The baby-formula shortage was created by the government, and its persistence is the result of failed leadership. Food products, especially baby formula, are heavily regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Despite experts and parents clamoring for months for the White House, the Biden administration ignored the cries of parents until the shortages reached crisis levels.That was the horseshoe nail that fell out. The problem was longer in festering.
The shortages stem from the FDA’s February 17 recall of baby-formula products after a lethal bacterial strain was discovered in some products at the Abbott Nutrition plant in Sturgis, Mich. An anonymous whistle blower had previously reported problems with the plant, which the FDA did not act on for months. Months later, the FDA shut down the plant. However, the Abbott plant will soon reopen as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found no link between the bacteria and the plant. Still, it will take time before the plant returns to normal production.
The Abbott recall was not the only cause of the shortage. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, scared parents hoarded baby formula. As parents worked through their stockpiles into 2021, manufacturers reduced production. Last year also saw a 1 percent increase in birthrates. If that trend continued in the early 2022, it would have created a perfect storm: insufficient supply and surging demand.Apparently, at least some parents were coping with that fear in a procreative way. That brings us to the current situation, where my local supermarket has the formula in the same locked case where they keep the expensive liquor.
Lewis likes to use her flowery language and terms like “gestator” and “gestatee” to dehumanize the abortion process. She did graduate from (bottom teeth out) Oxxxforrrd. Killing is OK, man. Especially when you have a clump of cells becoming a host and taking over your body. You’re “killing” for the greater good, you see. You don’t want the world to suffer the sag of forced birth, do ya? This “proto-person” gestates inside of a woman in “grisly biology and its everyday sublimity”.There's a lot more at the link, and the Nation essay is worth a look, if for no other reason than to savor the wordnoise with which the Highly Credentialed like to Demonstrate Their Erudition. It's all too much for Ms Carr. "But the 'morally superior' will continue to throw their moral superiority and pretentious behavior out there." When it's out there, it's material for mockery.
[Andrew Sullivan] links to this Jerusalem Post article about a falling rate of invention of new drugs to treat AIDS. Sullivan's conclusion: "What's interesting here is that there is a collusion of interests between the leftist campaigners and the publicity-shy drug companies. The lefties want to insist there's no trade-off in the hounding of pharmaceutical companies; the companies don't want to admit that their research is fueled by such gross motives as making money. Meanwhile, progress against a fast-mutating virus slows." Sigh. Doesn't anybody remember "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages?" (Smith 1776, p. 18)Sorry, no guarantees on any of those old links.
Research published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA estimates that close to half of all new brand-name prescription drugs launched in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 came with an original price tag of at least $150,000 a year, a finding that sparked fresh calls for Congress to rein in the pharmaceutical industry's virtually unchecked power to drive up costs.The article recites the usual complaint that third-party payers in the United States lack monopsony power.
Authored by researchers with the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Brigham and Women's Hospital, the new analysis finds that "from 2008 to 2021, launch prices for new drugs increased exponentially by 20% per year."
"In 2020-2021, 47% of new drugs were initially priced above $150,000 per year," the researchers wrote. "The trend in prices for new drugs outpaces growth in prices for other healthcare services."
The study also shows that median launch prices of prescription drugs soared from $2,115 per year in 2008 to a staggering $180,007 in 2021.
The authors of the new analysis stress that prescription medicine prices are rising so quickly in the U.S. because profit-seeking drug manufacturers are permitted to "freely set prices after approval," resulting in far higher costs than those seen in Canada, Germany, France, and other wealthy nations.I can't help but notice that the article is not complaining about price gouging by overseas drug manufacturers. Might that be because ... the other countries are dickering with U.S. pharmaceutical companies over prices in excess of avoidable cost, and their domestic drug manufacturers make nowhere near the breakthroughs in research, because the monopsony doesn't pay off well?
"Prescription drug spending in the U.S. exceeded half a trillion dollars in 2020," the researchers wrote. "In response to the current trends, the U.S. could stop allowing drug manufacturers to freely set prices and follow the example of other industrialized countries that negotiate drug prices at launch."
Presumably Canada's health authority negotiates prices for drugs at the avoidable cost of producing them, letting others, primarily U.S. insurers, bear all the common costs of research and development. (Or do Canadian taxpayers bear some of those costs through Canada Council grants?) United States patients presumably could get drugs for 30% cheaper if they agreed to freeze further development of drugs. (Who wants all that controversy over animal testing and double-blind studies, anyway?)In addition, presumably most of the more-cheaply-developed drugs have been discovered, and the improvements on what is already on offer involve more expense and more risk. None of that, though, stops the true believers in Free Stuff. "Late last year, House Democrats passed Build Back Better legislation that contained a provision allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of a subset of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies." Yes, that will work about as well as the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates to bring forth additional medicines. I don't know, might be fun to engage old senator Bernie Sanders in a conversation about the canonical coal town company store, and then ask him to explain how using the government's buying power is any different.
Once we get the coronavirus behind us, it is long past time for the countries of the Third World to get with the success sequence: free minds, free markets, and transparent institutions. I'll give the late Edward Lazear the final word. "Incomes of the poor are higher and grow more rapidly under free-market capitalism than they do in economies with less private ownership, more restrictions on trade, and a greater governmental role in allocation."On the other hand, I never lack for material, do I?
Walsh, for instance, effortlessly gets Michelle Forcier, a “gender affirming” pediatrician and assistant dean at Brown University’s medical school, to assert that what makes a chicken female is the fact that we “assigned” it that sex at birth, not the fact that it can lay eggs. Asked to explain what makes chickens different from kids, Forcier insists that chickens don’t cry or commit suicide. At the University of Tennessee, Patrick Grzanka, a professor of women’s studies, avows that he cannot—or will not—define the word that appears in his professional title. When Grzanka asks Walsh why he cares so much about the definition of woman, Walsh responds that he is interested in the truth. Grzanka, a taxpayer-funded employee of a state university with a motto that says, “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” becomes irate. “Getting to the truth,” he asserts, is “deeply transphobic.”There it is, dear reader, an experiment against reality in plain sight, and never mind the nuance.
For Western feminists, being a woman means having certain equipment as well as having the “lived experience” that comes with that equipment—but that “lived experience” need not include, and perhaps should not include, any of the traditionally female roles. One strand of feminist thinking even holds that women’s “lived experience” could be boiled down to their vulnerability to male predation.Deny those coherent beliefs ... enjoy the incoherence.
We can insist that a woman is someone with XX chromosomes and a certain type of anatomy, but only a fact-value extremist would leave it there. Walsh’s interlocutors are probably right to wonder why he—or anyone else—should care who qualifies as a woman. It is a question Walsh dismisses but perhaps should not. In the last scene of the movie, he returns home to find his wife taking care of the kids and making lunch. “What is a woman?” he asks her. Seemingly baffled by the question, she responds: “An adult human female . . . who needs help opening this” (holding up a pickle jar).
And what we see is people in a state of profound cognitive dissonance, who readily condemn their own common sense and endorse ideas that they must know, deep down, are absurd. “Gender ideology” turns out to be a form of mass self-delusion. So insular and self-referential is transgender activism, so inflated by faux confidence and saturated with garbled clichés, that it needs little help from Walsh to turn itself into an object of mockery.Or, perhaps, hold that part of the academy up for mockery. As the review notes, that's a productive start.
These papers should give a pretty good indication of the research interests of academic economists. They are, in fact, the research findings of the economists who wrote the articles, and they went through a two-stage selection process, first being selected to be on the program and then being selected to be published in the journal. Presumably, with the journal’s readership in mind, the articles that were published represent those that would be of most interest to academic economists, and that are representative of the research topics undertaken by them.The Proceedings issue has long been a way for the Association to highlight Rising Stars and recognize continued work by Established Senior Scholars. Paper sessions are organized well in advance, and it's rare for an over-the-transom submission to get into a Proceedings session, let alone into the Papers and Proceedings. The lineup of papers might reflect Contemporary Relevance, or it might reflect Pasha talking to the department head.
Economic issues have been in the news lately, with inflation accelerating, supply chain issues interfering with markets, with COVID policies interfering with economic activity, a rising national debt, and questions about international trade policy. What subjects do those 115 articles address?
Race and gender issues get the most coverage, and are the subjects of 44 of the 115 total articles. That’s 38% of the total. Migration and immigration are the subjects of 10 articles, or 9%. Much has been made lately about the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement in academics, and it is apparent in the research interests of economists.
Twelve articles deal with the effects of COVID and the government policies addressing it, although some of these articles are also included in the race and gender category. For example, I included articles like “COVID-19 and its Impact on Minority-Owned Banks” and “Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in Developing Countries” in both categories. (I didn’t include any articles in both the race and gender category and the migration and immigration category.)
What other topics interest economists? Twelve articles were about wealth and saving, six were about unemployment, four discussed government debt and deficit finance, and three discussed international trade. Several articles also discussed taxation, including ways that governments could implement wealth taxes.A good evaluation of recent inflation, whether taking issue with Modern Monetary Theory or not, would take up more space and be more technical than the shorter contributed papers comprising the Proceedings issue. Supply chains, likewise, are too empirical a topic, with little by way of advanced theory or econometrics to merit publication; that is, if the discipline hasn't delegated all such work to logistics faculty in business colleges.
Several noteworthy topics were not covered at all. There were no articles on inflation, and no articles on supply chain issues, despite the frequent appearance of those issues in the popular press. While the general public looks at the economy and is concerned about rising inflation, the rapidly increasing national debt, and supply chain issues that disrupt markets, academic economists appear to have much more interest in issues surrounding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Welcome to the Ivory tower.
Drunk on barely contested victories sweeping eastward through Poland and Czechoslovakia and then westward through France, which seemed to reinforce convictions of Aryan racial superiority, the Nazi war machine rushed toward Moscow, feeding Hitler’s hopes to capture the Kremlin by Christmas and rid the world of “the Judaeo-Bolshevik threat” and subordinate or liquidate racially inferior Slavs on the way to replicating—in a radically telescoped way—the U.S. government’s “pacification” and re-peopling of the North American continent in the centuries previous.It's probably churlish, surely it's reactionary, to note that Kursk might have turned out differently but for several German armored divisions being sent to ... Italy. But Mr Reed is not done with his tryout.
Nazi occupation—consistent with the regime’s exterminist ideology and program—murdered and brutalized staggering numbers of Soviet citizens, on a barely imaginable scale of calculated atrocity. The Soviet Red Army, taken by surprise and in disarray in the face of the scale and speed of the assault, also sustained staggering losses of both personnel and equipment as well as territory.
Within two and a half months, the Wehrmacht was encroaching on Moscow. As the end of 1941 approached, however, Red Army resistance stiffened and repulsed the Germans, dealing them their first defeats of the war. After an intense, nearly six-month pitched battle, the Red Army routed the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and began to turn the tide of the war. Victory in the massive tank battle at Kursk and liberation of Leningrad from a siege of more than two years that took an incredible toll on the civilian population set the stage for a massive Soviet offensive.
There are two takeaways from this history I want to stress. One is a nearly aesthetic appreciation of how the world moves by contradiction. Destruction of Bolshevism internationally and of aggressive working-class opposition domestically was a fundamental objective of the Nazis and other fascist movements and of the elements that financed and cultivated them on both sides of the Atlantic.We wish all comrades continued solidarity on the anniversary of Bagration. What a "MAGA fantasy of 'the pedophile Democratic elite'" has to do with anything real is left to the reader as an exercise.
For the Nazis in particular destruction of the Soviet Union was pivotal to their twisted racialist politics. And, not unlike on a much smaller scale, at least so far, the MAGA fantasy of “the pedophile Democratic elite” today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the “Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker” and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.
Once upper-class German reactionaries helped the Nazis come to power, the exterminism of the Final Solution and an invasion of the Soviet Union were as close to foreordained as actual history can be. And the practical reasons that made the Soviet Union such a threat to both fascists and the capitalist classes they served are precisely what would enable the collective organization that sealed the Germans’ fate after their initial months of success in 1941. (This brings to mind the similar irony, also pleasing in a sort of aesthetic way, that antebellum Democrats’ great victory in engineering and winning the Mexican War in 1848, which largely reflected concern to expand slavery, became the basis for slavery’s destruction less than twenty years later.)
The second takeaway is more prosaic. Not only did the Soviet Union bear the most extreme brunt of the war’s horrors; it also was without question the most central force in the Nazis’ defeat. That’s why, for example, my father—who was in the Normandy invasion and detested the D-Day anniversary in addition to all that “greatest generation” crap—always said that if his generation should get props for something, it should be Social Security and the CIO. He would comment acerbically that if it hadn’t been for the Red Army, the war may have had a very different outcome. He also never stopped remarking, practically even on his deathbed, on the hypocrisy that he was sent to fight the racist Nazis in a racially segregated U.S. Army.
An Illinois state auditor general review of the COVID-19 outbreak that killed 36 elderly military veterans at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home in 2020 blames Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Public Health department for failing to “identify and respond to the seriousness of the outbreak.”It's not any easier for children in some parts of the state. "Chicago police reported no leads Monday in the shooting death of a 5-month-old girl as she rode in her father’s car in South Shore last week." Just another "mostly peaceful weekend" in Chicago. Incompetent box-checking avatar of Weimar America, Lori Lightfoot, had other things on her mind. "Six mayoral challengers pounced on Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday for making an obscene reference to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for suggesting that last week’s landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade should be a prelude to overturning gay marriage."
Department of Public Health officials didn’t show up at the LaSalle home until 11 days after the outbreak began on Nov. 1, 2020, even though department leaders had been receiving near daily updates on the deteriorating situation at the home, according to Auditor General Frank Mautino’s review, which was released Thursday.
“This is clearly not what mainstream Illinoisans want. While the Governor is calling a special session to act on these and potentially other extreme measures, Illinoisans are trying to deal with soaring gas prices and massive grocery bills that are leaving families hopeless,” [Republican state senator Dan] McConchie said in a statement.The dead don't buy groceries, the mortuaries can pass along the gasoline prices, and the abortion tourism will not compensate for the ordinary tourism that's being scared away by the crime. Why, it's almost as if the Combine is deliberately chasing the productive people out.
“Instead of dealing with these vital issues, Pritzker is embracing an extreme agenda that will make Illinois an outlier even amongst the most liberal states.”
This is a revolutionary ruling. Not just for abortion, but for the ongoing debates over the nature of rights under the Constitution.That could be a good thing, as "justices ... who determine when public values have changed" establishes a small circle of philosopher kings who might be susceptible to being swayed by ad popularum arguments.
The ruling signals a massive change in how we read the Constitution, from a living reading to an original reading. The court has firmly rejected the theory of the living Constitution, which argues that the meaning of the document's language changes as the beliefs and values of Americans change.
The living view, which prevailed at the Supreme Court during the second half of the 20th century, means that additional rights can emerge over time, including abortion, privacy and same-sex marriage. The living Constitution is updated through the judgment of the justices of the Supreme Court, who determine when public values have changed, and hence new rights have emerged.
Originalism, which is the approach taken by the justices who overruled Roe, rejects the living Constitution. In the originalist view, the Constitution is static until officially altered by amendment. It does not evolve on its own without public approval. The role of the justices is to determine the original public meaning of the text, but to leave other decisions to democratic representation through elections.
The explicit rights clearly described and enumerated in the Bill of Rights—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms and others—are rising in influence, specifically because they have been approved and ratified by the people.Should it be that hard to organize, to turn out the vote, to make the case? There, at least, Mr Marietta concludes on an optimistic note.
But the other evolved or implicit rights that have been recognized by the court over time—abortion and gay marriage, among others—are simply not constitutional rights in the view of the new majority. Enumerated rights—the ones specifically spelled out in the Bill of Rights—will be accorded stronger protections, while the recently recognized rights of the living Constitution will not be protected.
Under Roe, the majority saw abortion as within the category of rights. Hence it received constitutional protection. But under the new abortion decision, it should be governed by majority rule, the kind of question that is to be determined by the citizens of each state through their legislatures.
Contrary to much speculation and worry, the Dobbs ruling and the new majority will not overturn protections of interracial marriage, especially the landmark ruling in Loving v. Virginia. That ruling hinges on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which is also enshrined in the text and is clearly protected under an original reading.As they should be.
But other nonenumerated, evolved or created rights that are not textually protected are now up for question. This includes the right of same-sex marriage recognized by Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.
Questions of rights not explicitly protected by the Constitution—and therefore now in the hands of state legislatures—will rely much more heavily in the future on local democracy. Social movements, campaigns and elections, all at the state level, will become the main battleground of American rights.
Do you remember all the liberals like Ron Brownstein fretting over the fact that the US Supreme Court, in the Obergefell decision, overrode binding marriage referendums at the state level? Neither do I, because it didn’t happen.Under the notion of a "living constitution," mightn't there be a situation in which the Militant Normals are the leading edge of Changing Popular Opinion, and mightn't they be the ones more likely to be upset by a Supreme Court standing on Constitutional principles? "All we wanted was to be left alone." But that was too much restraint for Weimar America. Constitutional protections might be their best hope right about now.
Similarly, do you see the Ron Brownsteins of the world complaining about how antidemocratic it is for major corporations — who are accountable to no voters — to threaten punishment to state legislatures if they don’t pass social legislation (e.g., pro-LGBT, pro-CRT) that the companies like? Gosh no.
Do they complain about illiberal, anti-democratic policies within institutions and in government that explicitly privilege certain demographics on the basis of race? Of course they don’t! Because they see that as normal, and democracy as working as it should.
A new requirement for Russian institutions to have a rector for students’ moral development has been seen by academics as another sign of a country reverting to Soviet-style thought control.Is it nyekulturny of me to suggest that the job description would not be out of place for the diversity, inclusion, and equity bureaucracy? "We all understand that a Chief Diversity Officer must be as conversant with the latest evolutions of The Party Line as any Stalin-era zampolit." The reversion to form is the restoration of the old order.
Coined during the Soviet era, the position of pro rector in charge of vospitatel’naya rabota—which roughly translates as “character building”—was once a common fixture at universities. Such individuals were tasked with benign activities, such as organizing volunteering and student scholarships, as well as more insidious ones—namely, inculcating state propaganda in their young charges.
The post still exists at many universities, but now it will be mandatory at all of them. Announcing the measure, Russian’s deputy minister of education Petr Kucherenko emphasized the importance of developing students not only as specialists in their fields, but also as “fully-fledged citizens of Russian society,” according to state media.It's too bad that Inside Higher Ed has discontinued comments, as the Populist Normals could have all sorts of fun with that "developing students ... as specialists [and] fully-fledged citizens." Under the current special education dispensation, we get students who are conversant with all the pronoun protocols but can't use "to" or "too" properly in a sentence.
Scholars said that the move recalled times when Communist Russia intervened more heavily to shape young people’s worldview.
“Given that the old system is gone, the Russian re-Sovietizers are looking for opportunities to recreate similar structures in their universities,” said Anatoly Oleksiyenko, a scholar of post-Soviet studies in higher education policies based at the University of Hong Kong.
“Most likely the Kremlin will give this responsibility to the rectors, so that they also feel greater responsibility—and thus become extra cautious and anxious—in the processes of student admissions and development,” [Professor Oleksiyenko] said.Let us be grateful, I suppose, that nobody is raising the spectre of Trumpian populists imposing the censorship.
Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that the move reflected a broader trend toward the “re-Sovietization of Russian universities,” with institutions “resurrecting or reinventing” Soviet rhetoric.
[Mc Gill political scientist Maria] Popova disagreed with Oleksiyenko’s assessment that the move to establish pro rectors for moral development was “an indication of growing anxiety among the Russian politicians expecting massive protests in the population” as a result of economic depression and growing frustration over the war.The moral development bureaucracy will also be ready, in case degenerate fraternity parties become popular in Russia.
“There is no evidence of massive protests brewing and I doubt that the regime has indication of it,” she said. “It’s rather pre-empting. It’s covering all its bases, so if an antiwar movement were to emerge and grow stronger, it could be nipped in the bud.”
CN wants to create its own route to Kansas City by prying away Kansas City Southern’s former Gateway Western trackage linking Springfield, Ill., with KC and St. Louis. CN’s request that CP be forced to divest the Gateway Western is reminiscent of Conrail’s failed attempts to scoop up Southern Pacific’s eastern lines during the Union Pacific-SP merger in 1995 and 1996. The key difference is that Conrail wanted SP’s crown jewel – access to Gulf Coast chemical plants and its Cotton Belt main lines to St. Louis. CN wants to create a new single-line route from Kansas City to Eastern Canada that it says would convert 80,000 shipments from truck to rail annually, or a third more than the entire CPKC merger. There’s no precedent for a carveout like what CN is proposing. And it seems to be a long shot under the old merger review rules under which CPKC is being judged.On the other hand, people who live in areas where a lot of trains run professed dismay that ... a few more trains might be run.
The Coalition to Stop CPKC, made up of eight towns along CP’s Elgin Subdivision west of Chicago, made demands that can only be described as outlandish. They claim that up to $9.5 billion – yes, billion with a B – is required to mitigate the impact of freight-train traffic rising from the current three per day to 11 per day. The price tag is more than double the cost of the 70 improvement projects envisioned as part of the CREATE plan in and around Chicago. This is utter nonsense, and the STB should recognize it as such.Only very old residents of those communities might remember how much more heavily trafficked that line was when some of Union Pacific's interchange traffic plus meat out of northern Iowa and a few trains out of Kansas City rolled on that line. But Chicago's Metra got involved.
In contrast, the county that includes Minneapolis simply identifies potential merger-related traffic and grade-crossing issues, asks CP to study them, and then fund necessary improvements. This is the right and reasonable way to go about it.
Metra shares trackage with CP freight on two routes, its Milwaukee District-North and Milwaukee District-West lines — routes owned by Metra but dispatched by CP. The filing says CP has a “history of non-cooperation and contractual breaches with Metra,” that its “poor dispatching” leads to regular train delays, and that the Metra-owned infrastructure used by CP freights “cannot accommodate” the trains the merger would bring. It says modeling for its Milwaukee West line shows delays per 100 train-miles will increase by more than 400%.After what we've learned about climate modelling and contagion modelling, perhaps we ought be skeptical of railroad companies essentially messing about with Train Dispatcher and coming up with scary scenarios. There's no word on whether Canadian Pacific plan to restore the second main track west of Elgin, or whether Wisconsin and Southern, or whoever operate the former Milwaukee Road trackage from Prairie du Chien to Madison to Fox Lake might seek to wet their beaks on some of that new traffic.
Not somebody who suggested the way to punish Republicans who were too Trump-friendly is to vote for Democrats, no way. That is to say, S. E. Cupp, and the Bulwark types, and George Will. The pompous, bow-tied, Chicago Cub and American Flyer fan is still at it, still trying to shame the Trumpian elements of the Republican coalition.Mr Will recognized, dimly, what his advocacy brought. Follow the link if you want. It's this message I want to reinforce. "Dear reader, if you're uneasy about that sort of Republican ... and your choice is between a Trumpian showboater and a Squad-adjacent Democrat, reject the false binary, and don't let those irritated rumps on the extreme get your vote. There might be libertarians or socialists or free-soilers elsewhere on the ballot."
Dear #NeverTrump crowd, reject the false binary. Your "punish the Trumpians by electing Democrats" contributed to this. https://t.co/x2zXCSckEM
— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) June 24, 2022
Now is a terrible time for sane, sensible Republicans. It's not bad enough that in 2020, Americans installed Joe Biden in the presidency with a Democratic Congress. Worse is that their fellow Republicans have become a dire threat to common sense, mature governance and constitutional democracy.He could have noted, as a number of people with bigger platforms than I have, that the national election of 2020 was popular sentiment to gridlock the national government, with the Democrats only getting that slim margin thanks to Donald Trump being his own worst enemy and queering the pitch in the Georgia Senate runoffs. That filled the Jarrett regency with all sorts of delusions, and we find ourselves scrambling for baby formula, scrimping to fuel the cars, and being told by Our Intellectual Betters to buy electric cars.
The Jan. 6 committee hearings have made it plain that the critical divide in this country is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's between Republicans and Republicans.
Republicans who follow in the path of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, once conservative heroes, are now outnumbered and reviled as RINOs.We have to look no further than the streets of Washington, D.C. on days other than 6 January 2021, or the empty jails of Democrat cities to see the kind of regard Democrats have for regular order. Mr Chapman's advice simply gives the agenda of Bernie Sanders more purchase than it otherwise would have.
How can they fight back? They can, of course, run and support primary candidates who are willing to break with Trump, his lies and his reckless indulgence of extremism.
But when that fails, they also have to be prepared to do what many have never done before: vote Democratic. However large their differences on taxes, abortion rights, oil drilling or immigration, they agree with Democrats on the most urgent issue of our day, which is upholding the Constitution and saving democracy.
Turning to the political economy, Brad De Long offers a candidate for Quote of the Month, proclaiming anathema on all politicians.Valerie Jarrett is a Chicago politician, as is potbellied dictator J. B. Pritzker, and earlier this year the Springfield Supreme Soviet authorized some temporary tax holidays, and required stores to call attention to their act of largesse. That's spawned a clinic in the way to demonstrate the folly of a law while complying with it.Democrats are (because of the environmentalist wing of the party) generally in favor of higher gasoline taxes and higher gasoline prices--except when gasoline prices are high). Republicans are in favor of letting oil markets "work"--except when gasoline prices are high.'Swar immer so.
But the chances of pro-growth reform are effectively zero. The governor is a hard-core leftist (as well as a hypocrite) and the state legislature is controlled by government employee unions.I'm not sure what to make of Citadel, a hedge fund, joining Boeing and Caterpillar moving money and offices out of Illinois. Isn't Citadel's Ken Griffin a major Republican money man?
That is, what do the Articles of War have to say about contraband property, including slaves compelled to dig fortifications for rebellious commanders? And what rights do slaveowners have to seek redress under the Fugitive Slave Law to request the return of their property, when said property took advantage of the presence of Federal troops to run away. (Yes, that happened. New example of chutzpah: renounce allegiance to the United States, then call on its government to enforce its own laws.) Thus depriving slaveholders of their property as a way of reducing their ability to wage war is consistent with existing rules of war calling for the confiscation of contraband property, and depriving slaveholders of their redress under the Fugitive Slave Law is most easily accomplished by preemptively abridging those property rights.Texas, and Texan planters, were not much affected by the war, although once the Mississippi flowed unvexed to the sea, their opportunities to trade were constricted. The summary history, though, ought not be too complicated. "It ought not be that difficult to get the chronology straight: first there was Independence, then a series of compromises, including between feudal slave-holding and commercial abolition-minded states established the constitutional republic, then it took a 'great civil war' to secure that new birth of freedom." Whether that's a point on which neoclassical economists and Marxians might agree is left as an exercise.
In reality, the defeat of the wealthiest and most powerful slaveholding class on the planet was inconceivable without the victory of Lincoln at the head of a political party that called for the destruction of human bondage. Lincoln’s victory, and the threat it posed to slavery, was indeed the reason why the southern states seceded, as was spelled out in their secession resolutions and the Confederate constitution. Even more crucially, the victory of the Union would have been inconceivable without mass support in the North, the endurance of the Union army, the resistance of slaves in the South, and even the opposition of slaveless whites to secession, as historian Victoria Bynum and others have shown. And it was Lincoln’s Proclamation, as Marx explained at the time, that gave the conflict a definite social revolutionary character.The holiday itself is symbolic.
The reality is that holidays don't so much commemorate accurate understandings of our nation's past, as much as they celebrate broadly held ideals and aspirations. As a national holiday, Juneteenth commemorates many laudable ideals—most notably the promise of racial equality. And while lingering racial disparities in income, wealth, healthcare, education, and mass incarceration make plain we have yet to achieve this goal, Juneteenth reminds us of both the progress black Americans have made since the Civil War and the work we, as a nation, have yet to complete.It is altogether fitting and proper, though, that if July 4 is about the new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, June 19 might continue the proposition, with the nation having a new birth of freedom. "America is a promise, one that has yet to be met. As July 4 commemorates the initiation of that promise, Juneteenth commemorates the work yet to be done, reminding us all that there are still miles to go before we sleep."
World swimming’s governing body effectively banned transgender athletes from competing in women’s events on Sunday.I should hope not, as it's crazy to talk about puberty blockers for kids who aren't even at puberty, let alone capable of a sexual experience, and preadolescence is not the age of majority for anything else, including being able to drive a car, drink a beer, carry a gun, or be invested as Prince of Wales. But experiments against reality have to crash into reality.
FINA members at the organization’s extraordinary general congress voted 71.5% in favor of its new “gender inclusion policy” that only permits swimmers who transitioned before age 12 to compete in women’s events.
“This is not saying that people are encouraged to transition by the age of 12. It’s what the scientists are saying, that if you transition after the start of puberty, you have an advantage, which is unfair,” James Pearce, who is the spokesperson for FINA president Husain Al-Musallam, told The Associated Press.
“They’re not saying everyone should transition by age 11, that’s ridiculous. You can’t transition by that age in most countries and hopefully you wouldn’t be encouraged to. Basically, what they’re saying is that it is not feasible for people who have transitioned to compete without having an advantage.”
The tide is turning as more “detransitioners,” now young adults, tell their tales of woe.Maybe it's time for the medical and behavioral scientists to behave like Responsible Adults.
The Post told some of their stories over the weekend. Chloe decided she was transgender at 12, was placed on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 15. By 16 she realized it was all a mistake. But testosterone had masculinized her jawline, broadened her shoulders, given her facial hair and may have stolen her fertility.
Disproportionate numbers of young people who go to gender clinics are reported to be autistic or have poor mental health, which makes the rush to feed them hormones and mutilate their bodies all the more reprehensible.In so doing, do the Wise Experts risk more anger from the people they've misled?
What we see is that the medical profession is not proceeding with caution, as they once did in the “watchful waiting” era when most kids grew out of any gender confusion, with some just being gay.
Because transitioning at the age of 12 is a form of child abuse. Chemical castration is child abuse. Mutilating the genitals of an individual who is not yet able to fight for their country or vote-even if it’s for a numbskull who falls off a stationary bicycle-is child abuse. Loving and supporting your child to the point of not being able to shoot him or her with the simple reality of their chromosomal makeup is child abuse.Perhaps, like with other extreme popular delusions, the end comes when the people most aware that the experiments against reality are running into reality, whether it's swim teams, or perhaps employers who cannot find people of ability, are the first to say no.
Brightline’s plan to extend its passenger route past the Orlando Convention Center, Disney World, and down the wide median of Interstate 4 to Tampa got a public boost Wednesday with the announcement that the U.S. Department of Transportation would release a $15.875 million Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvement (CRISI) grant.So much analysis before the tracks go down. It appears, though, that there will be tracks under the Christmas tree at the Orlando airport.
The funding will support preliminary engineering activities and environmental approvals required to construct a rail system between Orlando International Airport and Tampa. Activities include completing 15% and 30% engineering design for a completely grade-separated, mostly double-tracked line built within the right-of-way of the I-4 median and other existing transportation corridors.
A Brightline source, clarifying [company chairman Wes] Edens’ Tuesday statement to the Washington Post, tells Trains News Wire that the company fully expects that test trains will be running on the company’s new route between West Palm Beach and Orlando International Airport as soon as track structures and signaling permit. This is likely to happen even before Christmas 2022, but revenue service is still scheduled to launch at an “early 2023” date to be announced once crew qualification and route certification is completed.Brightline are also looking at at twenty other city pairs for corridor development, and (is anyone surprised?) the biggest impediment to getting going is analysis paralysis.
Permitting is the “biggest challenge” in rail infrastructure, [Mr Edens] says: “The actual project that is on the precipice of getting permitted from Vegas to L.A. started actually 15 years ago. We got involved in it about three and a half years ago. The total cost, the hard-dollar cost by the time we get our permits and are ready to start construction, it would be about $550 million … I think if you want to see this happen in a lot of other places, as I do, we have to make it a little bit easier for people to access.”Even with the procedural hangups, Brightline well might be eating Amtrak's lunch.
Under the twin banners of “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility,” we continue asking our public schools to identify the most academically talented children and prepare them for leafy academic enclaves, from whence they can be sorted into well-paying jobs in the globe’s most prosperous cities. In our zeal to optimize this system for extracting each diamond from the rough, we willfully neglect everyone else.That zeal might validate the people who have been prepared from day care to land on the partner track in investment banking or high profile law, in part by expanding the pool of people who are called, but not chosen. The costs might be substantial.
And heaven forbid someone who could have become a prestigious management consultant in New York City instead becomes a successful general contractor and leader in the community where he was raised. This offends the meritocratic sensibilities of an elite that sees its own pathway as uniquely worthy and wants to believe that opening the same pathway to all will validate the game it has won. So education reformers focus religiously on test scores and college admissions, treat everyone as a prospective college graduate, and when that fails for most, well, they promise to keep trying.No, I was not being outrageous about expanding the pool, and the frustration.
This is doubly wrong. It overestimates the cost of some people failing to maximize their academic potential. Building a decent life in one’s own community is hardly a prison sentence.
Our current approach also underestimates the cost of failing to serve the vast majority of young Americans. They are guilty of nothing but lacking the academic aptitude and career ambition that constitute “merit” according to those blessed with plenty of both. Yet we fail to prepare them for success, often burden them with debt, tell them they are inadequate, and then wonder why they fail to find good jobs, build strong families, or participate effectively as citizens. So many of our nation’s major problems—rising inequality, geographic concentration of wealth, deindustrialization, labor-force dropout, declining family formation, “deaths of despair”—derive in part from an education system dedicated to strip-mining talent out of communities rather than supporting talent in them.That's quite apart from the failure of those meritocrats to deliver the kind of leadership they congratulate themselves over.
A shortage of pilots is clobbering small airports and regional airlines across the country, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.I issued a call for further study.
Airline pilots are getting hired by bigger carriers, forcing smaller airports to offer fewer flights, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Some commercial airlines, such as SkyWest Airlines, are ceasing operations in a number of small cities altogether.
There's got to be a research project for somebody on the economics of a relatively short regional flight with no more than a bus load of passengers on board. A lot of those regional carriers depend on the so-called essential air service subsidy to cover what the code-sharing partner carrier doesn't. There aren't many amenities on those regional planes in any event.Ask and you might receive. "SkyWest Airlines wants to end most of its Essential Air Service flying by June 10." The details are in the article, it is the map I wish to address.
Meanwhile, the people inside and outside government are too wedded either to high-end bullet trains or local rapid transit to consider supplementing the regional air carriers with regional passenger trains.
The orthodoxies of the postwar world were trembling -- the Keynesian theories of economics, the social workers' theorems of the Great Society were demonstrably inadequate. So, too, were engineering theories, planning theories, finance theories. The government had built highways which destroyed cities and ruined railways and public transportation; the government had financed suburbs with cheap credit and strangled the cities that lived inside their ring; it had pumped in education to create an elite without responsibilities; it had accepted, in noble, high conscience, the revolution of civil rights -- but dumped its burdens on cities unable to sustain the burden; it had liberalized the immigration laws of the country -- and overwhelmed, with a new absorption problem, cities already strained to the breaking point by the civil-rights revolution.Arguably those continuing failures have given me no end of work to do, whethe it's squandering the victory dividend, the failure of the Great Society, urban renewal and expressways, the unsustainable suburban experiment, and the positional arms race generating credentialed people who never learned how not to be stupid about being smart.
From the founding of the country on, the central instinct and pride of the American liberal has been to keep opportunity for individuals open. For two centuries the wars of American liberals -- against King George, against the banks, against the slaveholders, against the railways, against the trusts, against the bosses -- have reflected a doctrine which is more than politics, a doctrine which is of the essence of the culture of the nation: No man must be locked into or hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape. He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty.Then came the 1972 rules on the composition of state delegations at the Democrats' nominating convention.
By insisting on a fixed proportion of youth, for example, and ignoring a fixed proportion of the elderly, it excluded the old. By insisting on a fixed proportion of blacks, Indians, or Spanish-speaking and ignoring, say, Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, old-stock colonials, it restricted. It restricted for the highest of moral purposes buttressed by the history of the previous decade.In so doing, that gave populists from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump an opening.
Somehow, by the end of the sixties these programs had themselves become values. However much the real world might fear liberal programs, it must submit because programs were morality, even after programs had gone wrong in visible practice.These days, the Jarrett regency would like to obtain that sort of deference, when the incompetence that is their diversity is on plain view.
On the long march of the American people to the uplands, most have usually been willing to go along so long as they feel that they or their children will not be discarded, or crushed, or sacrificed in the journey; they will follow as long as they feel those at the head of the march have a competence, a skill, a practical understanding of affairs which touch their lives. At Miami the music began to frighen people.If the class dimensions of Selective Service weren't enough, perhaps the corona tyranny and the online schooling kids were getting is.
The hot sauce is made from sun-ripened red jalapeño-hybrid chili peppers.Last summer's harvest was pretty good, and this summer's plants are started, and due for a dose of summer heat this week.
At the time, Huy Fong Foods reminded its customer base that the company started experiencing a shortage of chili pepper inventory back in July 2020. The shortage worsened in recent months after poor weather conditions adversely affected chili crops this year.
Why wouldn’t his administration go through normal legislative process for any of the COVID matters that still legitimately need attention?Let's hope that the resentment leads to accountability in the election. Mr Glennon continues (and I'm quoting at length because the message is important),
The General Assembly would no doubt authorize things still reasonably needed — and there are some, which have been in recent emergency orders. They include uncontroversial things like relaxed telehealth rules, healthcare worker background checks and daycare vaccination/testing requirements. Masking is still required in healthcare and congregate care settings. You can see a list of prior emergency orders that have been extended under the latest emergency order which was issued with the Disaster Proclamation.
All that could easily be authorized by the General Assembly, making emergency powers unnecessary. The supermajority Pritzker’s party holds could easily pass a single bill covering everything in the orders, with or without expiration dates.
Continued reliance on emergency power therefore seems like an unnecessary provocation. Illinois is becoming an outlier and fueling further resentment to one-person rule.
First, Illinois’ ruling class probably doesn’t care about perceptions of one-person rule. It appears they’ve concluded they can shrug off as “right wingers” anybody who complains about autocracy.It's worse than that, dear reader. There was a clarifying moment in the Illinois Republican primary last week.
They’re probably right about that in Illinois since the press now ignores it.
Second, you have to wonder if they are thinking just like at Anthony Fauci recently admitted to, which is that the establishment’s primary concern is to firmly cement the political and legal precedent for vast, unilateral administrative power. It’s about hoarding power, in other words.
Fauci last week said that the mask mandate for air travel wasn’t so much about health safety as it was about preserving power. It’s “less about mandates on the plane than it is about who has the right and the authority and the capability of making public health decisions,” Fauci said. “And I believe that the Department of Justice is operating on the principle that decisions that are public health decisions belong with the public health agency — in this case, the CDC. So it’s more of a matter of principle of where the authority lies than it is about whether or not there’s ‘gonna be a mandate on a plane or not.”
Whether deliberate or not, the power-hoarding precedent is indeed being set — a broad and dangerous precedent. Recent emergency orders include claims to authority that are very broad and would be controversial if enforced. Some earlier COVID emergency orders, for example, included power to set price controls, which has gotten little attention. Despite inflation exceeding 12%, price increases are prohibited for goods and services related to COVID treatment. Price controls obviously should not be set by a governor unilaterally.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Jesse Sullivan, who called on the Democratic incumbent to issue a disaster declaration in Chicago and deploy the National Guard to help quell the city’s violence.No. The point of electing a governor is to govern according to constitutional principles. It does no good to exchange one dictator for another, just because the new dictator might issue ukases you like better. In case Mr Glennon wasn't emphatic enough, here's Reason's J. D. Tuccille, elaborating.
“Somehow, 28 months in (to the pandemic), J.B. Pritzker is still signing monthly COVID disaster proclamations, but he is unwilling or unable to act on an even more pressing crisis — the senseless violence ravaging the streets of Chicago,” Sullivan, a venture capitalist from Petersburg, said in a statement. “If Pritzker says that COVID is still an emergency but police shootings aren’t, he needs to open his eyes.”
We can again dine indoors, walk unmasked in public, and go to the gym through the front door instead of sneaking in the back in defiance of lockdown rules. But there's a sense that the powers-that-be don't want us to get accustomed to free movement and uncovered faces.The Illinois gubernatorial primary is shaping up as an unedifying missed opportunity for the Republicans. I'll likely grouse about that in the next few days.
"We're going to be dealing with this virus on a chronic basis," Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, recently commented in the tone of an official who is having trouble surrendering his moment in the limelight. "We are not going to eradicate this."
But while "the pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented withdrawal of civil liberties among developed democracies and authoritarian regimes alike," in the words of The Economist's Democracy Index 2021, American officials still have limited power when people push back. At some point, they have to loosen their grip or else get sued, voted out of office, or ignored. Areas where they exercise relatively unchecked power, such as government schools and ports of entry, are windows into what officialdom would like to do if they had a free hand. But even when they get their way, that doesn't mean there's no escape. Just watch families flee public schools.
