Observations

 

Observations

A constitutional lawyer commenting on this Supreme Court said the most significant decision of this term might be its decision on school vouchers.

Cornell University has pulled the Gettysburg Address from its library in response to complaints that it is too controversial.

“Putin would like to find a way of making nuclear threats without quite incurring the liability from … making nuclear threats.--cowen

Enter nuclear power plants. 

'When Russian forces attack the plant, there is some chance that something goes wrong, such as a radiation spill. But more likely than not, the plant will hold up, and most dangerous processes can be shut down and the very worst outcomes avoided. You can think of Putin as choosing a “nuclear radiation deployment” with only some small probability.
Why might he do this? Well, he is showing that the use of broader nuclear deployments is not out of the question. He is also showing that he is willing to take a huge risk.
This was not a black swan event. This was an entirely predicted and predictable event. We knew it was going to happen….And yet, we weren’t ready.'--tabarrok

'There are four coronaviruses that cause common colds and all are mild. About half of all colds are caused by rhinoviruses, of which there are around 100 types. None is lethal. That cannot be a coincidence. If mutation can make a disease more dangerous, why have rhinoviruses never turned into killers? As Niall Shanks and Rebecca Pyles put it in a 2007 paper titled ‘Evolution and medicine: the long reach of “Dr Darwin”’: ‘The rhinovirus works its evolutionary mischief by keeping its host mobile — and hence typically in contact with other susceptible persons.’ It achieves this by, for example, staying in the nasal mucosa, and not invading the bloodstream.…..
Yet here surely there is a worrying lesson about the past two years. In the weird world of lockdown, severe strains of Covid were favoured by selection. If you tested positive but felt fine you were told to stay at home. If you fell badly sick you went to hospital, where you gave your illness to healthcare workers and other patients. So mutants that were more infectious, such as alpha and delta, paid no penalty for being just as virulent, maybe more so. The natural evolution of Covid into just another mild cold was therefore possibly delayed by at least a year.'--Ridley

Policies enacted during the past five years—including pandemic relief, but also "Congress' perennially broken budget process and fiscal policies"—have added $13 trillion to the projected levels of debt in 2031, at the end of the 10-year window Congress uses for budgeting. An additional 13 TRILLION of debt.

A new Harvard Center for American Political Studies (CAPS)-Harris Poll survey (conducted between Feb. 23 and Feb. 24 with 2,026 registered voters) released exclusively to The Hill on Friday found that 62% of those polled believed Putin would not be moving against Ukraine if Trump had been president. (Then again, maybe Trump would have dropped out of NATO.)

Some Things

Some Things

A young woman named Keira Bell successfully won a case against the UK’s gender identity development service for facilitating the transition she came to regret.

One popular accusation about the Jan. 6 fiasco is that Trump wanted to call the 82nd Airborne into Washington. Bill Barr said that did not happen, that the 82nd military police were put on alert. The story continues.

Hutchinson said at the Jan. 6 hearing that Trump demanded to go to the riots and actually grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine. The Secret Service denies this happened at all. Yet the press has this as the headline story. The story continues.

Larry Summer and Janet Yellen have completely opposite views on inflation and unemployment. Models with different results?

Nancy Pelosi has received communion in the Vatican.

Questions

Questions

The Pirates are hard to generalize about because they have no talent or plan so everything is always new. But they seem to have an innovation in the infield: they don't catch ground balls, they knock them down and keep the ball in front of them, like a goalie. Maybe an attempt to attract hockey fans.

So Biden says the oil prices are up because the oil companies are arbitrarily raising prices. But isn't the plan of the administration to raise prices as part of the esteemed "transition" to clean energy, so it's really the government that's raising the price arbitrarily.

The FED can change demand. They gave everyone money over the last years and increased demand, now they are raising rates to decrease that demand. And how does that work? Rates make everything more expensive so people buy less. But then, suppliers can't afford everything so they lay people off. The solution to inflation is job loss. Empathy in government is a disguise.

I-bonds, established by President Clinton in 1996, are guaranteed, inflation-linked securities issued directly by the Treasury to people and companies. Today, I-bonds pay a healthy 7.12% annual return. The interest rate is adjusted every six months to reflect changes in consumer price inflation. It’s hard to find a better, safer investment in this environment.
Currently, however, individual investors are limited to purchasing $10,000 in I-Bonds a year.

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.--nomani

Many insurers have seen a jump in death claims. Industry executives and actuaries believe many of these other fatalities are tied to delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments.

Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he said, ‘and we’ll finish up with a Chinese society.’

Some Questions

 

Some Questions

There are no tractor tires available in the U.S.

My peers and I are often told that we are the future leaders of America. We may be the future decision-makers, but most of us aren’t leaders. Our principal concern is becoming members of the American elite, with whatever compromises, concessions, and conformity that requires. The inability of Harvard students to question or oppose these irrational bureaucratic excesses bodes ill for our ability to meet future challenges.--Julie Hartman

A commercial for the NYT, which appeared online and in public spaces last week, features a subscriber called Lianna listing a few of her favourite things. Rather than raindrops on roses and warm woollen mittens, she mentions ‘Breaking the Binary’ and ‘Heritage in Rich Hues’. And then, shortly after, she is seen in a field, wearing a sort of wizard’s cape and flourishing a wand, ‘Imagining Harry Potter Without its Creator’.
In a sense this should not surprise us. Rowling has been in the crosshairs of East Coast elite opinion for a couple of years now. Indeed, given the degree to which her integration of ancient lore, magic and mythology with her own fantastical imagination won Rowling her pre-eminent place in the hearts of millions of young readers worldwide, it’s remarkable that her continuing ability to trend on Twitter rests primarily on her insistence on a position that would have been regarded as utterly banal in any other time. Namely, that the word ‘woman’ refers primarily to a state of biological being, rather than a state of mind.--from an article by Simon on creativity

A paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. "We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on the true impact of alcohol on injury-induced mortality. We also document a sharp drop in violent crimes, indicating a tight link between alcohol and aggressive behavior in society. Our results underscore the severe harm that alcohol can cause and point towards a role for policy measures that target the heaviest drinkers in society."

Fed. judge holds that Fairfax County, Virginia violated 14A by changing its high-ranked magnet school’s admission policies to decrease the proportion of Asian-American students. Strict scrutiny applies, and racial balancing is not a compelling interest

From a review of McClosky's trilogy: In Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), McClosky investigates the many other causal factors that have been offered as explanations for the Great Enrichment—geography, institutions, capital, culture, foreign trade, colonialism, slavery—and argues that even in combination they are not sufficient to account for the 300-fold improvement in living standards that we have experienced.
In the final volume, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), she expands this argument and emphasizes the liberal egalitarian implications of the spread of bourgeois ideas. The belief spread that ordinary people have equal liberty and inherent dignity, and should be free to “have a go” and try out new ideas. This freedom to choose, to experiment, and to innovate is morally proper and, over time, materially fruitful for individuals and for the societies composed of them. Without an ethical framework that honours hard work and industrious creativity, the Great Enrichment could not have happened.

Some Constitutional Stats

 

Some Constitutional Stats

65% of people think that overturning Roe means that abortion is illegal.

The stats on Hispanic opinions on Roe might be very interesting and be most important to the Dems. There are some earthquake potential problems for the Dems here. For example, a Quinnipiac University poll published on April 13 found that just 26% of Hispanic voters approved of Biden's job performance, the lowest mark of any demographic.

In 2020, pills accounted for 54 percent of all U.S. abortions, up from roughly 44 percent in 2019. Abortion by mail.

In the Va. gubernatorial election, the Dems tried to make abortion a major issue. Of those interviewed after voting who felt that abortion was the major issue, 60% voted for Youngkin.

Keith Oberman, because of the Supreme Court's gun ruling, wants to dissolve and end the Supreme Court.

The Dems are salivating over their effort to make Roe a mid-term factor. It will be fascinating because the pro-Roe position is not cohesive. Abortion within the first term has nothing in common with partial-birth abortion and the Dems are locked into the radical position.

Back

 

Back

The cost of two quarts of soup at Panera is 44 dollars.

The story of the Biden daughter's diary was a topic in Europe, apparently not much here.

The infusion of money into the economy by unelected government officials makes money more available for purchase, investment, and hiring. The object of raising interest rates reverses that. Do people understand that the purpose of raising interest rates is to decrease employment?

We all agree that supply and demand are intimately related, except, apparently, for oil.

If a team plans to start a minor league pitcher in a major league game to rest their roster, should a fan buying a ticket know that?

The Social Democrats in Sweden took over the economy after an extraordinary run of economic success. An economist recently said that in their government's thirty-year rule, the net jobs created during that period was zero.

When will people understand that high oil prices is the plan?

This gun law sham will be interesting with its Red Flags component. Is that sort of a vague Bill of Attainder? A carve-out of civil rights?

The single most important reversal of the American concept of the basic rights of human beings with authority being granted to the government is the brilliant idea of social credit where rights are earned, like Green Stamps or credit card points. The ingenuity of the totalitarian is sometimes remarkable.