aircraft carriers, according to a report by Australia’s news.com.

“What the United States fears the most is taking casualties,” the admiral said, before adding that such an attack on two of the U.S. Navy’s steel behemoths would claim upwards of 10,000 lives.

Lou went on to call America’s military, money, talent, voting system and fear of adversaries the five U.S. weaknesses that can be easily exploited, according to the report.

“We’ll see how frightened America is,” he said.

It should be noted that Adm. Lou Yuan is an academic rather than a line officer and has something of a history of making outrageous requirements. But such comments on the part of Chinese military officers are not particularly unusual, particularly in the Chinese language media. I’ve commented on them from time to time in the past before.

I don’t know what the U. S. would do if the Chinese Navy were to sink a U. S. aircraft carrier. I suspect they would not make the appropriate response but truly do not know.

I also do not know what the Chinese military fears most. I suspect it is that their military doctrine is so very untested. Maybe they are self-reflected enough to think that.

I also want to recommend this assessment of the state of our border with Mexico from Third Way. Here’s the conclusion:

Today the southern border is the most secure it has ever been in the history of our nation. Border security spending is at an all-time high, while immigration is stagnant and apprehensions are nearing historic lows. Increases in border security in the last 16 years have revolutionized what the border looks like, how it is protected, and the ways in which people enter the United States. There is no doubt the country’s immigration system is broken, but its flaws do not lie along the border with Mexico. President Trump’s executive order requiring construction of a wall across the border will cost taxpayers upwards of $25 billion, without making them any safer or the border any more secure. That undertaking is akin to building a wall from San Diego, California, to Chicago, Illinois—and it would be about as effective.

That significant groups of people are actually charging the border is an indication that despite the increased security and increased spending we still have a problem on our southern border. My approach to addressing the problem is more to reduce the pull factors drawing people to the United States than to try to push them out but that may be because my objectives are different. One advantage of my approach is that it would tend to reduce illegal immigration from anywhere, not just from Mexico and Central America.

I want to recommend a lengthy essay at Buzzfeed to you. In it the author, Anne Helen Petersen, outlines what I found the most honest self-appraisal of Millennials I have read to date. She assesses their collective mood as “burned out”:

It’s not as if I were slacking in the rest of my life. I was publishing stories, writing two books, making meals, executing a move across the country, planning trips, paying my student loans, exercising on a regular basis. But when it came to the mundane, the medium priority, the stuff that wouldn’t make my job easier or my work better, I avoided it.

My shame about these errands expands with each day. I remind myself that my mom was pretty much always doing errands. Did she like them? No. But she got them done. So why couldn’t I get it together — especially when the tasks were all, at first glance, easily completed? I realized that the vast majority of these tasks shares a common denominator: Their primary beneficiary is me, but not in a way that would actually drastically improve my life. They are seemingly high-effort, low-reward tasks, and they paralyze me — not unlike the way registering to vote paralyzed millennial Tim.

Tim and I are not alone in this paralysis. My partner was so stymied by the multistep, incredibly (and purposefully) confusing process of submitting insurance reimbursement forms for every single week of therapy that for months he just didn’t send them — and ate over $1,000. Another woman told me she had a package sitting unmailed in the corner of her room for over a year. A friend admitted he’s absorbed hundreds of dollars in clothes that don’t fit because he couldn’t manage to return them. Errand paralysis, post office anxiety — they’re different manifestations of the same affliction.

For the past two years, I’ve refused cautions — from editors, from family, from peers — that I might be edging into burnout. To my mind, burnout was something aid workers, or high-powered lawyers, or investigative journalists dealt with. It was something that could be treated with a week on the beach. I was still working, still getting other stuff done — of course I wasn’t burned out.

But the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.

It’s long but read the whole thing.

Most of those with whom I work are Millennials and I find that I get along well with them. Many are young enough to be my grandchildren. IMO their parents, whether Baby Boomers or Gen Xers have not served them well. As a group I find them incredibly cosseted. In many cases they live extremely structured lives and in too many instances their first experience with gainful employment came when they left school and got their first full-time jobs. By that time in my life I had already been working (in the sense of a job) for ten years. I find them incredibly busy without being particularly productive.

They don’t know how to do basic things. If they need to know how to do something they can look it up on Youtube but that doesn’t bring skill or confidence or understanding, things that only come through doing.

By the time they were 20 years old many in my mom’s generation had known real poverty without a government safety net, experienced disease, lived through the Great Depression, gone to war and seen death at first hand, and had to make their own way in the world without support from anybody. That’s burnout. By the time I was a similar age I had been stolen from, fought in the streets, seen overt, nasty racism of a sort unknown today, had ordinary childhood diseases (a concept practically unknown today), taught classes, held a job, punched a clock (literally), and had a dozen of my high school classmates die in Vietnam. Soon I would be working 60 hours a week.

I don’t envy the young people of today. Getting a job was pretty easy when I was their age. I had a sense of determination, purpose, and confidence. I had a country I could be proud of. There was a pervasive attitude of optimism, the feeling that things were getting better. It was far from perfect but things were getting better. Dignity was actually a thing in public life.

Keep in mind while reading my next remarks that I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and don’t anticipate voting for his re-election should he choose to run again in 2020.

Since when did having five years or less of relevant experience qualify one to be president of the United States? I understand the impulse: the status quo is a mess and whether it’s sustainable or not it’s not the direction in which many people want us to go regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans.

Haven’t we suffered enough?

I found this article about the IT jobs market from the Wall Street Journal revealing:

Employers across all industries in the U.S. shed 18,000 core information-technology jobs last month, amid broader employment gains for all occupations, CompTIA reports.

The declines, which followed gains a month earlier, left total employment for core IT jobs in 2018 just below 5.2 million, up from roughly 5 million a year ago, the IT trade group said.

All told, there were six months of IT employment gains and six months of losses last year. The results are based on an analysis of the latest Labor Department jobs data, released Friday.

“Looking at the bigger picture, we expect a continuation of a tight labor market for tech talent through 2019,” Tim Herbert, the group’s senior vice president for research and market intelligence, said in a research note.

Software and application developers remained the most sought-after tech workers, followed by computer user support specialists and computer systems engineers and architects, Comptia’s analysis showed.

For all occupations, U.S. employers last month added a seasonally adjusted 312,000 new jobs, the fastest pace since February, while the unemployment rate inched up to 3.9%, from 3.7%, as more workers entered the workforce.

To this I would add that based on the present statistics about half of all new IT jobs will go to workers from overseas. About 2 million young people receive newly-minted undergraduate degrees annually. A total of 5 million jobs across the entire economy, increasing at 200,000 per year, isn’t an enormous number. Don’t expect STEM (other than biomed) to be the key to a bright future.

When I first read the headline in this piece from the Gallup Organization, “Record Numbers of Americans Want to Leave the U.S.”, I found it dismaying. I found even more reason to be distressed in the body of the piece:

While Gallup’s World Poll does not ask people about their political leanings, most of the recent surge in Americans’ desire to migrate has come among groups that typically lean Democratic and that have disapproved of Trump’s job performance so far in his presidency: women, young Americans and people in lower-income groups.

During the first two years of the Trump administration, a record-high one in five U.S. women (20%) said they would like to move to another country permanently if they could. This is twice the average for women during the Obama (10%) or Bush years (11%) and almost twice the level among men (13%) under Trump. Before the Trump years, there was no difference between men’s and women’s desires to move.

The 30% of Americans younger than 30 who would like to move also represents a new high — and it is also the group in which the gender gap is the largest. Forty percent of women younger than 30 said they would like to move, compared with 20% of men in this age group. These gender gaps narrow with age and eventually disappear after age 50.

At one level 40% of young women finding the United States so awful that they want to leave is alarming. But as I thought about it I found it sort of sardonically amusing. My recommendation: go live somewhere else, at least for a while.

I’ve lived in and/or spent considerable time in a number of countries other than the United States. Admittedly, I’ve never lived anywhere other than as a man of European descent but I suspect that most young Americans, particularly young American women, would find any other country in which they might live disappointing. Take Canada, the nearest and least foreign appearing neighboring country. IMO most young Americans would find living there bland and boring.

Of course there’s the problem that, unless they’re sent to another country by their U. S. employer, they’d find it difficult or even impossible to work in another country. I suggest trying Dubai. It would be particularly eye-opening, particularly for a young woman. Or maybe Brazil although language might be a problem.