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.)