The crisis has not been averted, it has only been deferred.The hour might not yet have come, but ominous signs appear. "Demand for 30-Year Treasurys Proves Weak, Sending Yields Surging." That's how it begins. "The National Debt continues to accumulate, and one of these days the bond traders will only hold Treasuries at deep discounts."
What is the real debt ceiling? The value of the federal debt beyond which bond traders will not buy Treasuries.
When will the day of default be? Nobody knows the day or the hour.
The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield climbed above 4.8% on Thursday, from 4.655% the prior day, after a sale of $24 billion in bonds received far less demand from investors than the government is used to.Now try financing a new house or a new car, and look for credit card limits to be truncated because Our Political Masters pretend that capping credit card interest rates lowers borrowing costs.
Primary dealers, big banks who are obligated to finance whatever portion of a Treasury auction isn't purchased by other investors, bought nearly a quarter of the issuance—more than double their average in recent 30-year auctions, according to BMO Capital Markets.
Waning demand for long-term Treasurys rattled the stock and bond markets in recent months before the Treasury Department offered a dose of relief with less-aggressive borrowing plans than many expected.
Today's auction could revive worries that buyers of U.S. debt will now require higher interest rates to step up.
Another year, another $20 million lawsuit from Andy Stone over Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You."Yes, that song came out before Mariah Carey's. Apart from the "all I want" part, are they really that similar? Judge for yourself.
Stone, who performs as Vince Vance and the Valiants, filed a civil lawsuit against Carey, co-writer Walter Afanasieff, and Sony Music Entertainment in the Central District of California on Tuesday, alleging "copyright infringement and unjust enrichment" over a successful song — also titled "All I Want for Christmas Is You" — he co-wrote in Nashville and released in 1989.
A similar lawsuit was filed by Stone and co-writer Troy Powers (who is also a plaintiff on the current case) in Louisiana last June before it was dropped five months later.
In the new court documents obtained by PEOPLE, lawyers for Stone state that his "All I Want for Christmas Is You" received radio play in 1993 and became a hit on Billboard's Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart the following year, around the same time Carey's now-classic festive anthem was released.If that's not litigation enough for you, there's also a Liam Payne song, "All I Want for Christmas," but that one includes "Is you and me to fix this." Never mind Parson Brown or taking the girls tonight, the hits are in the frustration.
The filing claims that Carey copied the "compositional structure" of Stone's 1989 song, even though the documents also acknowledge the phrase "all I want for Christmas is you" wasn't originated by Stone.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs claim Carey and her collaborators "undoubtedly had access" to Stone's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" at the time of writing her homonymous song "given its wide commercial and cultural success."
At this moment, when there is an awful struggle over the Hebrews’ place in the world — so dire that you’re waiting for World War Three to vaporize everything you’ve ever cared about — one observes the Jewish American scene with trepidation. Since I am a Jewish American, I’m just going to flop this one on the table like so much meat to see what kind of animals it brings out of the woodwork to fight over it.Yes, he works in the gloom and doom that we have come to expect, and yet he recognizes that his kin have brought their own version of the Social Gospel into U. S. politics.
The Hamas war has exposed a deep current of animosity against Israel and against Jews generally world-wide, even here. This, you understand, is happening at a time of what we might call epic global political mental illness. A mass formation psychosis appears to grip many population groups, each in its own way, but often expressing itself as a longing for death, ranging from the economic suicide of Western Europe to the rise of Jihad to the desolate nihilism of American nose-ring youth.
Jewish Americans have played a leading role in American intellectual and political life through the 20thcentury and into this one. We Jews increasingly dominated the arenas of literature, academia, medicine, law, news media, and show biz. Business and government, too. In America, we mostly overcame (or seemed to) the deep, old-world superstitions against us, thanks to successful near-total cultural assimilation. I, for example, came from a Jewish family far more interested in baseball than Talmud, who put up a Christmas tree in the living room, and ate sweet-and-sour pork frequently. Perhaps this made us “bad” Jews, but frankly, it was more important to be good Americans — that is, people who cared more about our country than our ancestral origins.
American Jews have also been major players in the political Left through the past hundred-odd years, and especially within the Democratic Party. Lately, it appears that the Democratic Party is bent on destroying the country, so one is naturally left to wonder how this happened and what is the role of American Jews in this.
For the Jews who arrived here in the late 19thand early 20th century, America became even more of a promised land than that sliver of Biblical real estate on the Mediterranean. They succeeded here beyond their wildest dreams. Why dream idly about returning to the Middle East when the USA turned out to be the real Land of Milk and Honey? Hence, a revision in American Judaism became necessary. Next year in Jerusalem was replaced as a central animating principle by an alternate shibboleth: tikkun olam.It didn't hurt that there was a Victory Dividend to spend. Interstate Highways! Urban Renewal! Moon shots!
Tikkun Olam means repair the world. This has been driving American Judaism since the early 20th century. Meanwhile, the genocide of the 1940s gave new impetus to next year in Jerusalem for what remained of the European Jews, and thus you get the establishment of Israel in 1948 — notwithstanding the geopolitical legerdemain that actually brought it about. American Jews, while sympathetic to a fault with the founding of Israel, and deeply vested emotionally in its success, had a different agenda in the USA after World War Two. They endeavored to repair America. Tikkun Olam!
Mostly this expressed itself in Jewish support and involvement in the Civil Rights movement, since the end of discrimination against anybody was considered a good thing for the Jews as well as humanity in general. The country needed a moral repair job, especially after defeating manifest evil in the big war. That effort climaxed in the mid 1960s with the federal legislation that ended Jim Crow policy in voting and public accommodations. Much of the actual on-the-ground work to make this happen was accomplished by Jewish lawyers. This is a fact, not an accusation.
I’m not entirely sure, however, why Princeton feels the onus to create a high-aspiration environment. Doesn’t Princeton naturally create one when it selects less than 6 percent of 30,000 of the most ambitious applicants to join the first-year class each year? What’s more, does rigor ipso facto really create “thoughtful, resilient, and intelligent leaders?” I think not. Academic rigor and the challenges associated with it do not inherently create great leaders, and blindly pursuing academic rigor for its own sake is foolish.That first paragraph puts me in mind of what I've learned about Japanese universities: the pecking order is more strictly defined than that in the States, and the pressure to get good grades in high school all the more severe, and thus university life in Japan is one long party, but you'd better be prepared to revert to that high school work model upon becoming novice salaryman.
First, there are more major and distribution requirements than students can handle in productive ways. Currently, all students must generally experience a minimum of one semester — or four if they are BSE — where they take five classes. It has become commonplace for students to take, what they refer to as “an easy fifth” to resolve both of the aforementioned requirements. What this “easy fifth” lingo suggests is that students are optimizing ease over intellectual interest to fulfill these rigorous requirements. In fact, I’ve heard countless instances in which my friends have told me they felt bad for submitting terrible academic work in the fifth class that they are PDFing but must take to hit all their distribution requirements.
Every Thursday our next-door neighbor hires a worker to use a leaf blower. This infernal machine drives me nuts. Rather than letting a pet peeve render me literally insane, I’ve decided to explore the leaf blower’s deeper significance. A psychologist might call this writing therapy. Maybe the result can also provide a little relief for you, the reader, if you share my irritation.Couldn't he talk with his neighbor about the timing of yard work? Pay the landscaper a bribe to show up later? Find one of those Third Places to hang out at on Thursdays? No, it's so much more fun, I suppose, to dabble in the idiocies of culture studies, of which there are plenty when detached houses are involved.
The most obvious critique of the leaf blower is that it’s an obnoxious, destructive piece of machinery. As everyone within earshot of one knows, gasoline-powered leaf blowers are noisy.
[C]oherence is a Sin in the Culture Studies world. (Apparently some architects are pushing back, as I noted last week.) Thus can Ms Harris at one passage write of gardening as leisure or hobby, whilst devoting an entire chapter to landscaping, structured by such gems as "[L]andscapes and gardens are powerful conveyors of ideological content if we consider ideology according to conventional ways of understanding its operations." (Page 265. Whatever.) Thus, keeping one's lawn tidy is either a way of distinguishing one's property from the disorderly dwellings of the Lower Orders, or a Major Time Suck. But testing such an hypothesis is beyond Ms Harris's capabilities.California, whether because it is going to be residually inhabited by the Lower Orders, happy not to be living in an old camper or a tent, or because of its ban on gasoline powered landscaping equipment, will from the river to the sea be free of internal combustion leaf blowers. The battery electric or plug in ones are also noisy, because, well, they're ground-confined turbojets.
I wondered whether, 20 years hence, they would tell their children about how they went about, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, marching and calling for the eradication of an entire nation and race of people.I'm old enough to remember "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" and "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win," and the oh-so-authentic "Lon Nol, U. S. stooge! Victory to the Khmer Rouge!" It's surely an oversimplification to suggest that those campus protesters became Reagan Democrats en masse, and yet, with age sometimes comes maturity.
Because chanting horrible, genocidal phrases in a crowd is sort of thing you do when your brain is not yet fully developed and you’ve been trained in neither critical thinking skills nor the sort of nuance that must flavor authentic justice – when your reason is still malleable, and it’s so much easier to go along with a moment, particularly if you get to feel powerful and anti-establishmentarian as you do it.
Someday, perhaps – if those students ever do learn to think critically; if they ever do discover that the world is much more about shades of gray than black-and-white absolutism, they may come to realize exactly what it was they were chanting for in 2023, exactly what they doing while standing, bravely face-covered in Harvard Square calling Jews “dirty, dirty animals” who “should be exterminated,” or cheering as Jewish students were locked away for their own protection at Cooper Union College, as threats against Jews canceled classes at Cornell, as Jewish travelers were being hunted down at a Russian airport.There is a remnant who will. There are others who will not. In the same way, though, that the aging hippie became a figure of fun in the late 1980s, the aging whatever this lot of protesters is will become a future figure of fun, that is, if we have a future to have figures of fun in.
They might even have the good sense to repent of it – to feel shame as they recall that all the cheers, all the chants, served a demon of chaos and mass murder.
[I]t is precisely in times of heightened crisis and fear that university leaders must remain steadfast in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. These principles are the bedrock of academic freedom at all universities. Moreover, the First Amendment requires public universities to protect the right of students and student groups to debate and demonstrate on campus.That open letter focuses narrowly on pro-Palestinian student groups. Presumably the same free speech rights protect advocacy of women's sports for women or cultural conservatism or Making America Great Again. We know that university administrators are crossing their fingers and hoping the Gaza thing is resolved soon. Then they can return to business as usual.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a surge in efforts to punish and silence students for their speech. The Anti-Defamation League and The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law issued an open letter last week calling on university leaders to investigate pro-Palestinian student groups, alleging their speech constitutes “material support for terrorism,” punishable under federal and state law, despite no evidence to support such claims. That is why the ACLU sent its own open letter to the administrative leaders of each state’s public college system, reaching over 650 colleges and universities, expressing our strong opposition to any efforts to stifle free speech and association on college campuses. The letter unequivocally urges universities to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for exercising their free speech rights.
Cancel Culture affects you even if you don’t believe you’ll ever be canceled or threatened with cancellation. Its most profound harm for society as a whole — besides, perhaps, how it undermines interpersonal trust and is often simply merciless and cruel — is that it undermines trust in experts.Restoring a climate of open and skeptical inquiry and discourse will not alone restore higher education to a state of good repair.
When even a single thinker is punished for their academic opinion or for engaging in thought experimentation, it leads the public to be justifiably skeptical that any expert on that topic is being fully honest. For example, if even a single professor, like Carole Hooven at Harvard, lands in hot water for arguing that biological sex is real and important, that would, for obvious reasons, undermine the public’s trust in anybody claiming that it isn’t. After all, given the incentives and the climate of either conformity or cancellation, would a professor even tell you if they thought otherwise?
[T]here are plenty of factors in addition to Cancel Culture which undermined higher education’s credibility — perhaps, above all, millions of Americans sinking into debt while universities expanded their bureaucracies rather than their teaching staff. But if even one professor gets in trouble for having the “wrong” academic opinion, especially in an environment that everyone knows already has a supermajority of professors of one political stripe, it is absolutely devastating to expert credibility.It is a step all the same worth taking.
And not knowing what facts or experts to trust is disastrous for the stability of a democratic society.
These are difficult times, and we urge colleges across the country to hold fast to our nation’s best traditions and reject ill-advised proposals to restrict constitutionally protected speech. While one group is at the center of such affronts today, other students, groups, and speech could face similar attacks tomorrow. Restricting speech may seem like an attractive option for college administrators to quell campus tensions. But efforts to censor speech often prove counterproductive, and undermine the very mission of the university. We strongly caution universities against conflating the suppression of speech with the façade of safety.It's what, ten, twenty, thirty years too late to say "safety" is a foolish notion. And yet, it's worth noting that in allowing advocates of Palestinian terrorism the same opportunity advocates of Cambodian Marxism enjoyed fifty years ago to advocate for foolish causes, the principle of allowing advocates for other causes, foolish or not, on the basis of Constitutional principles, is a principle worth championing and defending.
There might be more ferroequinologically significant rolling stock extant than there are resources to conserve them, as we have learned watching local preservation railways having to choose among projects. But when the first successful mainline electric locomotive in the United States is still extant, if endangered, an all-hands effort to conserve it might be in order.We were only looking at the technology that made Grand Central Terminal possible and contributed to the appearance of many a Christmas tree, and ferroequinologist financial support was in order.
There are production model S motors in preservation but not operable outside St. Louis, and at the Illinois Railway Museum. The design lives on in several series of tinplate electric trains by Lionel and other manufacturers, and one occasionally appears in Cold Spring Shops Festive Season videos. The sole T-3 motor survived thanks to a decision by Penn Central or Conrail to replace an even older Pennsylvania Railroad DD-1 motor on the wire train working the East River tunnels. A third-rail motor could use Long Island's third rail, and the overhead wire de-energized for work. That DD-1 therefore made it into preservation at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.Good news on what has otherwise been a stressful day. The two locomotives have been disassembled and loaded onto low-boys for transportation to Danbury.
As the land the electrics were sitting on began to be redeveloped a few years ago, it appeared the end was near for the motors. But thanks to a frantic fundraising effort and a series of temporary moves, the museum was able to get the motors out of the way, at least momentarily.They're on my "Nice" list for Christmas.
Officials have not provided a set schedule for the move or information about when they will be unloaded, but it’s likely to be in the coming days. The motors are currently on private property.
People interested in donating to the effort to restore the motors can visit DanburyRail.org/Donate.
We’re pretty sure the most anticipated debut related to Native Americans this year is a much-delayed and much-less-snappily named release from the U.S. Census Bureau known as Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A.In higher education, that "less-than-educated guess" might be "to get on the preferential hiring list," and we'll get to that anon. When politicians and pundits as diverse as George Wallace and Joe Biden can point to the shameful treatment of the First Nations by the government in Washington, there might be a case for corrective policies, and we'll get to the abuses thereof anon. The "anon" will be the coda to a mini-dissertation that continues beyond the jump.
The report provides the most detailed data we’ve ever had on America’s racial and ethnic origins, including stunningly exhaustive data on nearly 1,200 tribes, native villages and other entities. We hoped it would shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in the 2020 Census: Why did the Native American population skyrocket by 85 percent over the past decade?
The number of Americans claiming Indigenous heritage jumped from 5.2 million in 2010 to 9.6 million in 2020, a stark increase that probably was not the result of good old-fashioned procreation. Native Americans had the lowest fertility rate of any group measured last year, roughly tied with Asian Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
We could make some less-than-educated guesses, informed by the observation that the rise was largest among Native Americans claiming a mixed heritage.
Every parent of young children has awoken on Nov. 1 to the aftermath of Halloween: piles of candy wrappers, discarded costumes, molding pumpkins and decorations demanding to be taken down.I grew up the child of Depression babies who knew how to squeeze nickels, and yet we managed to enjoy trick or treating, and our dental checkups were generally satisfactory. The Nazaryan household sounds like a real fun place to live.
Halloween is an expensive holiday, wreaking havoc on family budgets. And with children expected to consume as much as 7,000 calories on Oct. 31 because of all the added sugar in their diets, the holiday is also a public health calamity.
But scariest of all is the damage Halloween does to the planet.No, the scary thought is that this guy is part of the regime media. Does the plastics consumption from even the most gluttonous haul of trick or treating compare with the plastic involved in bottled water consumed on a random day during beach season?
All those candy wrappers have to go somewhere. So do all the plastic pumpkins, plastic vampire teeth, plastic Harry Potter wands.
And where they go, for the most part, is into landfills and waterways, where they contribute to a plastics problem that has become a global challenge. New research suggests that many of the single-use plastics we discard turn into invisible particles called microplastics that can cause serious damage to human health.
We all imbibe the equivalent of a credit card in microplastics each week, scientists say.
Now that’s a scary thought.
Some scholars say that because there is a "hierarchy of masculinities in which some will have more privilege than others," school administrators should better recognize college men who excel outside Greek life and sports.I don't know, does that mean putting Hefty Bags over the urinals? Seriously, though, those "Some scholars say" alludes to two essays in Journal of College Student Development: the endnotes are as blundering around in the Colossal Cave to find the first reference. Such blundering around is instructive as many of the sources, such as Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and Jezebel, are not exactly known for their objectivity. Do we really gain by creating more men without chests?
Another way universities could help college guys would be to increase their consistent exposure to less stereotypical interpretations of masculinity. A handful of once- or twice-yearly presentations about alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and hazing is a Band-Aid reaction that condemns what brothers might do without addressing why they might be compelled to do it in the first place. To get to the root of fraternity issues, universities and national offices would be better served by concurrently trying to reframe how students perceive gender roles.
The commentariat, so marinated in the Eastern Liberal Establishment's vision of Activist Presidents Promoting The Common Good in order to be able to devote Sunday mornings to mutual admiration with High Government Officials under pictures of the Capitol Dome, seem surprised that Our President is campaigning, rather than governing. Read the full transcript, which summarizes the failings of Activist Government as seen by the ditto-heads.Jason Shvili of Facts and Logic About the Middle East, an Israeli advocacy site, sees a similar dynamic at work, perpetuating the plight of those dispossessed Palestinians. "Why Palestinians’ bad behavior has made them pariahs in the Arab world."
The key to Our President remaining popular despite disappointing the commentariat by a lack of activism is in this passage.You can point to Detroit; you can point to New Orleans; you can point to any state or city that's been run by liberals without opposition for any serious length of time, and you'll see an utter disaster. You've got the IRS running amuck. You know the details in the IRS scandal, and I can give you the latest today, and I will. You know all that. It's not just Obama. This is who liberals are.More precisely, this is how ward-heeler politicians operate. There's a symbiosis between desperate people who like having a ward-heeler "fighting for them" and a ward-heeler who mau-maus the rest of the polity about the continued parlous condition of his or her constituents. A ward-heeler cannot call out the constituents for engaging in self-destructive behavior, nor get re-elected in a district in which constituents discover, or re-discover bourgeois habits. Better to have constituents rendered helpless by years of Democratic policies. That's how Gwen and Bobby and John and Maxine achieve seniority in the Democratic caucus.
On [October 23] the White House announced the selection of 31 regional "technology hubs" that will spur innovation, manufacturing capacity, and employment with the help of generous federal subsidies.It's possible, isn't it, that those central places emerged for reasons beyond some public money being thrown at them? Without the right sort of pollinators to go with the growing conditions, there won't be any oranges. Those central places offer favorable conditions for ideas to have sex, or to appropriate a William Arrowsmith line, you have to provide forests in order to get druids.
"We're going to invest in critical technologies like biotechnology, critical materials, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing—so the U.S. will lead the world again in innovation across the board," Biden said in a press conference announcing the new initiative, per the Associated Press.
These new hubs, spread across the country, will receive an initial $500 million in federal subsidies—a slice of the $10 billion included in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act to stimulate investment in high-tech industries.
The hope is to create innovation centers outside the country's existing "superstar" cities like Seattle, Austin, and New York City—where high-tech employment is currently concentrated.
For all the president's optimism and federal funding, the history of "place-based" investment policies and economic theory suggest that this latest effort to create dispersed tech hubs will be unsuccessful.The problem with such well-intentioned wastes of money is that the correlation of forces in those tracts is conducive to concentrating poverty. The correlation of forces that creates a Marshallian industrial district is emergent, and public money alone is insufficient pollination.
Indeed, the idea of federally subsidized, special investment zones is hardly a new one.
As part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Congress created the Opportunity Zones program, which gives investors tax credits for investing in state-designated census tracts with high concentrations of poverty. The idea was to direct investment to areas in desperate need of it.
There's a reason federal subsidies have a difficult time creating innovation centers from scratch. As it turns out, it's easiest to produce innovation in places where there's already a lot of economic activity happening. Firms can draw off a wider pool of highly skilled workers. These workers can flit between more employers, carrying skills and new ideas with them. The close proximity of capital and labor allows more collaboration (planned or spontaneous). A larger market allows for greater specialization and division of labor.A few years ago, Richard Florida looked into the identifying features of the most prosperous Marshallian districts. I fear he mistook symptoms for causes: the music clubs and the bars catering to, shall we say, alternative lifestyles, followed the creatives. The humans having sex might have met compatible partners trading the ideas that were having sex. We can be grateful that the current administration isn't subsidizing the clubs and bars, although such an effort would highlight the failure of throwing money at a few rent-seekers in a way more worthy of a Golden Fleece award.
This positive-sum agglomeration explains why so much high-tech industry and innovation is currently concentrated in a few large urban areas. The Biden administration is explicitly going to war with the logic of agglomeration by trying to seed new tech centers in places where they don't exist currently.
Odds are that the White House's tech hubs will be a similar flop to previous efforts at creating "opportunity zones" and "manufacturing hubs" out of nothing. At best, it will likely shift a few more jobs and federal dollars to existing, federally funded research centers.
