Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest of Christian thinkers, famously wisecracked that his prayer as a youth was “God, grant me chastity and continence—but not yet.” Does anyone see echoes of that in the complaints about civility today?

I’ve been clear in my opinion. I think that if you want want moderation and civility in civic discourse you must model it in your own conduct. Others, obviously, see things differently.

You know, I actually agree with the proposal from the editors of the Washington Post about what to do about the “caravan” of Central Americans and others who want to come into the United States that’s making its way across Mexico:

Notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, the problem of migrants is real. Many cross the border with their children and apply for asylum, overwhelming existing legal mechanisms, feeding what the president calls a “catch and release” revolving door for migrants freed as they await hearings, and contributing to a backlog of about 1 million cases in immigration courts.

A rational response would be to add to the 350 or so immigration judges, who cannot handle the tens of thousands of asylum claims flooding the immigration courts annually. The administration this year hired a few dozen judges, a fraction of what is required. As the caseload has more than quadrupled since 2006, the number of judges has not even doubled, according to congressional testimony in April by Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Further, I would send the judges to the border to adjudicate the cases right then and there. After all justice delayed is justice denied.

But what then? If history is any gauge about 1% of those in the caravan will actually be granted asylum and refugee status. Does anyone really believe that the people in the caravan will accept the judges’ decisions?

The underlying problem is that there are millions (I’ve seen an estimate of 100 million) in Latin America alone who, given a chance, would move to the United States to trade their present problems for a different set of problems. For decades we’ve been treating our own laws with a wink and a nod. If we won’t enforce our laws, who will?

One of the things that has occurred to me is that mass immigration is the present generation’s version of the Peace Corps. Instead of going to far away places with dirt and poverty and disease and civil unrest to make the world a better place they’re bringing the world here. That way they can make the world a better place without courage or commitment or leaving their Internet connections.

Many people aren’t aware of it but very few news organizations these days have substantial staffs of reporters. Most of them get their news even local news from one of the big syndicates, Associated Press or UPI. If you want truly local news you must turn to social media sites which include Facebook and Youtube. AP has been around for 150 years. For most parts of the country professional local news coverage went out with disco balls and leisure suits.

Consequently, when I read this passage in David Ignatius’s lament in the Washington Post:

The virtues of a slower, less fluid Internet were outlined in an important recent article on Motherboard by Justin Kosslyn, who heads product management for the Jigsaw think tank operated by Alphabet, which also owns Google. The article’s title makes the basic, heretical argument: “The Internet Needs More Friction: Tech companies’ obsession with moving data across the internet as fast as possible has made it less safe.”

“Friction — delays and hurdles to speed and growth — can be a win-win-win for users, companies and security,” Kosslyn writes. “Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions . . . yet digital information moves limitlessly.” Unfortunately, he notes, this combination of blazing speed and non-oversight “accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware and disinformation.”

I like Kosslyn’s idea because it’s an alternative to the potential trap Facebook has entered, of hiring many thousands of human content assessors and fact-checkers to decide what ideas should be allowed on its platform. To many people, this sounds like Facebook’s version of thought police. Next, alas, come the government regulators.

Rather than create a new regulation regime for Facebook (as Congress is discussing), maybe it would be wiser to treat these social-media companies as publishers of content — and apply the same, well-established legal standards (including libel laws for reckless defamatory comments) that apply to any other publisher. This transition — from platform to publisher — should be implemented carefully, not in the heat of anti-Facebook agitation. In the meantime, slow it down.

I realized that he was engaging in yet another exercise in nostalgia. I wanted to acquaint him with a remark of Stewart Brand’s that goes back long before the Internet, just about 50 years:

Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.

Like school shootings or flying jetliners into office buildings, this is a problem of personal empowerment and it will only go away if the personal empowerment itself goes away. That would have grave implications for our society and our economy.

Just look at the major U. S. companies whose business models are built around personal empowerment. They include not only Facebook but Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, and Microsoft. That drives me to the conclusion that the speed that personal empowerment demands will not go away. Speed is here to stay.

Adam Schuster’s op-ed in the Chicago Tribune is yet another example of wishful thinking. In it the Rauner advisor gives advice to the man who defeated Rauner’s re-election bid:

• First, ask schools and universities to shoulder the cost of their employees’ retirement. Under the status quo, local officials negotiate salary and health benefits, which form the basis for pension payments and retiree health costs, but the state pays the bill. That creates a misalignment between responsibility and accountability, reducing pressure to keep compensation affordable for taxpayers. Gov. Bruce Rauner pushed this idea in each of his budget addresses, but the proposal started with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

According to data from the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget, by phasing this shift in over a number of years, Pritzker could see savings of $825 million in the first year, with further savings each year after.

• Second, Pritzker should ask state government workers to play fair at the bargaining table. Rauner suggested savings of nearly $500 million annually, accomplished by asking workers to pay for the same percentage of their health care costs as is typical in the private sector, or about 40 percent, up from just 23 percent now. Again, this concept has received bipartisan support. Former Gov. Pat Quinn also tried to right-size government worker health insurance costs.

Was Mr. Schuster AWOL during the first week of November? Rauner lost and, as been said, elections have consequences. One of those consequences is that otherwise reasonable ideas for balancing Illinois’s budget won’t happen because they won’t pass muster with Mike Madigan.

Re-imagining J. B. Pritzker as Bruce Rauner is an exercise in futility. I have no idea what Gov. Pritzker will do. My guess is that he will try, unsuccessfully, to enact a graduated income tax in Illinois (that would require a constitutional amendment). And he may try to attract more big businesses to Illinois despite Illinois’s adverse tax and regulatory environment. What will he offer them? Tax breaks? Why not offer the tax breaks to companies that are already here to induce them to stay?

In a remarkable exercise in lack of self-awareness, in his New Yorker column Jonathan Chait takes exception to the new rules of decorum promulgated by the Trump Administration:

Interactions between the media and the White House are a form of democracy theater. The give-and-take is a tangible and living sign of the fact that in a republic, the president is not a monarch but is simply a citizen like everybody else. In authoritarian regimes, the palpably cowed news media treats leaders with a deference that communicates their inviolable status.

There is nothing whatever democratic about the White House Press corps. No one voted for them. No democratic process whatever was involved in their getting their seats.

The comparison he gives, Question Time in the United Kingdom, is remarkably dissimilar to White House press briefings. All of the MPs who take part in it have stood for election and the ministers of whom questions are asked are appointed and elected from within their political parties. In White House press briefings unelected and unanswerable reporters are asking questions of the president who was actually elected.

Presidents are under no obligation to give the press briefings at all. They do it when it suits their purposes. How does it serve the president’s purpose to be subjected to an inquisition by hostile camera hounds?

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google have collectively lost $ 1 trillion porin value from their recent highs. CNBC reports:

The five “FAANG” stocks collectively lost more than $1 trillion in market value from recent highs as shares dropped after Tuesday’s open.

The stocks — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet — all began Tuesday trading lower. Apple led the group’s losses, falling as much as 4 percent. The four other stocks later turned around, each going slightly positive on the day.

Combined market capitalization losses since their 52-week highs hit $1.02 trillion on Tuesday:

• Facebook: $253 billion
• Amazon: $280 billion
• Apple: $253 billion
• Netflix: $67 billion
• Alphabet: $164 billion

$1 trillion is quite a bit of value. Is it time to panic?

My answer: absolutely not. The time to panic was when just five stocks became responsible for so much of the stock market’s growth and that was a couple of years back. Dow-Jones, Standard & Poors, and other indexing companies might want to start thinking about their indexing strategies and whether they actually mean anything any more.

As it is the FAANG stocks have just lost about 10 months worth of price increases.

How does the liberal world order result in a country that doesn’t believe in the rule of law running Interpol and countries that don’t believe in human right running the UN human rights organization?

In his Washington Post column Charles Lane looks, dewy-eyed, at a compromise approach to immigration proposed by William Galston and Bill Kristol:

Its essence is a trade: legalization of roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants already here, in exchange for tough measures against future illegal immigration.

Those brought here as minors, the “dreamers,” would receive immediate permanent residency. Others would be granted a new six-year status — “registered provisional immigrant” — that would gradually lead to citizenship, provided they meet criteria such as a clean criminal record and English training.

The federal government would build a series of physical barriers, fencing and walls, where it makes practical sense, on the U.S.-Mexico border; crack down on visa overstays with the help of advanced biometric technology; and implement a universal E-Verify system to ensure that employers hire only authorized workers.

The current annual legal immigration level, approximately 1 million lawful permanent residents, would remain in place, but there would be a major shift away from family reunification in favor of skills-based selection of newcomers.

The arbitrary “diversity” immigration program that awards visas by lottery to countries that send relatively few immigrants would be eliminated and its 55,000 annual admissions redistributed to other categories of newcomers.

I suppose I should be heartened at this proposal; it resembles things I’ve said here from time to time although my preferred approach would be to increase the number of work visas for which Mexicans are eligible rather than creating a new class of visa.

Sadly, the proposed plan is a non-starter, unacceptable to either side in the immigration debate. With a confidence based on experience we know precisely what would happen under such a plan. The six year provisional status would be made permanent or extended again and again while the barriers, stiffening of visa enforcement, and universal E-Verify would never materialize. Following the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, only a minority of those eligible ever became citizens, the promised stiffened enforcement never happened, and illegal immigration increased greatly, encouraged by the previous granting of legal status.

I’ll repeat my proposal: greatly increase the number of work visas for which Mexican citizens are eligible, toughen workplace enforcement with serious penalties for infractions (intentional or not), produce some program for the “Dreamers” but adhere to whatever standards are established rigorously, and return H1B and L1 visas to their intended purposes which were not to provide employers with an opportunity for hiring foreign workers who will work for less.

As it stands the proposal is just another example of wishful thinking.

Is Walter Russell Mead assessing the evolution of the Trump foreign policy correctly or engaging in wishful thinking in his column at the Wall Street Journal?

President Trump’s foreign policy has passed through two stages—one restrained and one more turbulent. The third and most decisive is now beginning to take shape.

[…]

The liberal-internationalist vision, which holds that the world is a kind of greater European Union, moving inexorably toward its own kind of “ever closer union” via a strengthening network of international institutions, seems to be running out of steam.

As countries like Turkey, India, China, Brazil and Nigeria develop, they are striving more to strengthen their sovereignty than to pool it. By shifting America’s stance away from the losing defense of legacy liberal internationalism that characterized the John Kerry years, the Trump disruption might, might point the way toward a more sustainable U.S. diplomatic approach.

But for Mr. Trump to be remembered as something other than a diplomatic wrecking ball, his administration will have to rapidly shift gears. Destruction ceases to be creative when it doesn’t lead to the construction of something better. After the cautious first stage and the dramatic second stage, a third stage of strategy and leadership must follow.

In the Middle East, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seem to be forcing the administration to review its strategic options. Simply outsourcing U.S. regional policy to Riyadh and Jerusalem won’t do. Washington needs a vision and a policy that both reassures our local allies and disciplines some of their wilder instincts. Walking away from the Iran deal was easy; implementing a new regional strategy will be hard. Like his predecessors, Mr. Trump will be judged not by his intentions but by his results.

The administration’s China policy has also reached an inflection point. The tariff card has been played. But what is the administration’s vision for the future of an economic relationship that, despite Chinese abuses, has benefited both countries and cannot be ripped apart without profound damage to many U.S. companies and industries? How will the administration balance its interest in building a strong global alliance to counter China and its efforts to extract more favorable trading terms from partners like Germany and Japan? Can the Trump administration develop an approach to China that is bipartisan enough to ensure Democrats don’t scrap it all when they return to power?

Unlike the Soviet Union, China has engaged successfully with the international market system and as a result has many more channels of influence around the world. How will the administration orchestrate a global response? This is a harder task than the Truman administration faced; is the Trump administration up to the job?

In Europe, President Trump has been blunt about the many shortcomings he sees in existing U.S. relationships with key allies. He hasn’t, however, put forward a compelling vision of the kind of trans-Atlantic relationship he would like to see instead.

It is the same on trade. We know Mr. Trump prefers bilateral deals to multilateral ones and that he sees reciprocity as the key to fairness. But what would a reformed World Trade Organization look like? How does Mr. Trump want trade disputes to be handled? Can Mr. Trump subject the international economy to an endless series of trade shocks without undermining the domestic prosperity on which his future and that of his party depend?

Donald Trump spent much of his pre-political career as a builder and a developer. President Trump has mostly been in the demolition industry where foreign policy is concerned. That will likely change in the next few months as the unrelenting pressure of world events forces the administration to define and communicate its objectives more clearly. As stage two gives way to stage three, it will become easier to see where this administration wants to take the world—and whether it is having any success.

There is another alternative that Dr. Mead doesn’t seem to entertain: that Trump could just back down. Will the Trump Administration enter a constructive phase in its foreign policy, continue to stir the pot, become more aggressive, or back down?

Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy ride.