Shit hole cities? Probably not.

I know I'm weird, but when the president starts condemning cities as hell holes because of their crime rates. my first instinct is to look at the numbers. So here are the top 20 cities in the US in terms of violent crimes against persons, per 100,000 population, according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_United_States_cities_by_…
City
St. Louis
Baltimore
Detroit
New Orleans
Baton Rouge
Kansas City
Cleveland
Memphis
Newark
Chicago
Cincinnati
Mobile
Philadelphia
Milwaukee
Pittsburgh
Indianapolis
Stockton
Tulsa
Washington, D.C.

So, yeah, Baltimore and Chicago are in the top 20 (Chicago is #11). And older cities tend to have higher crime rates than do younger cities. And Indianapolis is #17 on the list.

But, how about murders? Well, for starters, neither Baltimore nor Chicago is in the top 20. Chicago is #36 & Baltimore is #41. (Indianapolis falls out of the Top 20, all the way down to 25.)

City
New Orleans
Anchorage
Cleveland
Minneapolis
Spokane
Columbus
Tulsa
Detroit
Colorado Springs
Denver
Wichita
Cincinnati
Oakland
Tucson
St. Louis
Kansas City
Omaha
Memphis
Aurora

Or aggravated assault? Albuquerque?
Baltimore is #18. Chicago is #56. (Indianapolis? #27. Looks like Indy is more of a hell hole than Chicago...)

City
Albuquerque
Spokane
Memphis
San Francisco
St. Louis
Oakland
Portland
Baton Rouge
Wichita
Tulsa
Orlando
Mobile3
Anchorage
Seattle
Tucson
Cincinnati
Baltimore
Cleveland
San Antonio

Why am I not surprised that, once again, he doesn't know what he's talking about...

Not MY America

The more I think about William Barr's speech at the Notre Dame law school, the more concerned-distressed--and, to be honest, frightened I become.

Here's what he had to say:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-remarks-law-school-and-de-nicola-center-ethics

Here are some responses:

"William Barr’s Wild Misreading of the First Amendment"

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/william-barrs-wild-misreading-of-the-first-amendment

"Notre Dame had a right to host Barr — but his talk was ridiculously stupid"

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/notre-dame-had-right-host-barr-his-talk-was-ridiculously-stupid

It's bad enough to think that morality and decent human behavior are possible only in a religious environment, but it's even worse to select a single religious tradition--which is, for all his invocation of the "Judeo-Christion tradition"--an extremely conservative, even authoritarian, strain of Roman Catholicism. 

In his speech, he not only ignores the value of any other religious traditions*, he states that it is not possible to have a moral society without a very narrow definition of morality based on one of those traditions.  He asserts that the growth in the number of people who do not accept that one faith tradition is the *the cause* of what he sees as the collapse of public (and private, too, I think) morality in the US. 

I could--but won't--make the opposite argument.  That religious beliefs have been a major cause, not only in Europe and America, of the slaughter of millions.  Christians slaughtering Christians (the Cathars, anyone?).  The persecution, serially, if Protestants and then Catholics in England?  The 30-Years' War in Europe?).  Christians in the U.S. slaughtering the people who were here before the European invasion?  The forced conversions of their children even in the 20th century?  (Well, OK, I did sort of make the opposite argument.)

And it scares me that the Attorney General of the United States, speaking not as a private citizen, but as the chief legal official in the US, makes this argument, that he places the blame in what he claims is great moral decline, on people like me, who profess no religious beliefs, but (to the best of out ability) try to live moral lives. 

Robert Heinlein wrote a series of SF novels and stories (in the 1950s) based on a United States that had become a theocracy.  As a kid, those stories struck me as all too plausible.  And they still do.  I do not wan a country--and I do not think the Founding Fathers would wand a country, i--which a person's right to believe, or not believe, in one, or any, on no religious tradition, has been taken away. 

Barr seems to be a theocrat.  But if I have anything to say about it--not in this country.

* Hindu, B'hai, Jehovah's Witnesses, Islamic, Mormon, the various religions of the original Americans, Hinduism, Bhuddaism (not actually a religion, but a set of moral teachings), and scores of others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States, is you're curious).  And that's not to mention the non-theistic moral traditions.]

The Coming Educational/Skills/Training Apocolypse

I've been thinking a lot lately about the consequences of the increases in the costs of acquiring post-high-school skilled and training and education, on the one hand,, and about the increasing importance of those skills and education on the other. The depressing thing is how things have  changed (slowly) over time.  I managed to attend a somewhat selective small liberal arts college based on actual financial aid (scholarships), working (both during the school year and summers), and an affordable contribution from my parents (who had 4 kids to put through college in the space of about 10 years). 

In the intervening 55 years (my older brother started college in 1964), tuition t the school I attended has gone up from $1500 a year to over $50,000 a year a factor of 33, and average family income has increased by a factor of 14, while prices in general have increased by a factor of 8.  One of the things this means is that, when I entered college, tuition at the school I attended amounted to about 20% of average family income.  Now, it's basically 50% of average family income.

Everything I know about higher education tells me that financial aid (I DO NOT COUNT STUDENT LOANS as financial aid) has not increased anything near enough to make it possible for someone like me (my family's income was probably 150% of the average family income in 1965, my tuition plus my brother's tuition probably would have amounted to about 30% of the family's income--before taxes) to have attended the school I did.  At 150% of average family income today, my tuition and my brother's would amount to roughly 65% of family income.  So there's no way we could attend those schools today.

At a public schools--like, for example, Indiana University--tuition was about $350 a year in 1965 and about $10,500 in 2018.  For a family with 2 kids in college, with family income at, say, 2/3 of the average, tuition would have been 14% of average family income in 1965--and 21% today.  And, remember, that does not include books and supplies (textbooks alone have increased tremendously--my intro econ boon was $7--new--in 1966.  A "standard" intro econ book is around $250 (again, new)--a price increase on a par with tuition increases.  It also does not include room and board--also about $10,500 in 2018. 

A college education--or any post-high-school education--which is becoming more and more important has also become disproportionately more expensive to obtain.  It's more and more difficult to make a compelling case for post-high-school education if we expect students to pay for it largely by borrowing. 

On the other hand, it's also the case that the prosperity of our country is more and more dependent precisely on workers with more knowledge, more skills of all sorts.  And we are doing an increasingly bad job of making it possible for people to obtain the education and training that they need--and that we, as a society, need them to have.  We have, it seems, begun to think that there are no society-wide benefits to having a highly-skilled work force.  And, in thinking that we are completely wrong.