A Small Victory for Common Sense

And a victory in the drug war right next door

The victory came without even trying.  It came without even looking for a fight. It came without a fight.

I was off to Chicago to attend a wedding.  I got to the wedding site and did note that some folks had masked themselves.  Not many, but some.

These people may have worn their masks through the duration of the service, but, by the time everyone had retired to the reception, the masks were gone.  I did not even notice—not right away.  And the masks remained out of sight as the music came on. 

Loud it was.  We had to raise our voices to be heard.  Surely, if you’re going to insist on wearing a mask, then that would have been the time to do it: Everyone is in close quarters speaking loudly into each other’s faces.  But the masks had disappeared.

Why?  Because it appeared ridiculous?  Because a critical mass of people didn’t care?  Because the herd of mask fetishists wanted to blend in with the larger mass of people who had liberated themselves from masking?  Puzzling.

The night before heading out for Chicago, the drug dealers and their friends had again descended on the vacant gallery space next door.  They had done this a few times over the last few weeks: Trespass on a vacant space, put on loud music, smoke prodigious volumes of weed, chug vodka from the bottle, deal drugs right out front.

The music would start at 10 in the evening.  This was an organized affair.  Absent police intervention, it would end around 4 in the morning. 

And the police did intervene, but one can imagine their concerns: Breaking up a mass of high, drunk angry people, some of whom may be armed, could make for a fraught affair.  And, really, what could they do, because there could be some question of whether these people were really trespassing.  Perhaps someone had been paying rent on that space.

Last week I communicated with our city councilor’s people.  They did a good job in inquiring with the property manager about what was going on.  I also communicated with the property manager myself and learned that the partiers next door were affirmatively trespassing.  So, now I could confidently inform the police that they would have some basis for kicking these people out.

That’s what the property management urged: call the police!  But, one can see part of what’s going on here: the property manager really doesn’t want to expend any resources managing that vacant space; how convenient to have neighbors next door to monitor the situation and to manage it for them.  But, with the City starting to take notice, the property owner might have felt some compulsion to do something: they finally fixed the lock on the door to the vacant gallery space.

The police really stepped up.  They gave us instructions to call once festivities were to get going, and they reported that they had elevated this matter to an agenda item on their daily briefings with staff. 

The day before I headed out for Chicago, the police showed up next door at the gallery space without having to be called.  A little digging around online reveals that they had nabbed some people for “weapon law violations”.  This was the scene:

While sitting that following Saturday morning in Washington Square Park in Chicago, I tapped out an email to my neighbors inquiring about how the “drug war next door” was going.  All Quiet on the Western Front was the report. We haven’t seen any extracurricular activity since.

It looks like coordination between the residents, the city councilor’s office, the property manager, and the police has achieved the desired results:

1. To raise the costs on the drug dealers and partiers next door to dealing drugs and trashing the place.  They’ve taken their business elsewhere, and the rest of us can sleep instead of putting up with their affirmatively anti-social nonsense three or four nights a week.

2. The property owner was compelled to get his act together.

Back in Chicago, I had a good time talking with an interesting bunch of people.  I found myself separately talking to each of two particle physicists.  One of them works at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. I told her that I had very much appreciated the “country profiles” that the IAEA posts on its site; I had referenced the Germany profile for a piece I had posted out here on the Substack platform.

I also indicated that some of my antitrust colleagues and I had had some experience thinking about nuclear matters by virtue of having worked on a merger investigation involving nuclear decommissioning services.  We all became amateur particle physicists, finding ourselves talking about “picocuries,” “radionuclides” and “decay chains.”  As radioactive elements shed particles (as they decay) they morph into other elements, and a lot of them ultimately end up as lead.  They end up as lead, not gold.  Lead is really stable stuff. 

Through that experience I learned that the universe is way more unstable than I might have appreciated.  There is radioactivity everywhere.  Even that banana one may have had with breakfast this morning contains radioactive potassium.  Way back I had done a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Each gram of that banana will ping you with a particle about once every ten seconds.  Feeling jumpy?

From all of that, I came to appreciate that nuclear energy (from fission) might not be so hazardous—if one does it right.  The technology is so much better than when, say, the Curies were mixing up radioactive stews literally in their own backyard.

The Green folks should really get over their opposition to folding nukes into a “green” energy portfolio.  Our friend from the IAEA agreed.

It was nice to talk about a potentially fraught matter and find some points of agreement—and to be able to talk frankly about potentially fraught matters.  This did not extend to all matters, for I had joked to some other folks that my neighbors and I were engaged in a “drug war” with the dealers and partiers who would show up three/four times a week next door.  I expressed concern that the police might not be too responsive because (a) breaking up the festivities could be really hazardous and (b) their ranks may have been decimated over the last year or so in the face of vaccine mandates and such. 

The second point got some folks really worked up.  It was explained to me that Americans do not generally have good educations in “science”, and they are falling victim to “disinformation” with respect to the “vaccines.”  The vaccines are “safe and effective”.

These folks sounded like government-sanctioned talking points. 

I did not press the matter with them.  Though, I really would like to know where they get their understanding from.  Are their views informed by data?  Speaking of thinking in scientific (empirical) terms: what is the basis for claims that the vaccines are safe and effective, especially since there is abundant evidence that the vaccines are very problematic?

Why do people believe what they believe?  And, so stridently?  Are they not capable of maintaining “working hypotheses”?  That is, we may have ideas about what is going on in the world, but, absent good evidence, we might not really be able to substantiate what is going on.  And, knowing that, we may know that we really don’t know.  That is thinking scientifically.  Unwittingly passing off political talking points as “science” is not. 

These people should know better.  But, they don’t, notwithstanding the fact that they come from an over-educated (if not well-educated) class of self-anointed best-and-brightest elites. They lack sense.

I did have a good time talking with these people, but, again, I was being nice; I did not press the matters aggressively.  Although I would like to understand: What do people think they affirmatively know, and why do they believe what they believe. Fascinating. And frightening.