I disagree with Foster Friess’s prescription for restoring civility to our culture, expressed here at RealClearPolitics, in one particular:

We are NOT a nation of negativity. The world looks to America, but–just like we are encouraged to put the oxygen mask on ourselves before we put it on our children in a domestic airliner–so too we need to get our act together as a nation before we can start rescuing the little kids outside Nairobi digging through the dump looking for food.

Perhaps, our Christian community can lead this mission using the Bible’s example: never return evil for evil, pray for those who persecute you, Forgive seven times? No, seventy times seven. Always consider other people more important than yourself. Vengeance is mine says the Lord.

We can see the impact of this world view through Mr. Heyer’s forgiveness toward the young man who killed his daughter. Despite his pain and sorrow, he chose to forgive. He is returning civility to our nation.

Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church provided our country with another example of civility. When misled hate shot and murdered nine innocent worshippers, their relatives and the church responded with forgiveness, and Charleston had vigils and hugs, not riots.

Contrast these two reactions to Ferguson and Baltimore, where in the latter instance the mayor said, “we needed to give them room to destroy.”

The only thing necessary for evil to thrive is for good men and women to do nothing. Each of us can decide to be a well poisoner, or someone who keeps their yard’s white picket fence well painted and retreats to the comfort of their home. Or, we can take a third route to being an encourager and someone willing to take the risk to confront evil.

So, here’s my challenge: invite someone to coffee!

While Mr. Friess’s prescription may be necessary it is not sufficient. It’s not enough to sit down to coffee. We’ve also got to stand down. Inviting someone to coffee only to screech at them how awful they are or use the opportunity to beat them with clubs or run over them with your car will not restore civility. My advice precedes sitting down. The actual pursuit of evil is quite rare. In real life people pursue good ends using evil means. If you can’t understand the good in the other guy’s views, lay down your weapon, go home, and think about it until you do.

Every person regardless of his or her views is entitled to respect simply as a consequence of their being human. Denying that respect is not merely politically counter-productive, it’s fallacious and sinful.

I believe our problems are varied including that social media act as a force multiplier for people at the extremes. I don’t think our problems are just those between left and right. I think the more grievous problems are between the radicals and the moderates. Radicalism admits of no compromise.

At the Wall Street Journal Alyssia Finley recounts the history of Chicago Public School pensions:

In 1995, amid financial duress, the state established a block grant to help Chicago pay for special education, transportation and nutrition programs. In 2017, Chicago schools benefited to the tune of $250 million. As part of the deal, the state handed control over Chicago teacher pensions to then-Mayor Richard Daley, who took a 10-year “holiday” from payments. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, this allowed the district to divert more than $1.5 billion from teacher pensions to pay and other perks.

In 2011 Chicago suspended pension payments again for three years to prevent massive teacher layoffs and benefit reductions. After teachers went on strike for seven days in 2012, the district awarded the union a 17.6% pay increase over four years.

A few years later, facing a $1.1 billion structural deficit, the Chicago Board of Education approved $1 billion in borrowing. Last summer, the district increased property taxes by $250 million to make an obligatory pension payment, but later agreed to a new contract boosting teacher salaries by 4.5%. Now pensions are underfunded by $11 billion.

Mindful of the investment risk, creditors are charging junk-rated Chicago schools a premium to borrow. To pay its bills the district borrowed $725 million at an 8.5% interest rate in March and another $387 million at 6.4% in June. In July the school district issued $500 million more in debt at a rate of about 7.25% to repay creditors. The Chicago Board of Education is counting on a state bailout to repay all of this debt.

Meanwhile, student enrollment is plummeting, and not only because more kids are attending charter schools. Crime, high property taxes and lousy schools—only a quarter of eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—are to blame for an exodus of black families. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Chicago was the only major city to lose population in 2015-16.

While the status quo is unsustainable, the Chicago Teachers Union has demanded that state lawmakers hike property and business taxes to pay for their pensions. But even the union seems to realize that it has overplayed its hand. See its press release this week charging that “Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Gov. Bruce Rauner are knowingly sabotaging Chicago’s public schools” and “supporting a plan that will give money to private schools that could be directed to our public school classrooms.”

Let that sink in for a while. Chicago suspended payments to the CPS pension fund for 13 of the last 22 years, using the money to pay for raises instead which further exacerbated the pension problem.

In the column Ms. Finley is hailing Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s offer for the state to provide a temporary bailout to the CPS pension fund in exchange for implementing a voucher system:

Illinois sources say a deal supported by legislative leaders could be announced this weekend that will provide $100 million in tax-credit scholarships for low-income kids. This would represent the biggest first-year scholarship funding among any tax-credit program in the country. Each scholarship would be worth up to $12,280—roughly equal to Illinois’s average per-pupil funding. Special-needs students could receive more. Families with incomes up to 300% of the poverty line would be eligible, but lower-income kids and those attending failing schools would have priority.

The problems I see with this are many. The state doesn’t have the money to shore up the CPS’s pensions system; the city doesn’t have the money to implement the voucher system. Implementing either would require borrowing at the high rates that result from their poor credit ratings or raising taxes which would further erode their ability to pay.

I guess I shouldn’t worry about the plan going through since Illinois’s legislature, securely in the hands of Democrats, probably won’t allow the plan to go through. Ilinois House Speaker Mike Madigan has steadfastly refused to throw a bone to the CPS so far. After all, what’s in it for him?

When did state and local governments start subsidizing the construction and/or refurbishing of sports parks? Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field were built entirely with private funds. My hypothesis is that subsidizing the owners of athletic franchises is something that’s happened in the last 30-40 years. It’s corrupt.

When I read Austin Bay’s lament about Afghanistan at the Observer, this passage leapt out at me:

In 2017, many Americans seem to have forgotten that Afghanistan is where Osama bin Laden, the Soviet Union and the U.S. intersected. In 1979, Moscow saw the chronically weak Carter administration trapped in the Iran hostage crisis. An Afghanistan Soviet Socialist Republic would be a step toward obtaining one of the czars’ strategic goals: a warm water port on the Indian Ocean. After Afghanistan, the Russians would take Pakistan’s Baluchistan (western Pakistan) and Russian-controlled territory would split the Asian continent.

Outlandish? Perhaps, but many mad dreams in Moscow have led to war.

I know of no credible evidence that the Russians have ever harbored such ambitions. The Soviets were utopian millennialists and genuinely believed that a communist world was inevitable.

The claim usually relies on “Peter the Great’s will”, a 19th century French forgery used to justify Napoleon’s aggression against Russia. We didn’t invent anti-Russian propaganda, you know.

To the best of my knowledge Peter the Great’s longing for a warm water port ended in Iran and the Persian Gulf. And the Soviets did in fact advance that goal by occupying part of Iran during World War II. Something to keep in mind when you’re worrying about a Russian-Iranian alliance. They’ve hated each other a lot longer than they’ve hated us and with much more reason.

In his speculative article at Forbes on contact with extraterrestrial intelligent species why does Ethan Siegel never ask why such beings would travel the enormous distances between worlds to reach us? I can only think of one plausible reason: they live on their ships, need resources to survive, and probably won’t be overly scrupulous about taking what they need.

As to why we haven’t encountered aliens from outer space so far my guesses are:

1. We have. They just haven’t bothered us whether through benignity or distaste.
2. We are the elder race.
3. There aren’t any.
4. It’s just not worth travelling that far.

I lean towards #2, a depressing thought.

When I read the caption of Gretchen Reynolds’s New York Times article, “Age Like a Former Athlete”, my immediate reaction was, you mean be in constant pain? Every real athlete places stresses on his or her body that result in injury and in many cases those injuries in turn result in continuing pain, particularly in old age. There’s a reason for the cliche of the elderly (age 50) prima ballerina hobbling around the young students in her ballet class, leaning on a cane. Those retired ballerinas were in pain.

Here’s Ms. Reynolds’s peroration:

But the broader message of the study, she says, could be that we may need to rethink what normal fitness is or should be in older people. The tables that doctors and other experts currently use to determine “normal” fitness have been constructed with data gathered from typical older people today, many of whom have been sedentary for years.

These men’s lives suggest that greater fitness is possible in old age, even for those of us who were not previously Olympians, Dr. Everman says. “These guys were not training hard” by the time they became septuagenarians, she says, and most already had eased back considerably in their workout routines by the 1993 testing, she says, when they were middle-aged.

But they never stopped exercising altogether, except during periods of illness or injury.

If the rest of us followed a similar workout trajectory during our lives, she says, we might wind up with a higher VO2 max than otherwise in our old age, resetting both our expectations about age-related fitness and the existing tables.

VOX₂ max (milliliters of oxygen used per kilogram weight per minutes) is a lousy proxy for total health. There’s got to be some healthy medium between athletics and, as a recent study of the UK has found, people over the age of 40 not walking for ten sustained minutes per month. As another recent study (on diet) did we might turn to hunter-gatherer societies for guidance. In hunter-gatherer societies people routinely walk a lot but rarely engage in extreme exertion. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

In an entire article at the Washington Post on how programs to get kids to eat any let alone more fruits and vegetables have fallen short, not once does the author mention that in every country, at every time, as long back in our past as we’ve been able to determine, human beings have preferentially sought out the highest fat food source in their environments. When you add that Americans are conditioned from birth to believe that large quantities of bland, mediocre food are to be preferred over small quantities of food with vibrant flavors and textures and is it any wonder that kids won’t eat even a single bite of apple?

After recapping the many strategies that have been attempted and failed in Afghanistan, in his column at the New York Times Bret Stephens outlines the alternatives for future actions:

What can we do? With relatively modest troop increases, we can provide the elected Afghan government with sufficient military support to reverse some of the Taliban’s recent gains and ensure that it cannot seize Afghan cities or control entire provinces. With relatively modest troop numbers, we can also try to keep U.S. casualties relatively low over time, avoiding the political race to the exits when combat fatalities rise.

Bottom line: We need an approach that’s Afghan-sufficient, from a military point of view, and America-sustainable, from a political one, for the sake of an open-ended commitment to an ill-starred country from which there is no way out.

Now he tells us. Everything Mr. Stephens describes was apparent in 2001. Every decision by each president since then has been politically motivated and ignored the facts on the ground. President Bush invaded Afghanistan because he had to do something. The situation absolutely required a really futile and stupid gesture on somebody’s part and the somebody was us. The consequence of President Obama’s “Afghan surge” was that thousands of Americans were killed pursuing an unachievable objective or at least an objective unachievable with the level of force the president was willing to apply.

Now President Trump is reincreasing the number of American troops in Afghanistan, changing the rules of engagement to strengthen our military’s hand, not offering the Taliban the option of running out the clock, and brinksmanship with respect to Pakistan. It will be no more successful than the strategies of his predecessors.

As I wrote 15 years ago there has only been one successful invasion of Afghanistan in the history of the world and that was by Alexander. He settled a population there. Can you see our doing that? Me, neither.

You might want to read Steve Malanga’s article at City Journal on the subsidies being doled out by state and local governments to have movies and TV shows filmed in their jurisdictions:

The rise of celluloid subsidies resulted from a sharp increase in the 1990s of so-called runaway productions—movies and TV shows filmed in foreign countries for cost savings. The number of U.S.-conceived and -developed movies and TV series shooting abroad rose to 285 in 1998, up from 100 in 1990, according to a study by the consulting firm Monitor Company. More than eight in ten of those productions were in Canada, where a roughly 20 percent decline in the Canadian dollar, plus tax rebates that the government offered to American producers, slashed the cost of filming by about one-fifth compared with a similar production in the United States. After the Monitor report, states took action. A few had launched modest incentive programs in the 1990s, but Louisiana changed the game in 2002 when it vastly expanded its effort, offering producers an exemption on sales taxes and an investment-tax rebate. Hollywood started shifting productions to the Bayou State, leading others to follow Louisiana’s lead.

For some states, it wasn’t only a matter of economic opportunity but also of pride. After Chicago filmed in Toronto, for instance, Illinois lawmakers started granting producers a 25 percent tax credit on wages paid to Illinois residents for movies filmed there. No sooner did that program go into effect in 2004 than high-profile productions, including Batman Begins and Ocean’s Twelve, arrived in the Land of Lincoln. In a tax-incentive version of the line “I’ll have what she’s having” from When Harry Met Sally, the number of states offering inducements grew from six in 2002 to 44 by 2010. States were giving away about $1.5 billion to Hollywood annually by then, up from less than $100 million in 2002.

There’s a lot of money involved and the return on these pricey investments is generally lousy. I can’t help but wonder if state and local officials aren’t just starstruck and are feeding their desire to hobnob with the beautiful people.