NO. NEXT QUESTION?

Today's demonstration that there's no common sense at Common Dreams comes from Stephen Zunes.  "Can Biden Learn From 1968 Before It’s Too Late?"  For purposes of this post let us understand that it is not Biden learning, rather it is his puppet masters.  The premise of Mr Zunes's column, though, is amusing.  "In order to get the necessary turnout among young people, minorities, and progressives to prevent a Republican victory in November, the Biden administration needs to change its policies, and soon."  I don't know that the parallel works: in 1968 Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace all were pretty clear on where they stood on things, and nobody tried the conjuring trick of running Dementia Joe as some sort of not-quite-crazy Democrat until you looked at the platform, but who ever pays attention to party platforms?  Perhaps we should have.  "Dementia Joe is trapped.  His Justice Department is still holding people who trespassed in and disrupted day-to-day political activities in the Federal Capitol: should he shout out a Right on! to people occupying landmark buildings at Columbia or UCLA, the Trump ads would write themselves."

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LEGAL RESIDENCY BY DECREE.

The positive theory of immigration amnesties, starting with a maintained hypothesis that the underground economy serves as a sort of apprenticeship, is too crass for Sensitive People.  Thus we get either protracted tussles in successive Congresses over some sort of procedural reform, or presidents issuing ukases.  Those bring a different sort of troubles, as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner, describing "a morally right but politically fraught move," explains.

I’m more of a stickler for the rules than most but it’s really hard to make a good moral argument for deporting people married to American citizens because they didn’t have permission to be in the country at the time of the ceremony. While there are doubtless some small percentage of people who get married to game the immigration system, the overwhelming number of these people are simply building lives together and starting (or have long since started) families. Sending them back to their countries of origin, and thus separating them from their family, for months or even years would be unconscionably cruel.

At the same time, it’s not obvious to me that this is a sound political move. I’m skeptical that the number of “mixed families” in battleground states outweighs the percentage wanting to crack down harder on the border.

Well, yeah, a few high-profile crimes with illegal aliens held as suspects will do that.  Moreover, it is only fitting and proper that if people, whether as establishmentarian political scientists or as Democrats and their court intellectuals, vest all their hopes in a president, that the blame will land in the Oval Office, sooner or later.  "There’s no reason at all to doubt that Americans writ large are frustrated by our border policies and, unfair though it may be, blame Biden as the incumbent President."  Live by the executive order, die by the executive order.  His conclusion, though, suggests that the past century has been the most roundabout journey from Ellis Island to Ellis Island.  "Biden is on the right side of the issue, wanting to toughen border enforcement and end the abuse of the asylum system while treating folks who have been here for years in violation of our immigration laws with some sense of humanity. We’ll see whether that pays off politically."

LET'S UNDO THE FATAL CONCEITS.

As long as I'm in a taking-dim-views mood, let's recall, dear reader, why Technocracy Fails.  "Technocrats, you see, are pretty good at pulling the right policy levers, and Wise Experts can always design legislation and write the subsequent rules to Improve The General Welfare."

Alas, in Washington, a lot of that designing and rewriting slipped from the hands of The People's Representatives to what the Militant Normals like to call "unelected bureaucrats," and Congress was fine to leave the grunt work to others, and Separation of Powers wasn't something for courts to worry about.

I could set this post to a Sixties rhyming chant: Two! Four! Six! Eight! Smash the Administrative State!  We've already called attention to the overreach.  "The Environmental Protection Agency allocation tsar recently set hand and seal to ukases requiring multiple changes in the personal automobiles and in the commercial trucking business."

Perhaps, notes Reason contributor Veronique de Rugy, not for much longer.  "The Supreme Court May Be on the Brink of Radically Restricting Bureaucrats' Power."  The problem, she notes, combines legislative lassitude with specialist ambition.

The United States Constitution vests all legislative powers in Congress. Yet, over the past century, we've witnessed a disturbing trend of legislators increasingly delegating much of the authority to set the laws that govern the land to the executive branch, which includes unelected officials at administrative agencies. This undermines democratic accountability, contributes to government bloat and abuse of powers, and disrupts the balance of power crafted so carefully by the Framers.

Reasserting congressional authority is essential for maintaining a balanced government and ensuring that policies reflect voters' wishes. It's also the best hope for promoting economic freedom and growth. Unfortunately, getting Congress to stop evading its authority is an uphill battle. After all, we're talking about an institution that systematically fails to do another of its primary jobs by passing legitimate budgets on a timely basis.

Nevertheless, there is some light at the end of the tunnel, as the Supreme Court might soon stop being so deferential to executive branch agencies in interpreting the laws set by Congress.

In doing so, the Court is going to upset both Business as Usual and the teaching and research plans of political economists.  For Business as Usual has meant Congress not concerning itself with the details of regulation (craft a bill with an appealing title, put "It is the intent of Congress that ..." in the preamble, and conclude each section with "The Secretary shall issue regulations ..., which means, in practice, some task force of newly-hired Master of Public Administration types draft the regulations) in part because getting the details right is work (can you imagine Jasmine Crockett and Marjorie Greene on fisheries or retention toilets on trains) and in part because years of Academic Accomplishments argue in favor of these Issues as Too Subtle for Laymen.  (Thus, too, did the reading of the entrails of chickens become Holy.)  Moreover, there was enough in the way of those academic arguments to the effect that courts were of limited utility in balancing the conflicting claims, and thus best defer to those rookie public officials, who ... are unelected bureaucrats.)

LET'S PRETEND THAT PASSING LEGISLATION IS GOVERNING.

I'm no fan of "got a problem, get a program."

Perhaps the voters who voted were not in favor of Doing Anything More, and at least some of the eligible voters who didn't vote didn't see that What Was Done worked. If What Was Done had more than a little rent-seeking in it, all the better.

Thus, I'm not impressed with recent claims by acolytes of the Jarrett regency to put their figurehead president figuratively on Mt. Rushmore.  Recently Wisconsin senator Tammy Baldwin went to the virtual Recombobulation Area to make a video, transcript not yet released.  A service called Wisconsin Right Now released the pretense I call attention to.  "Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin insists that the Joe Biden presidency is 'one of the most successful administrations in generations. In terms of legislative accomplishments, it is one of the most successful administrations in generations. And passing legislation that will have generational impact, that will unfold over the next decade, is really striking.'"

THEY'RE MUCH MORE USEFUL AS FIGURES OF FUN.

Donald Trump might be up in the presidential preference polls, and that's scaring the usual suspects.  Rachel Maddow recently appeared as guest on "The View" and the fear-fest began.

RACHEL MADDOW: Well, so, I was asked, “Am I worried about me?” And my answer was I'm worried about all of us. I'm no worried about me than I am worried about everybody in the country. I think it's bad to have somebody saying give me as much power as you can in this country so I can use it to go after other Americans, so I can use it to go after these subhuman internal enemies and I will destroy them. That's just not a good system for anybody and I don't think anybody is safe if that's the sort of basis on which he wants to get more power.

BEHAR: Well remember when Nixon had an enemy's list, that was a proud moment when they were on the enemies list. That was a proud moment for a lot of people if they made it onto the enemies list. Maybe we have to turn it around like that.

MADDOW: I mean I don't – if he decides to go after you or me or anybody who is well-known, you know, we have resources, we will likely be fine, but I think there's a pattern where he picks out individual people and effectively terrorizes them. I mean, there's Stormy Daniels wearing a bulletproof vest to get into the courthouse.

BEHAR: Once you have political violence you have fascism following that. So you've characterized some of Trump's rhetoric as being pornographically violent. That's a good phrase, I like it. In just the last weeks he's joked about his supporters committing suicide, listen to this, did you catch this, he tells them wouldn't it be bet tore commit suicide than to vote for Biden? He's going full Jim Jones now, you know? It's like the Kool-Aid thing. Is he losing it or what? Do they think he's kidding when he says that? What?

There must be a corollary to "your social standing varies inversely to your familiarity with Las Vegas" that governs where "The View" is concerned, and yet, the whiff of fascism drives ratings, doesn't it?

THE PUNISHMENT CYCLES CONTINUE.

Do we have any more compelling evidence of the emptiness of politics than the touting of false narratives by the True Believers?  Guardian contributor Rachel Leingang files a refreshingly objective, given the source, report on what the Jarrett regency is calling "cheap fakes."

For viewers of rightwing media or social media feeds tailored toward conservatives, these videos of Biden surface near-daily in an attempt to underscore one of the president’s key liabilities, his age.

They’re often selectively edited to make Biden look, well, old. They kick off a series of headlines about how his age or senility is showing, then another series of headlines about how the videos are created to mislead.

The videos, and the subsequent hand-wringing over them, show how bifurcated today’s political and social media ecosystems are. Few watch a full speech or a full newscast, instead getting a quick example of what they missed from an account they align with. Your view of a given event – of a speech by a president, or a campaign rally - is colored first, and often predominantly, by the way it’s presented by the people you follow.

Yes, that's both-sides-ism, it's what you'd expect from punishment cycles, and it's not terribly edifying.  Dear reader, if the Democrats' policies are as bad as Republicans claim, does the senility or not of the president matter?  Conversely, if those policies are working, does the erratic behavior of the former president matter?  Only, she continues, because both major parties are running geezers.

In reality, both presidential candidates are old, a fact that doesn’t change. Trump is 78; Biden is 81. Whether you view them as prone to senior moments, incoherent and rambling, or slow on their feet relates mostly to your views on who they are – and the content you’re seeing about it.

The two candidates’ ages may create more of these gaffes, and the coverage of these gaffes gets extended because voters are concerned about the age of the next president. There seems to be a “little bit of a ping pong game of who has the senior moment du jour”, Schafer said. Endless repetition of age-related criticisms can influence voters and reinforce concerns they have over fitness for office, which is why these news cycles, and promotion by both campaigns, continue.

These separate media ecosystems aren’t new this election cycle, though they create alternate realities for their viewers. It’s not just how something is covered, but whether it’s covered at all, [process-worshipper Bret] Schafer noted. A viewer of some rightwing media could be served coverage of a story incessantly while it doesn’t make headlines in the broader press.

Alas, the so-called "broader press" has revealed itself, or so the Trumpian populists think, as Democrat operatives with bylines.

WATCH: Fox’s @GregGutfeld calls out liberal media over claims from White House that Biden videos are ‘cheap fakes’: "Where were these anti-hoaxers in the ‘fine people hoax’, the ‘drinking bleach hoax’, the ‘koi pond hoax’, the ‘migrant kids in cages hoax’, the ‘border patrol… pic.twitter.com/LmnygWM4kW

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) June 18, 2024

So it goes.  But invocations of legislation passed, bridge-building commenced, money printed, and military hardware abandoned, you know, the meat and potatoes of governing, aren't terribly interesting.  Thus we focus on the presidency, er, the gerontocrats seeking the office, and neglect the dog-catcher and the school board and the city council.

MAYBE HE SHOULD HAVE STUCK TO SUMMER STOCK.

Last fall, the University of Wisconsin system removed LaCrosse chancellor Joe Gow for conduct unbecoming.  The university at LaCrosse is in the middle of a for cause investigation stripping him of tenure in communication studies.

The former chancellor, Joe Gow, said [in April] that interim Chancellor Betsy Morgan filed three charges against him March 29, accusing him of unethical conduct, failing to cooperate with an investigation, and using UW-La Crosse computers to produce pornographic materials.

Gow declined to share a letter from Morgan detailing the charges, saying he didn't want to look as though he is trying to play out his case in the media.

But he said the ethics charge may be connected to his writings in two pornographic e-books. He declined to go into detail. The allegation of failure to cooperate stems from his refusal to speak to an outside law firm investigating the matter without an attorney, he said. He denied using any UW state-owned equipment or state dollars to produce porn.

It's not pretty.  There's always the tension between professionalism and transgressivity in the university.  So it is playing out in LaCrosse.

Some Wisconsin Republicans have embraced the system’s efforts to fire Gow, arguing that his behavior is amoral and unbefitting of a public university employee. But free speech advocates have decried the move as an attempt by the system to save face in the wake of an embarrassing scandal. They argue that firing Gow from his tenured faculty job violates the First Amendment, which protects sexually explicit speech—including the pornography Gow made outside the university.

It verges into misappropriating state property territory: are we headed for a pass wherein faculty shy away from using their home computers and office supplies for academic work because the boundaries on the use of office computers are elastic?

Gow is also accused of refusing to cooperate with the investigation into his firing, including by allegedly deleting information from university-owned computers. Related charges on technology-use policies allege that Gow received “vendor emails” at his work account “for sex toys and other sex products,” and configured web browsers on a university laptop to remember login credentials for seven pornographic sites, among other things.

The former chancellor is continuing to rely on freedom of speech defenses.

“At root here, what we have is a situation where I exercised my First Amendment freedoms, did things on my own time, and put them on social media, on the internet. And that’s what this case ultimately is about. Do we have a First Amendment freedom to do that?” he said.

Gow also disputes the notion he made money off the videos, as UW officials have claimed; if he earned more than $1,000 a year from them, he would be required as a public official to report the income. Instead, Gow said his video ventures were costly rather than profitable.

Which would have been no big deal had he and the lady made a few bucks from summer stock.

THERE ARE NO UNPLANNED PROPERTY RENOVATORS IN MILWAUKEE.

Not too long ago, Illinois changed its legal language to refer to people who had been arrested, stood trial, or convicted, as "justice-impacted individuals."  So it often goes with Inclusive Euphemism.  Chicago Contrarian contributor J. D. Busch proposed a number of other circumlocutionsproposed a number of other circumlocutions, with the arsonist now described as in the title.

Unlike many of you cops, racists, Islamophobes and MAGA members in the audience (by Chicago standards, that includes RFK supporters, too), I find this bill to be a wonderful idea, a gateway to ushering in an entirely new branch of the English language that will show the path to an intersectional utopia, where bad means good, and good means bad (as it should be). In short: “Justice-impacted individuals” represents one small step for cisman, and one giant step for cismankind.

He got unsolicited assistance from Grammarly: make sure you've sipped your Sprecher before you click over.

PUT ANOTHER PIN IN IT.

Hurricanes are part of the great heat cycle, moving warmer water and air from the equator to the poles.  The following excerpt comes from Heritage's Daily Signal, and the policy shop caveat applies.

Every year at this time, when hurricane season rolls around, corporate media start pumping out headlines linking the severity of hurricanes to climate change. But is there causation or correlation? And if changes in the climate do affect hurricanes, is it in the way climate activists claim?

Climatologist David Legates says, “[If] we have colder periods, we will get more hurricane activity. If we have warmer periods, the hurricane activity tends to drop off.”

Legates serves as a visiting fellow for the Science Advisory Committee in the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, and is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. He is also the co-author of the book “Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.”

We put a pin in one such prediction earlier this month, and followed up with the first set of confounding factors.  There's a lot more at the essay, including a number of charts suggesting all sorts of variability in hurricane activity, and a claim that the most active recorded hurricane seasons occurred during the Little Ice Age.  (Was it a late season hurricane that claimed Monitor?)

THE CASE FOR SUBURBAN LIVING.

Two apparently unrelated essays from the left wing make it.  We start with Stan Cox, part of the Common Dreams stable of provocateurs who provoke laughter, now pronouncing anathema on air conditioning.  (Never mind that all the weather broadcasters encourage people to seek shelter there as the temperatures do their summer thing.)  Mr Cox grants leave to do so, although not without the scolding.

I’ve always made it a point to emphasize the life-saving role that air-conditioning plays during severe heatwaves, stressing that what I want to see eliminated is the routine overcooling that occurs at other times. Consider the widespread American practice of keeping windows closed year-round and simply switching the thermostat from “heat” to “cool” in the spring and back to “heat” in the fall. That not only wastes energy and increases emissions, but also squanders opportunities to enjoy comfortably warm stretches of summertime and comfortably cool stretches of winter that commonly occur in much of the country. Sadly, though, if those grim climate forecasts prove correct (and unless global emissions are reduced dramatically and fast, there’s no doubt they will be), such temperate summer interludes will become rarer and shorter in the years ahead, and Americans will become even more dependent on indoor cooling.

I’m not going to stop defending open windows or critiquing air-conditioning just because the world’s getting hotter, but I’ll need to stress more than ever that the harms aggravated by air-conditioning extend well beyond global warming.

It being Common Dreams, those "harms" include a place of your own with an ample yard for the kiddos to play on.

I’ve often argued that air-conditioning’s role in molding America’s built environment and society in general is underappreciated. An exception was a 1999 survey in which members of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History were asked to rank “the top 10 influences on the American metropolis of the past 50 years.” Air-conditioning made the list at number nine. More importantly, through its key role in the massive post-World War II population movement from Rustbelt to Sunbelt, air-conditioning helped drive six more of those top-ten influences: the de-industrialization of northern cities; Sunbelt-style urban sprawl; enclosed shopping malls; downtown redevelopment; the Levittown-style suburban tract house (which, without air-conditioning, could have functioned only as what Fortune magazine characterized in 1953 as a “TV-equipped hotbox”); and the dominance of the automobile. (Imagine hundreds of thousands of sweat-soaked commuters stuck, windows down, under the August sun, in one of Atlanta’s or Dallas’ legendary traffic jams.)

That's in the usual line of Social Criticism from the collectivist types, right back to the first tract houses for returning G.I.s.  Perhaps the planned use development is an evolutionary dead end.

ENCOURAGING FAVORABLE SELF-SELECTION?

Our President has issued another ukase, this one intending to bring illegal aliens married to citizens who have generally stayed in work and out of jail into something resembling regular status, if not yet permanent resident visas let alone starting the clock to apply for citizenship.  The first link goes to the full statement.  Two passages are salient for today's post.  First, the policy gets rid of the "go away and reapply" elements of current policy.  "This new process will help certain noncitizen spouses and children apply for lawful permanent residence – status that they are already eligible for – without leaving the country."  Second, the ukase, provided it survives the legislative and legal scrutiny that's probably already under way, is consistent with the underground-economy-as-apprenticeship model of illegal immigration and amnesty that Eli Katz and I once wrote about.  "In order to be eligible, noncitizens must – as of June 17, 2024 – have resided in the United States for 10 or more years and be legally married to a U.S. citizen, while satisfying all applicable legal requirements. On average, those who are eligible for this process have resided in the U.S. for 23 years."

ENJOYING THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL?

So it goes when a noncooperative equilibrium breaks down.  "Once the punishment cycles start, though, everybody suffers."  In National Review, Berkeley attorney and Republican court intellectual John Yoo appears to be calling for at least one more punishment cycle.  "To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind."

Look, I don't know when this cold civil war started, was it the Canon Wars on campus, was it the House Republicans impeaching Bill Clinton, might it have been simmering since Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire?"  Donald Trump having the effrontery to stand for the presidency, to win the nomination, to then be elected president: a symptom of something gone wrong, which seems to be shaping up as a failure of the Credentialed Elite.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We, the people, have had enough of Our Progressive Betters.  "They ignored citizens who were fed up with being overrun by "immigrants," run over by inflation, beaten up by skyrocketing energy costs, pursuing "Green" policies that delivered the opposite result promised, suffering while waiting for a boiling frog Climate Apocalypse that never arrives but never ends and watching their national identities and standard of living being stripped away before their very eyes."  After a century of those Wise Experts being anything but, it's time to turf them out.  "As we, as a society, continue to destroy any sense of community, any sense of autonomy, any sense of personal responsibility, and liberty, as we continue to invest more and more power in people and institutions far removed from our lives and our interests, we also continue to make elections and elected officials more and more important in the operation of those lives. We continue to give people who are not especially smart, especially talented or even especially competent greater and greater control over us." Put succinctly, "People are annoyed by so much bureaucracy from Brussels."  They applied a corrective.  "Voters went to the polls and delivered a well-deserved and long-overdue thrashing of the malignant Left in voting for the European Parliament."  Why?  "Voters simply don’t trust mainstream parties to control immigration."  (Or much of anything else!)  No doubt there are latter-day Peter Jennings types scolding voters for having a temper tantrum.  Tango Sierra.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on mostly traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

SPEECH CODES ARE ALWAYS BAD.

I am not a fan of speech codes.  "My stance has always been 'Justice, freedom: still contested territory. Whether it is black or Palestinian or male lives that are being diminished by the administrative ethos, it is the administrative ethos that is wrong."  Nor am I impressed by legislation with ambitious sounding titles, and if the title becomes a twee acronym, my irritation only increases.

NARRATIVE JOURNALISM EXISTS.

I mean, when James Joyner of the establishmentarian Outside the Beltway catches it?  "A non-ruling by the Supreme Court is being touted as something else."  Is the continuance of a right to purchase more important than the legalities?  You decide.

Headline-only readers—which is to say, most readers—will come away with the impression that the Supreme Court ruled on the merits that there is a right to access this abortifacient. But they did no such thing. They simply ruled that the group of doctors who brought the suit lacked standing to do so.

The right to continue to purchase mifepristone, for now, might matter to the voters. As, perhaps, might downplaying the process when there's another narrative about how appointing Constitution-respecting Justices is a horrible form of court packing.

Perhaps, in a world with a greater respect for factual reporting, rather than celebrating personal truths that are anything but, the rephrasing Mr Joyner suggests would be what we read.

Even here, though, readers will likely come away with the impression that there was a ruling on the merits. Something like “Supreme Court Declines to Rule in Abortion Drug Mifepristone Case” would better serve the readers.

Perhaps, although reporters, copy editors, and whoever writes the headline would then get caught up in what the lede ought to be.  I bet there are a lot more readers for whom the continuing opportunity to buy abortion pills matters a lot more than the Court's reasoning, let alone the legal maneuvering to come up with a new petitioner with a better claim to standing.

REDISCOVERING AN OLD IDEA?

The editorial board at Chicago's Tribune recently hailed the completion of the South Shore Line's double tracking project as far as Michigan City, which included a restoration of more frequent trains.

On May 14, just in time for warm-weather trips to the Indiana Dunes National Park, the line, run by the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District (NICTD), will introduce a new expanded train schedule, a consequence of the completed double tracking of its electric-powered corridor lining Chicago and Northwest Indiana.

The improvements are very impressive. The South Shore Line, which was built between 1901 and 1908, now will offer an additional 14 weekday trains, including new express service that will take travelers from Chicago’s Millennium Station to the lovely dunes in just 57 minutes. As anyone headed to Indiana and Michigan resort towns will attest, those times are tough to beat by car, especially during the morning and evening rush. Improvements in addition to the new 18 miles of double tracking include new stations, better accessibility at existing stations, more parking, fewer at-grade crossings and expanded accommodations for bikes. Michigan City, a lakefront town with much potential that needs a lot of help given its struggling outlet mall and sleepy downtown, will be one of the major beneficiaries with its new 11th Street station. And students at Notre Dame now will find it much easier to hop a train to spend a day or a weekend in Chicago.

A few years ago I stumbled upon a party of North Carolina State fans enroute to a game in the shadow of Touchdown Jesus.  The South Bend service has not yet been augmented, the line east of Shops is still an interurban time machine, and the Morning and Evening Hot Shots drag lots of empty cars from or to South Bend thanks to new regulations that make adding or dropping cars at Shops only slightly less of a production than rendezvous and docking at the Space Station, while South Bend's government wrangles over whether to bring the trains to the west side of the airport, speeding up that trip, or return the trains to somewhere downtown, possibly the still-standing joint station next to the baseball park..

None of which deterred a writer to the Tribune, a few days later, from Thinking Big.  (Quoting from the May 8 edition on paper):

These upgraded electric-powered double tracks provide a real opportunity for expanded service from Chicago to the East, especially as Amtrak struggles to bring in trains over freight-owned or controlled tracks into Union Station.

Imagine inviting Brightline, the company building high-speed trains from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, to build high-speed tracks from this beautiful new asset to South Bend all the way to the Acela line on the East Coast.

I wonder if the corporate shell of the Goshen South Bend and Chicago Railway is still available.  Yes, Brightline being active at building Passenger Rail projects is encouraging, and yes, Indianans taking an interest in Regional Rail once again (first let's restore daily service between Chicago and Indianapolis, that once offered by a private contractor who got out); and yet there's nothing like excess enthusiasm to midwive disappointment.

LEON TROTSKY, MAY I INTRODUCE MILTON FRIEDMAN?

Regular readers are aware of where the real debt ceiling is.

Last week, Nick Beams at the World Socialist Web Site called attention to it.

Financial markets appear to have been enjoying a period of relative calm in the past year since they were shaken by the failure of three significant US banks in March 2023, requiring rescue operations by financial authorities.

But there are signs of turmoil building up beneath the surface. They centre on continuing possible liquidity problems in the $26 trillion US Treasury market, the basis of the global financial system, signs of currency divergences and concerns over the growing role of private credit in the financial system.

Last week a tremor went through the Treasury market when there was what was characterised as a “shaky auction” for $44 billion worth of seven-year US Treasury notes. The shortage of buyers mean that the big banks, which are crucial to the operation of their market as primary dealers, had to make up for the shortfall and purchase 17 percent of the debt, somewhat higher than the norm.

This followed an auction the previous day when there was subdued demand in an auction of two- and five-year debt.

The lack of demand, sending the price of debt lower, meant that the interest rate on the 10-year bond (the two move in the opposite direction), went to 4.63 percent, higher than it has been in some weeks.

The immediate cause is the realisation that the Federal Reserve is not going to make significant cuts in interest rates in the near future. At the start of this year, markets were pricing in as many as six rate cuts by the Fed in 2024. Now there are predictions there may not even be one.

We all know that, as we know the outcome: the money center banks who do the open market operations on behalf of the Fed had to add the unsold bonds to their balance sheets, thus crowding out those banks' ability to lend for such things as houses, locomotives, or hot pepper canneries.  Meanwhile China is going broke, slowly.

A fall in the value of the renminbi would impact on other countries, especially in Asia, which depend on the Chinese market, and could lead to stepped up action from the US, which has already accused China of dumping cheap products on the US and world markets. A devaluation would further lower the price of Chinese goods in the US and other markets.

But a one-off devaluation is a possibility because, as one Shanghai-based currency trader told the FT, there was “enormous downward pressure that has built up over the past few months.”

Another potential source of instability, already pointed out by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions, is the growth of private credit funding.

What's the big deal? Only this, dear reader: nowhere in that factually accurate column do you find any of the expected crowing about the final crisis of capitalism or the boilerplate closing paragraphs about the Vanguard of the Revolution.

STANDARDIZATION BEGETS MEDIOCRITY.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.  The sort of travel snob who scoffs at McDonald's and Holiday Inn misses the value proposition of those enterprises, which is that the fries would be hot and the room spruced up, and in summer there would be a pool for the kiddos.  At least that was true during the American High; of late, McDonald's have been trashing their value proposition and diners are noticing: although in their defense, on weekend mornings they were the only eatery operating in suburban Manchester and serving strong coffee the few times I've been there.

ALL ETERNITY TO MAKE AMENDS TO JOHN MCADAMS.

Marquette University announces the passing, at a relatively young age, of president Michael Lovell.

Marquette University President Michael Lovell died on Sunday following a three-year battle with cancer and a decade of service to the university, the university announced over the weekend.

Lovell was the first lay president in the Jesuit school's 133-year history and was in Rome on a Jesuit formation pilgrimage when he became sick and was taken to a hospital.

Lovell became Marquette's president in 2014 and focused on devotion and care for the campus and surrounding Milwaukee area.

Mr Lovell made an intra-city move, being called from Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Marquette.  Both he and his successor as Milwaukee chancellor, Mark Mone, recently dealt with cancer.

The article notes a number of difficulties that arose during Mr Lovell's presidency.

Faculty and staff objected to Lovell laying off 39 employees in 2021 as part of an effort to “right-size” the university. More recently, his plan to cut $31 million over the next seven years drew substantial pushback from staff who decried what they saw as a lack of transparency.

Campus climate also drew concern. As racial justice protests swept the country in 2020, Marquette students of color demanded more campus support. The university agreed to fund a Black student cultural center, hire Black mental health counselors and offer 40 new full-ride scholarships for Milwaukee Public Schools graduates.

Two years later, students of color disrupted a freshman welcome event to protest what they saw as a lack of resources for students of color. Marquette sanctioned the students, a move that outraged some members of the campus community who saw the punishment as missing the larger point students were trying to make.

So it has gone with higher education.  Marquette is far from the only university where the administrators have usurped faculty governance, and sanctioning dissidents is not unknown, even when the Jesuits aren't doing the sanctioning.  "The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes that President Lovell has done nothing to change Marquette's status among the worst schools for free speech.  It's fitting, I suppose, that a university notionally run by Jesuits would continue a tradition dating back to the Diet of Worms."

Now both Michael Lovell and John McAdams have departed this life.  R.I.P.

LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE RACE COMMITTEE.

American Thinker contributor Mike McDaniel summarizes in a brief passage why the Wise Experts aren't.

Their policies are perfect, non-falsifiable. They cannot fail. Yet they inevitably fail, and when they do, the fun begins. When Americans refuse to buy EVs that can only be because they’re too stupid to know what’s in their best interests. When they can’t afford an EV, that’s only because they don’t appreciate how good the economy actually is. When they complain about brownouts, they’re climate deniers.

The excuses offered may or may not be correct.  It doesn't matter.  The legislation, or the ukase, looked so good on the workshop room blackboard, and the Intentions were Good.  How dare you question our Good Intentions?