Climate Alarmism Doesn't Seem To Be Scaring Anybody Any More

In a post back in December, I made this prediction:

As soon as the United States stops parroting the global warming line, the other countries will quickly start backing away from it as well.

Look around and you will find that this is happening much faster than even I would have thought.  Scott Pruitt hasn't even been confirmed yet as EPA administrator, and already the floodgates are starting to open around the world to rapidly expanding fossil fuel use, particularly coal.  Now mind you, no country has actually officially stated that "we don't buy that global warming crap any more."  If you just listen to their official words and pronouncements, it might seem that not all that much has changed.  But then, take a look at what they are doing, and you get a very different picture.

Let's have a round-up:

Japan.  Do you remember Japan's pledge, after the Fukushima nuclear plant incident in 2011, to transition away from nuclear and fossil fuels and toward the holy grails of wind and solar power?  It seems that that did not work out too well.  Andrew Follett in the Daily Caller on February 1 reports on Japan's newly revised energy plans.  Wind and solar?

Officials promised to replace nuclear power with wind or solar, but this caused the price of electricity to rise by 20 percent.

Enough of that foolishness!  What are the new plans?

Japan [has] plans to build as many as 45 new coal-fired power stations in the coming years.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is still firmly behind plans to build coal plants, despite repeated pressures from environmentalists to stop construction of the major new coal plants. Abe wants more new coal plants to make sure the island nation isn’t too reliant on any one source of electricity. . . .  Japan got 24 percent of its electricity from coal in 2010 and the country plans to get more than a third of its power from coal by 2040.

According to Follett, Japan is also planning to add natural gas capacity, as well as to restart most of its nukes.  Back to energy sanity!

Australia.   Do you remember that back on September 28 a big storm in South Australia caused the amount of power coming from its extensive wind farms to swing so wildly that it knocked out electricity to the entire province for a couple of days?  Going in to that disaster, South Australia was one of the world champions of wind power, crowing that it got up to 50% of its power from wind on some days.  Well, what are they going to do now to keep the disaster from re-occurring?  From The Australian on February 1:

Australia’s Turnbull government is planning to help fund the construction of new clean-coal-fired power stations­ in an extraordinary meas­ure to intervene in the looming energ­y security and pricing crisis. . . .  [T]he federal government will look to either repurpose plants or directly invest in the construction of new-generation coal-fired plants in partnership with the ­private sector.

Canada.  In 2015 the Canadians voted out the notorious Conservative "climate denier" Stephen Harper and voted in trendy lefty Justin Trudeau.  Surely this guy would carry forth the torch of the fossil fuel restriction movement?  Don't count on it.  From Yale Environment 360, January 17, "Canada's Trudeau Is Under Fire For His Record on Green Issues":

Trudeau’s critics say that while he has talked a good game on climate change, his actions have been in stark contrast to that rhetoric. Trudeau has approved two contentious pipeline projects to transport Alberta tar sands oil. One, the Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline, would carry oil from Alberta to the U.S. Midwest and beyond. The other, Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, would move oil and bitumen to ports in British Columbia for export, thus extending for decades the life of tar sands operations.  Trudeau also supports the highly controversial Keystone XL Pipeline, which would transport tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. . . .  In addition, Trudeau has approved the $11.4 billion Pacific NorthWest liquefied natural gas (LNG) project that would be built by the Malaysian national oil company, Petronas, at the mouth of British Columbia’s Skeena River.

China.  Of all the countries on the world climate stage, China is my favorite.  They are willing to say the most transparently deceptive things to make the environmental crowd think that they are going along with the program, when in fact they are just thumbing their noses -- and the environmentalists get completely taken in every time.  And thus on January 18 came the big announcement that China was canceling some 103 coal plants previously planned to be built.  Exciting!  From the New York Times of that date:

China is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants, seeking to rein in runaway, wasteful investment in the sector while moving the country away from one of the dirtiest forms of electricity generation, the government announced in a directive made public this week.

That sure sounds like something for a greenhouse gas-hating environmentalist to cheer about!  So let's try to put it in some perspective.  How much coal electricity-generating capacity does China already have, and how much is it still building even after the cancelation of the 103 plants?  As of 2015, China's coal-fired electricity-generation capacity was over 900 gigawatts, according to Bloomberg, and continuing to grow rapidly.  It seems that they had planned another 350 gigawatts; but with these cancelations, they will now limit that to another 200 or so gigawatts, to achieve a "limit" of about 1100 gigawatts of coal-fired generation capacity.  From Next Big Future on November 8:

China will need to cut about 150 gigawatts of coal-fired power from projects that are either approved for construction or already under construction to maintain the 1,100-gigawatt limit, Huang Xuenong, director of the power generation division of NEA said during the webcast. Without restrictions the country’s coal-fired power capacity could reach about 1,250 gigawatts by 2020, he said.
By contrast, the evil pollution-happy planet-destroying U.S. has coal-fired electricity-generation capacity of a big 305 gigawatts.  So China's announcement of cancelation of that last 150 gigawatts of planned capacity means that they are graciously going to "limit" their coal electricity-generation capacity to 3.7 times the U.S. capacity, rather than the previously-planned 4.2 times.  That sure sounds like "climate leadership" to me!   From Isabel Hilton at Yale Environment 360 on November 21:

With Donald Trump threatening to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, China is ready to assume leadership of the world’s climate efforts. For China, it is a matter of self-interest – reducing the choking pollution in its cities and seizing the economic opportunities of a low-carbon future.   

Sure, Isabel.  And here's another way that China is seizing the "climate leadership" away from the United States:  by building well over a dozen new coal-fired power stations in the Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovinia and Montenegro.  From Not A Lot Of People Know That on September 21:

The Balkan region’s first privately-funded power plant came online on Tuesday, increasing the region’s dependency on coal-fired power stations even as environmental concerns are driving them to the brink of the extinction elsewhere in Europe. It was built by China’s Dongfang Electric Corp and financed with the help of a 350 million euro ($391.13 million) loan from the China Development Bank. 

And that plant is just the first of many.  Paul Homewood of Not A Lot Of People Know That helpfully provides this map of planned coal-fired power stations in the Balkan countries, largely to be financed and built by Chinese investors and construction companies:

The best part about all of this is that in the time since President Trump's election the voices of climate alarm have reached entirely new levels of hysteria.  It's just that it seems that they aren't scaring anybody any more.  

The Bureaucrats Think That They Don't Answer To The President

Look in the Constitution, and you will find this very simple statement about the executive power of the United States (Article 2, Section 1):

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Sometimes it's called the "unitary executive."  Every single person in the executive departments of the federal government answers to the President.  It did not have to be set up this way.  For example, under the constitutions in many states, there are executive officers who are separately elected and don't answer to the governor.  In my own state of New York, this is true of the Attorney General and the Comptroller.  But in the federal executive branch, absolutely everybody works for the President.

Of course, that's not their view.  I mean, as long as the President is someone that you fundamentally agree with, it's generally OK to go along with him.  But, really -- Donald Trump???  Isn't there a basic constitutional principle that it's OK just tell him to get lost?

A small drama over this issue has just played out at the Justice Department, where Trump's nominee for Attorney General has been stalled for several days by Senate Democrats.  That has left in charge as Acting Attorney General an Obama holdover named Sally Yates.  As Trump's flurry of executive orders got to the big one on immigration, Yates took the opportunity to assert the federal bureaucrat's "I don't care what you say and I'll do as I please" privilege.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, Yates sent an email to the lawyers in Justice's Civil Division instructing them not to defend President Trump's executive order in court (in the face of a series of lawsuits that required immediate defense).  In her email, Yates acknowledged that the executive order had been reviewed by the Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which had determined that it was "lawful on its face."  Her email then stated that she had concerns about the legality of some aspects of the order, but did not specify what those concerns might be.  And then Yates said that, even without specific basis to believe the order to be contrary to law, she would direct the Department to decline to enforce it, because OLC's determination of facial legality did "not address whether any policy choice embodied in an executive order is wise or just. . . ."  

Needless to say, Trump promptly fired Yates.  But really, is it OK for the senior Justice Department official to thwart a direct order from the President, not on grounds of any specific illegality, but rather because of disagreement with the "policy choice" in question?  Of course, the DNC promptly rose to Yates's defense, with a spokesman calling her a "brave patriot" who "dare[s] to speak truth to power."  Huh?  Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz (one of the very few progressives willing to state an honest opinion as opposed to an official talking point on any subject), writing in the Hill, got it right:

[Yates] referred to [the order's] possibly being unconstitutional and unlawful. Had she stuck to the latter two criteria she would have been on more solid ground, although perhaps wrong on the merits. But by interjecting issues of policy and directing the Justice Department not to defend any aspect of the order, she overstepped her bounds.  An attorney general, like any citizen, has the right to disagree with a presidential order, but unless it is clear that the order is unlawful, she has no authority to order the Justice Department to refuse to enforce it.

So, in this first round of Trump v. The Bureaucracy, Trump seems (for now) to have gotten his way.  But without doubt, this is only the beginning of a protracted struggle, likely to play itself out in many agencies and departments.  Another place where the struggle has already begun is the EPA.  As readers here well know, EPA is badly afflicted with the use of junk "science" to support its dreams of bigger budgets, a bigger empire, and greater control over the economy.  See, for example, my posts here and here as to EPA's more or less complete lack of scientific support for the proposition that there is any empirically-validated relationship between human emissions of CO2 and global temperatures.

So does the incoming administration -- which is rightfully skeptical of the politicized "science" coming out of EPA -- have any ability to stop the dissemination of junk science and make its own independent reassessment of the scientific landscape?  Look around and you will already find the crazed screams of "censorship" and "gag orders" hurled at every attempt of the new administration to try to get even a little control over the message.  For a particularly hysterical exemplar (but there are many) try this from the Daily Banter on January 26:

With Trump's Announcement That He Will Censor the EPA, America is Now a Pre-Fascist State . . . .  According to the AP the Trump administration will now be "Mandating that any studies or data from scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency undergo review by political appointees before they can be released to the public.”  

Apparently the position of the bureaucracy and its media allies is that the President has no ability to direct or restrict what public messages or information may be put out on behalf of his government.  That's "censorship"!  Does the same apply, I wonder, to national security information in the possession of agencies like State, NSA and the CIA?

Of course, we do have a First Amendment, and any current bureaucrat has the right under that provision to say whatever he or she wants on climate change and most other subjects.  But not on behalf of the government.  If you disagree with the new administration, and you want to speak out against them, the honorable thing to do is to resign.  If you don't, the President is well within his rights to fire you.  I don't think that the bureaucrats see it this way.  

Can Actual Evidence Ever Convince A Progressive Of Anything?

A key purpose of this blog is to present the easily available data and statistics that show progressive myths -- particularly myths about the efficacy of government spending and programs -- to be false.  But some of those myths just seem so intuitively obvious that they can't possibly be wrong!  Or can they?  

On Friday, Gabrielle Gurney in the American Prospect (even more progressive than the New York Times!) took up some of the top obviously false pieties of the progressive cause in an article headlined "It's the Poverty, Stupid, Not Trump's Imagined Carnage."   I already discussed the question of whether the "carnage" in Democrat-controlled American cities is real or imagined in this post last week.  But Ms. Gurney now seeks to take the "imagined carnage" theme in a different direction by arguing that even if there might be some excessive crime in a few places, the solution is more government spending to address the underlying problem of poverty:

Most municipal leaders understand that crime reduction hinges on addressing multiple underlying economic factors like poverty, which requires dollars and innovative strategies, not beatdowns. Chicago officials want more federal funding for education, economic development, and gun control, not the National Guard.

I mean, what could be more obvious than that crime increases with the rate of poverty, and therefore the most effective way to reduce crime must be through reduction in the rate of poverty?  And what could be even more obvious than that "more money" for government "anti-poverty" programs is the way to reduce poverty?  Indeed, these things are so obvious that if you don't believe them you have earned the sobriquet "stupid" from Ms. Gurney.  But before you buy into Ms. Gurney's thesis because you don't want to be called "stupid," perhaps you should consider some easily-available data about New York City that may point to an opposite conclusion.

First, consider the question of whether government "anti-poverty" spending actually decreases measured poverty.  I have covered this issue multiple times at this blog (see posts collected under my Poverty tag) and won't repeat all those things in this post.  Suffice it to say that nationally, the War on Poverty began in 1965 with little-to-no "anti-poverty" spending and a measured poverty rate of about 15.5%; and 50 years later governments were spending about $1 trillion per year on "anti-poverty" spending, and the measured poverty rate was still 15.5%.  

But the results of "anti-poverty" spending in New York City have been far, far worse.  The first decennial census after the War on Poverty began was in 1970, when big "anti-poverty" spending was just getting going.  An article by Levitan and Wieler for the New York Federal Reserve Bank collects poverty statistics for New York City for the three decades from then to 2000.  New York City's measured poverty rate in the 1970 census was 14.5%, about in line with the national norm.  Progressive icon John Lindsay had just been elected mayor, and began to implement the Cloward/Piven program of vastly increased welfare spending as the solution to poverty.  Ten years later, in the 1980 census, the measured poverty rate in New York City was -- 20.2%, about a 40% increase from 1970's rate.  That's about half a million more people in poverty than before government started to meddle.  Good work, guys!  In 1990 the City's poverty rate had dipped a little to 18.8%, but by 2000 it was back up to 21.9%.  The most recent poverty rate for New York City from the Census Bureau is 20.6% (2015).  So it's not just that all the "anti-poverty" spending in New York hasn't made a dent in the poverty; it's that poverty has actually gone up some 40% from where it started, in the face of ever-increasing spending.  And all the new and "innovative" programs and spending over the years have never, ever, ever gotten the poverty rate to head back to anywhere even near where it started.

And how has crime in New York City correlated with the poverty rate?  From 1970 to 1990, crime increased along with the poverty rate, seeming to validate the poverty-causes-crime hypothesis.  But then, something went haywire.  In 1990, when the poverty rate was 18.8%, the number of murders was 2245 (per data from the New York Police Department here).  That gave New York a murder rate of about 28 per 100,000 -- about the same as Chicago's rate today.  But then in came Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and new policing strategies; and he was followed by another kind-of Republican, Mike Bloomberg.  By 2010, when the poverty rate had increased to 20.1%, the number of murders had declined spectacularly by about 75% to 536.  Since 2010, the poverty rate (collected by a different method in between decennial surveys) has inched up to 20.6%; but the murder rate has continued its precipitous decline, reaching a low of 334 in 2016.  Our murder rate is now less than 4 per 100,000.  Trends for other crimes have been roughly comparable to the trends for murders.  (I like to focus on murders because the numbers are much less subject to influence by subjective judgment than the numbers for other crimes.)

Can anybody look at these numbers and continue to believe that spending taxpayer money on government programs supposedly designed to reduce poverty has anything to do with the level of crime?  Well, there's the American Prospect.  And they are far from alone among progressives.      

Who Again Is "Anti-Science"?

It seems like the official climate change talking point for the Trump era has been established:  President Trump and his environmental team are "anti-science."  For a few examples, consider the Daily Beast on December 8 ("No one has ever headed the EPA with [Scott Pruitt's] level of anti-science, anti-environmental record. . . ."); Scientific American, January 18 ("Trump's 5 Most 'Anti-Science' Moves," which include naming Pruitt to head EPA; the New Yorker, December 13 ("taken as a whole [Trump's cabinet appointments] can be seen as part of a larger effort to undermine the institution of science. . . .").

Now, as far as I know, science is not a body of knowledge, but rather a method -- a method whereby hypotheses are constantly tested by data and experiments; and when hypotheses are inconsistent with data or experiment, they are invalidated, no matter how many people may believe them.  The scientific method is most famously and briefly articulated in the well-known quote from Richard Feynman:  

It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”

I also understand that you don't need to be a scientist to understand what the scientific method is.  Indeed, it was taught to me (and all my schoolmates) in junior high school.

So then, consider which of the following qualifies as "science" and which as "non-science" or, indeed, "anti-science."

• At the EPA web page, there is a section on "Causes of Climate Change."  (There have been press reports for several days that this section is about to be taken down, but as of today, it's still there.)  EPA confidently asserts that "it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of recent warming."  And how do they know that?  Readers here know that in the massive tomes of the Federal Register EPA has come up with something called its "Endangerment Finding," purporting to attribute atmospheric warming to human emissions of greenhouse gases.  Here at the website they present an abbreviated version of the logic of the Endangerment Finding, brought to life by this seemingly dramatic chart:

Aha!  Natural factors alone can't explain the recent warming!  Or at least the chart makes it look that way.  But read on and you find out that their conclusion has been reached completely without resort to testing by data or experiment.  Accompanying the chart is text indicating that the purple band of "natural and human factors" and the green band of "natural factors only" both come entirely from "models."  But what testing by data or experiment have these models undergone?  You won't find anything about that here, or anywhere else in EPA land that I have ever been able to find.  EPA's assertion that recent warming has been caused by "human factors" is entirely derived from models.  But aren't models just "hypotheses" in scientific terminology, really just "guesses" as Feynman calls them, pure speculation until validated (or invalidated) by data or experiment?  Exactly how does declaring your hypothesis valid without subjecting it to testing against data qualify as "science"?  Got me.

• Or alternatively you can consider the Research Report of Wallace, et al., discussed in my post on September 19 titled  "The 'Science' Underlying Global Warming Alarmism Turns Up Missing."   That Research Report subjected the EPA's Endangerment Finding (including the determination that recent rising temperatures could be attributed to human emissions of "greenhouse gases") to rigorous testing in accordance with the scientific method using the best available data.  All of the data and methods that went into the Report and led to its conclusions are fully available via links in the Report itself.  The conclusion (as stated in my post): "EPA's 'lines of evidence,' and thus its Endangerment Finding, have been scientifically invalidated."

It has now been about four months since that Research Report came out.  In that time, every so-called "scientist" comprising the alleged "97% consensus" of climate scientists has fully had the chance to examine the Report, to attempt to replicate the Report, to attempt to find any other or better data that would lead to a different result, to attempt to critique anything and everything about the methods and analysis used in the Report, and to publicize any error or flaw, major or minor, that can be found or identified.  But it hasn't happened.  The Report stands unscathed.

Now, which of these two is the "science" and which of these two is the "anti-science"?  It's not a trick question.  Right now, it is seeming like literally every writer for every mainstream media outlet somehow skipped over junior high school and is intellectually incapable of comprehending the three lines of the classic Feynman quote.  There is going to be some very serious embarrassment to get spread around very shortly.     

How Do You Measure "Success" In K-12 Education?

In the field of K-12 education, two models for improving school performance have been competing now for several decades.  The forces of progressivism advance a model of government-monopoly public schools, always unionized (which most importantly means that no teacher can ever be fired), and with standardized curricula.  When many of these schools perform poorly, and their students prove unprepared for further education or for life in general, the proposed solutions are always one form or another of "give us more taxpayer money" -- smaller class sizes, higher teacher salaries, special attention (from more union members) for struggling students, new pre-K and after-school programs (run by union members) and maybe new programs like dance or singing or robotics or something (all of course run by union members).  The alternative model, generally advanced by conservatives and Republicans, looks to dramatic increases in accountability on all fronts -- competing schools (often non-unionized "charters"), serious testing, rigorous teacher evaluations, the potential to fire poor-performing teachers, and closure and replacement of poor-performing schools.

I would say that the evidence was in at least 20 years ago that the "more money for failing unionized schools" program would always fail.  But you must remember that the number one source of funding for the Democratic Party is the teachers unions.  So of course in every place where Democrats are in charge, the "more money for failing unionized schools" program is almost certain to be tried and then, when that fails, tried yet again.  Hey, we just weren't given enough money last time around!  This time it's sure to work!

If you're willing to look around, you can almost always find some fresh reports of yet another attempt at fixing unionized schools by throwing more money at them, and failure of same.  The end of last week, for example, brought a report from outgoing Education Department personnel on results of the Obama administration's highly-touted program called School Improvement Grants.  The Washington Post in an article on January 19 described that program as "the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools."  According to the article, the program spent some $7 billion in the period 2010-2015, with the money distributed to states for them to spend on their worst-performing schools in order to "turn them around."  Individual schools could get up to $2 million, and the goal was to "turn around" as many as 1000 schools per year.  Well, we're at the end of the Obama administration.  How did it go?:

One of the Obama administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis.  Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program — the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools — than in schools that did not.

You do have to hate when that happens.  Meanwhile, back here in New York City, during the mayoralty of Mike Bloomberg (2002 - 2013), there was a somewhat different strategy.  The big idea that Bloomberg's people had was to identify failing schools and "close" them.  I put the word "close" in quotes, because they would then open what they called "another school" in the same space.  The new school would have a new principal, new teachers, and often a new theme (like, this is a "performing arts" high school, or this one is a "math and science" high school).  Of course, to a large degree they were just shuffling the same staff from one place to another, but at least there was a sense that things were getting shaken up a little.  The Bloomberg team also greatly expanded the number of charter schools.

But then in came new Democratic Mayor de Blasio in 2014, with the teachers union as his biggest backer.  Of course he was a sworn enemy of charters, and of course he also came up with a big proposal fairly described as "more money for failing unionized schools."  His name for his new program (this time it is going to work!) is Renewal Schools.  The program started in 2015.  How has it gone?  From the New York Post on December 15, 2016: 

Nearly half of the de Blasio administration’s Renewal high schools did worse at preparing their students for college last year than they did the previous year, a pro-charter group charged.  Families for Excellent Schools said it reviewed public data from the 34 high schools that the mayor’s Education Department identified as the most failing and targeted for improvement in 2014.  Of that group, 15 of the schools declined in terms of college preparedness last year.

And "Renewal Schools" is just a relatively small group of the worst schools.  Meanwhile, New York City overall K-12 education spending continues to soar.  The New York City Education Department budget for FY 2017 is $29.2 billion.  For about 1.1 million students, that's around $26,500 per student!  (National average per student spending is less than half of that at around $12,000.)

So what do we taxpayers get for all of that money thrown at our unionized schools?  For one thing, we get a big article in yesterday's New York Times with the headline "With Many Schools Thriving Nearby, Those in Harlem Are Left to Fail."   The article discusses New York's Community School District 3, which covers two neighborhoods that demographically are very distinct:  the Upper West Side (very wealthy, heavily Jewish) and Central Harlem (poor and lower middle class, although recently gentrifying, heavily African American).  The summary:

Some of the best public elementary schools in New York City are in Community School District 3, on Manhattan’s West Side. At those schools, the vast majority of children pass the annual state tests, gifted and talented programs buzz with activity, and special programs attract promising young musicians or families who want a progressive approach to education.

But none of those schools are in Harlem.  In District 3’s Harlem schools, there are no gifted and talented programs. Of the six elementary schools there where students take the state tests, only one comes close to the citywide passing rates of 38 percent in reading and 36 percent in math. At one school, only 6 percent of third- through eighth-grade students passed the most recent math tests.  The children in the Harlem schools are mostly black and Hispanic and low-income, while the majority of children in the district’s other elementary schools are white or Asian, and either middle class or wealthy.

OK, but what does it mean when you say that the schools in Harlem are "left behind"?  In New York Times-speak, saying that something has been "left behind" is always to be taken as code for "they need more government money."  But New York City spends over $26K per year per student, and the authorities can't possibly be spending less money per student on the Harlem schools than those on the West Side.  Certainly, you won't find any statistics about that in this article.  Indeed the school most discussed in the article is P.S. 149 in Harlem, a school so bad that the chairwoman of the Community Education Council zoning committee won't send her own daughter there.  It turns out that P.S. 149 is part of the Renewal Schools program -- meaning that it is the target of particularly high levels of spending.  The results?:

[District Superintendent Ilene Altschul] noted steps that some of the schools were taking to improve their performance, including the hiring of an academic coach to work with teachers at the STEM Institute and the hiring of a math consultant and a new writing curriculum at P.S. 149. She noted that P.S. 149 had also recently added programs in dance, singing, soccer, in-line skating and robotics.  But more than two years after its academic struggles earned it a place in the Renewal program, P.S. 149 has not yet made clear progress on the goals set for it by the city.

It just all depends on how you measure "success" in K-12 education.  For example, you may think it's a problem that the Feds spent $7 billion on School Improvement Grants without improving student performance in any noticeable way.  But for the teachers union, that $7 billion translated into about $5 billion for union members' salaries, and therefore about $70 million in union revenues.  And for the Democratic Party, it then turned into maybe $30 million in political contributions.  Here in New York City at the Renewal schools, each new unionized teacher of "dance, singing, soccer, in-line skating and robotics" means something around $500 - 1000 per year for the Democratic Party.  It sure seems like "success" to them!          

Who Is Right About The "American Carnage"?

The trendy thing in the progressive press after the inauguration was to characterize President Trump's speech, and/or its description of the United States, as "dark."  (New York Times:  A "uniquely dark vision of the U.S."; Washington Post: "a dark inaugural address").

I myself did not have that overall reaction.  Clearly there was plenty of uplifting phrasemaking in the speech, at least as it described the future America under Mr. Trump's prospective leadership.  A few examples:  "We . . . seek to [have our] way of life . . . shine as an example for everyone to follow. . . .  [W]e must think big and dream even bigger. . . .  No challenge can match the heart and fight and spirit of America. . . .  We will make America proud again.  We will make America safe again.  And yes, together, we will make America great again."

But there was a new phrase in the speech that seems to have set off the progressives more than any other:  "American carnage."  That phrase is understood to have referred to the high number of killings currently going on in many major cities run under Democratic Party control for decades.  The Times in an editorial the day after the speech said that Trump "waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation’s cities."      

"Imagining"?

Then yesterday Official Manhattan Contrarian Worst Economics Writer Paul Krugman (who seems  these days to have strayed far from his economics base) took up the theme.  

The Trump vision of an urban America ravaged by “the crime and the gangs and the drugs” is a dystopian fantasy: Violent crime is, in fact, way down despite highly publicized recent murder increases in a few cities. Crime could, I suppose, fall further, but it could also rise. What we do know is that the Trump administration can’t pacify America’s urban war zones, because those zones don’t exist.

What the hell is this guy talking about?  An America ravaged by crime and drugs is a "fantasy"?  America's urban war zones "don't exist"?  Remember, these are the same people who have just spent four days attacking Trump for exaggerating the size of the crowds at his inauguration.  By contrast, it actually matters if there is a totally unacceptable rate of murders of black males occurring in many of America's major cities.  So, on this important subject, who is right?  

In my post just two days ago, I collected statistics on the murder rates in several of our nation's murder capitals -- all of them cities under solid Democratic Party control for generations.  These statistics are not difficult to find, and the links are in that post.  In a nation where the overall murder rate for the country is about 5 per 100,000, and where the largest city (New York) has an even lower rate of about 4 per 100,000, we find a murder rate of 60 per 100,000 in St. Louis, 44 in Detroit, 50 in Baltimore, 42 in New Orleans, and 30 in Chicago.  To put that in some perspective, if New York had a murder rate like that of St. Louis, instead of about 300 murders last year, it would have had about 4500!  And in Chicago, if it could lower its murder rate to be near that of New York, then instead of the nearly 800 murders it suffered last year, it would have been more like 100.  These are extremely dramatic numbers.  And about half or more of the victims are black men.  How is it possible to use any word other than "carnage" to describe this situation?  

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute collects some more statistics in a post yesterday for National Review.  She particularly has focused on the number of murders of black males as broken out in the FBI crime statistics:  

In 2015, the last year for which we have official national data, more than 6,000 black males, according to the FBI, were killed by criminals, themselves overwhelmingly black. That is 900 more black males killed in 2015 than in the year before, but the number of black victims was undoubtedly higher even than that, since an additional 2,000 homicide victims were reported to the FBI without a racial identity. Black males make up about half of the nation’s homicide victims, so they presumably make up a similar share of racially unclassified homicide victims.

And about how many of the 6000 or so black male homicide victims were unarmed men shot by the police?:

By contrast, the nation’s police fatally shot 16 “unarmed” black males and 20 “unarmed” white males in 2016, according to the Washington Post’s database of police killings. I have put “unarmed” in quotes because the [Washington] Post’s classification of “unarmed” victims rarely conveys the violence that the suspect directed at the shooting officer. But even when we take the “unarmed” classification at face value, those 16 fatal police shootings of unarmed black men represent no more than 0.2 percent of all black male lives lost to homicide in 2016. If police shootings of allegedly unarmed black males represent a national epidemic of bloodshed, then what should we call the gunning down of over 375 times that number of black men by criminals? “Carnage” seems like a pretty good descriptor. 

I'm sorry, but the carnage in many American cities is not a subject on which it is OK to pretend it doesn't exist because you oppose everything President Trump says and you want to protect the guys on "our team."  It's not OK because cities like New York and (to a lesser degree) Los Angeles have demonstrated that it is eminently possible to get a murder rate down to well less than 10 per 100,000 despite a population that includes large numbers of blacks and other minority groups.  (The murder rate in LA in 2016 was about 7 per 100,000.)  If New York and LA can do it, then the other cities like St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and Chicago have no excuse any more.  Why their voters don't throw out the entrenched (Democratic Party) power structure, I have no idea.