Unless you set out and look for it you’ll be hard put to see much in the way of news about either the campaigns to re-take Aleppo or Mosul from their DAESH captors. In the instance of Aleppo, the city appears to have been re-taken. The Washington Post reports:

Late Tuesday, Russia announced that the Syrian government was in full control of all of Aleppo, though that could not be independently confirmed.

The deal would end the intense battles and bloodshed that have wracked Aleppo. Among the dead are at least 82 civilians killed by Syrian soldiers and allied Shiite militias from Iraq and backed by Iran, according to U.N. reports.

It would also signal an end for rebel fighters clinging to their last footholds in the strategic city after being pushed back by overwhelming firepower.

There are plenty of questions remaining as in what has become of the residents of Aleppo? There’s a basic conflict between Western reports of hundreds of thousands of people under siege and the few dribs and drabs that we heard about.

There have been some reports from rebel sources of Syrian Army reprisals and brutal attacks on civilians. There are also reports from Russian sources of residents of Aleppo rejoicing at their liberation. In either case what would you expect them to say? We’ll need to wait a while for more independent judgments.

Meanwhile, there’s concern that the Mosul dam could be captured and used as a weapon of war. The Sun reports:

Weakening foundations are threatening to burst open the dam which was built by Saddam Hussein more than 30 years ago,

Should this happen a 11 trillion litres wall of water will surge into densely populated areas.

The facility is under tight guard amid concern ISIS jihadis could capture and sabotage it.

US army engineers fear a sudden collapse could flood Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest story, under 60 feet of water.

Iraqi government forces – backed by US air force and the RAF – are currently battling to expel ISIS from the city.

But if the dam breaks a fierce surge of water could do the job for them.

The Iraqi capital, Baghdad, could also be left 15ft under water.

At this point those are just conjectures. The International Business Times reports that the Iraqi government may already be declaring victory, possibly prematurely:

Iraq is bracing itself for a new phase of warfare as the Islamic State (Isis) loses its grip on Mosul and targets Iraqi cities and civilians in a bloody campaign of deadly suicide attacks.

Acting Interior Minister Ageela al-Khazali told IBTimes UK that while Iraq looked close to collapse in the summer of 2014 – when IS first seized Mosul – Iraqi forces had all but triumphed over the terrorist group on the battlefield.

But the minister added the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi now had to work to combat the next phase of the IS threat.

In Mosul, Khazali said the the defence and intelligence services were expecting sporadic gunfights to erupt after the city, Iraq’s second largest, had been liberated.

“In the future we are expect street wars and street fighting in Mosul,” he said.

There have also been what to me appear to be rather bizarre reports of DAESH fighters from Mosul going to Syria to bolster the resistance there:

One doesn’t need to be a genius to guess why the US-led coalition, which has very powerful surveillance tools, failed to pick up the 4,000 ISIS jihadists making their way to Palmyra, says Peter Ford, the former UK ambassador to Syria.

Thousands of ISIS fighters are trying to recapture the ancient city of Palmyra which was liberated by Russian and Syrian forces in March. Syrian troops have started a major counter-offensive.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Syrian army with Russian air support managed to repel several attacks on Palmyra, killing up to 300 jihadists.

Here’s the key quote:

PF: There has been a trickle over an extended period, and there has also been a flow from Raqqa itself. ISIS was preparing a bolt hole for the eventuality that they will lose Raqqa and they will transfer their capital to Palmyra. It may be in the back of their minds. And the American strategy plays into this. We can forecast a scenario where Mosul is on the verge of falling to the Iraqi US-backed forces, and safe passage is arranged for ISIS fighters. Where would they go? Of course, they will be dumped on Syria – the ideal outcome from the Obama administration point of view.

I certainly hope that isn’t the case. The objective should be defeating DAESH rather than letting it become somebody else’s problem.

The map of at the top of this post is from South Front. I can’t vouch for its veracity.

This report from Reuters underscores the points I’ve been making:

The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.

While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations, it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, said the officials, who declined to be named.

which is why I think the next step in the process should be a bipartisan commission.

More from the article:

The CIA conclusion was a “judgment based on the fact that Russian entities hacked both Democrats and Republicans and only the Democratic information was leaked,” one of the three officials said on Monday.

“(It was) a thin reed upon which to base an analytical judgment,” the official added.

Thin reed, weak tea, whatever.

The millionaire with a stomach ulcer due to all the stress he’s under is a stereotype of old movies and television. As Peter Orszag points out at Bloomberg, that might have been true in the 1930s but not so much anymore:

The new Hamilton Project analysis, however, noticeably strengthens the evidence. (I am on Hamilton’s advisory council.) Diane Schanzenbach, Megan Mumford, Ryan Nunn and Lauren Bauer examined changes over time in the relationship between health and income. And, using laboratory measurements of health biomarkers from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, they constructed a new measure of stress load.

That survey is particularly insightful for the purpose at hand because it collects health measurements along with more traditional socioeconomic and related data, and because its data go back several decades. The Hamilton team looked at the measurements from 1976-80 and 2009-14 to see how things had changed.

Beginning with self-reported health, the researchers found a decline for all income groups, but for high-income people, the change was small and not statistically significant. For low-income people, the decline was much larger and statistically significant.

Being poor is extremely stressful. Heck being anything other than rich is stressful and getting more so.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that unemployment increases the risk of divorce, particularly for men. Since divorce is pretty darned stressful and itself may contribute to poverty, there’s the possibility of a vicious circle.

I found one interesting fact in Aaron Blake’s Washington Post article on the selective use of statistics in discussing the 2016 election. As a percentage of the eligible voters the greatest victory of any president in the last century was Lyndon Johnson’s over Barry Goldwater. He got 37.8% of the votes of eligible voters.

The implication of that is that if your notion of presidential legitimacy is based on strict majority rule we haven’t had a legitimate president in the last century.

In Mexico just to cite one example of 22 countries in the world voting is mandatory. Should we go in that direction?

At RealClearPolitics Charles Lipson outlines what we know about Russia’s cyber-espionage with respect to the 2016 elections:

1. According to U. S. intelligence agencies Russia engaged in widespread cyber-espionage.
2. The objective of the cyber-espionage was to acquire “secret information” from political operatives.
3. Disclosures hurt Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.
4. There is no consensus about Russian intentions.

and calls for a bipartisan commission to investigate Russia’s hacking, a view that I fully endorse.

Read the whole thing. An important observation from Dr. Lipson: “There is zero evidence they changed any vote counts.”

With respect to yesterday’s big news story, the report on Russian “meddling” in our recent election, while I definitely think we should investigate it I think the story to date is pretty weak tea. No actual evidence of anything has been shown to date other than the ineptitude of the Democratic Party organization with respect to data security.

I also think that it’s a bit amusing to see the consternation. I don’t recall anything like this level of dismay over U. S. meddling in Russian politics in the late 90s.

Recently, I’ve posted several times about income inequality but there are other sorts of inequality, including wealth inequality and social inequality. You might find Michael Heise’s observations on wealth inequality at Project Syndicate interesting. Among the points he makes are the difficulty of defining inequality:

Even the most basic question – how much inequality is too much – is virtually impossible to answer. There is no “natural rate of inequality” characterizing an economy in equilibrium, a level at which policymakers can aim. Instead, countries’ rates of inequality are measured against one another – a narrow approach that ignores everything from broader economic trends to differences in the impact of wealth inequality on populations in different social environments.

On the effects of central banks’ monetary policies:

On the national level, inequality is rising, but only in some places. In the emerging economies, the share of wealth owned by the middle class is increasing, indicating a drop in wealth inequality. It is primarily in the industrialized world that inequality is on the rise, with the share of wealth held by the top 10% growing the most.

This discrepancy may be explained partly by the fact that the global financial crisis was most painful for the advanced countries, especially in Europe. But the expansionary monetary policies that advanced-country central banks pursued after the crisis made a bad situation worse.

Those policies pushed up prices of assets – especially bonds and equities – that were held largely by wealthy households. At the same time, they hurt middle-class savers, who typically rely on duller savings instruments like bank deposits. With zero or, later, negative interest rates, those savers lost out. Though median households are generally benefiting from lower borrowing costs, wealthier households are benefiting much more, thanks in part to savings on mortgage loans, which are highest relative to income for the upper middle class.

But the impact of ultra-loose monetary policy extends far beyond today’s wealth and income effects. With advanced-country populations aging rapidly, saving for old age is more important than ever. With very low interest rates reducing the rate of accumulation of pension assets, all but the wealthiest households will probably have to boost savings and/or reduce consumption, now and in the future. The decline in lifetime spending will ultimately have a negative impact on growth and potentially generate social fault lines for the coming generations.

And the differences in the acceptability of wealth inequality between societies:

Complicating the inequality narrative further are differences across individual economies, including among those that, technically, have similar levels of inequality. Consider the disparities between the US, Denmark, and Sweden – all three of which are among the world’s most unequal societies, with respect to the distribution of wealth.

Denmark and Sweden are known for their well-developed social-welfare systems, free education, and high labor-market participation. Moreover, Denmark took the top spot in the United Nations’ World Happiness report last year, suggesting that wealth inequality does not trouble Danes too much.

By contrast, in the US, which lacks many of the social protections provided by its northern European counterparts, inequality is very troubling indeed. The increase in wealth inequality there over the last decade has been the most pronounced of any country. Today, the US has the smallest middle class, holding just 22% of total net financial assets, half the average of other industrialized countries, and the highest concentration of wealth than in any other country.

I’m more concerned about the distribution of wealth or income within societies than comparing those distributions between societies. I think that there are just too many variables whose effects are not well understood to make meaningful comparisons.

I also think that a just income or wealth distribution should be thought of as a distribution, i.e. when income and wealth occur in distributions other than a normal distribution there are probably factors other than chance or even merit at work.

In the United States as I’ve shown before the distribution of wealth and income are somewhat weighted toward the richest five or ten percent. We should be thinking about the factors that produce that and the cost of addressing them.

At the RAND organization’s blog Jeffrey Wasserman brings up a too long overlooked point. Our healthcare system is far too focused on care and not focused nearly enough on health:

International comparisons of aggregate health outcomes provide additional evidence of the poor return America is getting for its national health expenditures. A 2015 report by the Commonwealth Fund, for example, found that the United States had the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest infant mortality rate of the 13 high-income countries included in the study. The prevalence of chronic diseases was also highest in the United States. Ditto for the obesity rate.

It is important to recognize that even if the United States had a high-performing health care system, it is unlikely that it would improve aggregate health outcomes appreciably. This is because health care may account for as little as 10 percent of Americans’ overall health, with the balance due to social and environmental factors, individual behaviors and genetics.

Unfortunately, efforts to address some of these other factors, in particular social and environmental ones, have also come up short. The Commonwealth Fund report noted that the United States spent less on social services—pensions, employment programs, supportive housing, etc.—than the comparison countries. A similar result was obtained by a group of researchers from RAND Europe, which also found a high correlation between social service spending and key health outcomes.

Yet money alone is not the answer. In fact, the United States spends almost double the amount of the next highest-spending country (France) on health care. Instead, existing resources could be better targeted at high-value care and away from unnecessary and low-value care. This can be achieved through a variety of means that include improving the ways in which health care provider performance is measured and reported; creating user-friendly tools for consumers that enable them to make valid price and quality comparisons; and altering the financial incentives faced by health care providers in ways that reward providing high-value care.

How would a system in which the emphasis was on health rather than care be different from the present one? That’s a question. I’d really like to know the answer.

I suspect we’d be spending more on people from age 0 to 30 and spend less on those over the age of 65 but that’s just a guess.

In his last election Speaker of the Illinois House Michael J. Madigan received 17,155 votes in the primary and ran unopposed in the general election. He is the longest-serving speaker of any state legislature in the United States. He has become quite wealthy as a consequence of his elective office.

In Illinois state legislators do very little. Mostly they rubber-stamp the decisions of the leadership. Consequently, nobody is more responsible for Illinois’s fiscal mess than Mike Madigan, as this City Journal article by Daniel DiSalvo points out:

Illinois currently holds the dubious distinction of being the most fiscally derelict state in America. In 2015, Moody’s downgraded Illinois’ general-obligation bonds from A3 to Baa1, the lowest ranking among the 50 states. The state’s pension systems are only 40 percent funded, the worst ratio in the country. Forbes rated Illinois’ business climate 38th among states last year. Chicago, the state’s economic engine, has been cratering under the weight of huge pension costs, and had to enact a $500 million property-tax increase last year. In addition, Chicago’s schools are in crisis, and—most disturbing of all—the city has watched its crime rate explode. The migration rate out of Illinois over the last five years has been the highest of any state.

Digging so deep a fiscal and economic hole takes effort. Many people doubtless share some of the culpability. But if one person should be singled out as responsible for Illinois’ political and economic mess, it would be House Speaker Madigan. Unlike Rauner, who just arrived on the political scene, Madigan is at the heart of Illinois’ political establishment. Chicago magazine has long ranked him among the “most powerful” people in the Windy City.

Madigan, 74, has been involved in electoral politics for 43 years and has served as speaker of the Illinois House for 31 of those—making him the longest-serving state house speaker in U.S. history. His duties hardly stop there. He is also the chairman of the state Democratic Party, a partner in Chicago’s most successful property-tax law firm, and—last, but not least—a committeeman for Chicago’s 13th Ward, a post he has held since he was 27. These four positions and their associated networks of patronage appointees, legislative staffers, corporate lobbyists, campaign donors, industry clients, and family members are what some in Illinois refer to as “Madiganistan” or the “Madigan industrial complex.”

Mr. Madigan has made his objectives quite clear:

1. Maintain his own control over the state legislature.
2. Maintain Democratic majorities in the state legislature.

Getting his daughter, presently serving as state attorney, elected governor might be in the mix there somewhere.

The citizens of Illinois, still predominantly Democrats, demonstrated their displeasure with “business as usual” by electing a Republican, Bruce Rauner, governor in 2015. Very little has been accomplished since then because of the stonewalling of the legislature. Lest one think that the problem is Rauner’s, can anyone seriously contend that we would have been better off if Pat Quinn had been elected?

Illinois presently has the highest net rate of domestic outmigration of any state. They’ve done what they can at the ballot box. Now they’re voting with their feet.