Bananas

Pa. Gov. Shapiro is beginning to appear in those self-congratulatory state government ads. It is noticeable. Why would that be?

***


Bananas

The Trump decision is in. While it was not a surprise, it was--and will be--an earthquake. A political party is willing to manipulate and distort the judicial process for its own benefit despite the damage it does to the nation. This is more than simple incompetence. Or the result of fear like the Japanese internment. The questions were not beyond the poor citizens like the Simpson case. This case was a refined assault upon a citizen and political opponent by a cynical, ambitious political opponent.

The country looks ludicrous in the world but such a criticism alone is shortsighted. The basics of this country have always been assumed. The safety of the individual in the face of hereditary or simply grasping ambition has made this nation a beacon of hope in the corrupt, vicious world. Now that certainty has been undermined. Shamelessly.

America is no longer trustworthy. To her legal core.

Is that important? Ask Israel. Ask Ukraine. Ask Social Security recipients. This takes the Bork political outrage and makes it part of our national heritage.

It is said that this distortion will be overturned. Probably. But overturning this depends upon the integrity of the people in the government system. And those people have clearly been shown to be corruptable.

Which makes the very idea of this country much more fragile and vulnerable than any of us thought.

Notes and Notable 7

Pittsburgh Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center on South Negley Avenue notified residents and staff that they will close on Aug. 12.
In a letter to patients, residents, and responsible parties, the center said “Recent inflation in the cost of goods and wages, combined with millions of dollars owed to us from the local Medicaid office, operating the building is no longer financially sustainable.”

***



Notes and Notable 7

The instructions to the jury in the Trump case included that the jurors need not agree on the basic charges to find Trump guilty.

***

Goldman Sachs estimates that U.S. private investment in AI will total $82 billion next year—more than twice as much as in China. Big tech was late to catch the AI wave. But businesses of all sizes are now using AI to develop medical treatments, improve productivity and logistics, assist customers, and more.

***

The great body of economic and political literature since World War II – both academic and popular – has presented a misleading picture of the performance of private enterprise and of the State in the economies of the free world. This literature exaggerates the defects of the one and the merits of the other. Freedom will remain in jeopardy unless the public gains a clearer picture of the workings of the free market and comes to realize that its greatest virtue is not its extraordinary capacity to produce widely diffused material benefits, important as this merit is, but its unique capacity to protect the great immaterial values of our Western Heritage.--Haberler

***

According to new research from economists at the University of Oregon and the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, new low-skilled immigrants to the US are a net fiscal plus — each adding an estimated $750 a year to government coffers at the federal, state, and local levels. And their contribution to the entire economy is likely larger still.

These new measures do not deny the standard assessments of the potential fiscal costs of immigrants. Rather, they consider an additional positive factor: namely, that low-skilled immigrants enable native workers to move into higher-wage jobs, and in some cases to work more hours.

Strangely, any of the complex downsides of the cultural and legal disruptions are ignored.

***

A curiosity in the N.Y. Trump case is the apparent unawareness by the prosecution and the co-conspirator judge that this case will likely tarnish those involved forever in history. One would think they would be devoting all their time to figuring out how to rescue themselves.

***

O'Leary was on television talking about the Trump trial. He was in Europe selling his data collection idea and he said this trial was murdering the "American brand." These people are transients, he said, the American idea is not.

O'Leary says the first thing that Biden should do when Trump is convicted is magnanimously pardon him.

 

Spoiling the Barrel

President Joe Biden will likely miss a Ukraine summit next month because it conflicts with a campaign fundraiser in California he’s set to attend alongside George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and other stars.--Bloomberg

***

"Married at First Sight" is in its 15th season.

**

Congress’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $3 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency, which gave $50 million to a group called the Climate Justice Alliance. That alliance busies itself with a lot more than the environment, including the liberation of Palestine and the dismantling of capitalism. $50 million.

***

What was DeNiro doing at the NY court? Whose idea was that?

***


Spoiling the Barrel

Kansas City Chief punter Harrison Butker followed his graduation speech at Benedictine College with a new graduation speech at The Culinary College, this time extolling the virtues of apple pie before a stunned audience.

Butker called the apple pie "logically American," connected through history with George Washington's cutting down the apple tree and Johnny Appleseed's evangelical and fortuitous CO2-capturing apple tree orchards.

Many in the audience gave Butker the razzberries.

Students from citrus states called out objections and many stood and turned their backs to the dias during the speech. Some students threw blueberries at the speaker. Fundamentalist students objected to the extolling of a fruit that, through Adam and Eve, caused the downfall of man and their banishment from Eden.

Protest signs reading "Just Deserts" appeared, the misspelling causing outrage as some obscure, subtle comment on the Middle East.

A Palestinian banner was raised in defense of the watermelon which was felt to be their national fruit.

A schism among apple pie supporters developed over the value of a la mode.

Several students symbolically overcooked a quiche in protest.

At the end of the speech and graduation, the crowd retreated to the picnic area where a disappointing time was had by all.

A Heritage of Amateurism

A new study out of Sweden finds that people with tattoos have a 21% higher risk of developing lymphoma.

***

“Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms,” as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley say in their masterful creation Superabundance, “there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms. The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense.”

***

South Korean students born approximately ten months after the World Cup tend to perform significantly worse in school. Moreover, our results uncover a hitherto overlooked aspect: the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.

***

A Heritage of Amateurism

There are few book reviews of "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump," a new book by Alexander Ward, a national security reporter at Politico. Here is one from somewhere.

Biden, et al. have confronted five crucial moments in his slightly more than first two years as captain of our national security ship: Three of them became major and deadly-beyond-imagining-in-2020 disasters, plus two smaller dramas that seemed like good ideas with good results at the time.

Biden wanted a summit in June of 2021 with Vladimir Putin and got one. Ward dutifully reports Biden’s account of the president leaning in close to the Russian dictator, Clint Eastwood-style, and stating "I looked in your eyes and I don’t believe you have a soul." Then, Ward recounts, a jubilant "Biden left the meeting telling his aides that he got his message through to Putin." A "senior staffer" alerts Ward that "Biden had come to Geneva to do what he needed to do."

"Now he could put Putin aside and deal with other issues," the staffer purred, less than three months before Abbey Gate and eight months before Putin would roll his tanks into Ukraine. The president, it turns out, was clueless about Putin.

Hamas began firing barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel after street fighting broke out in Jerusalem between Arabs and Jews. Sullivan dove into the crisis on May 9. Meetings were held on the 11th. More meetings on the 12th. Joe calls Bibi, repeatedly. They are old acquaintances. He knows how to handle Bibi. The rockets keep coming and the Israeli Air Force pounds back. The left wing of the Democrats acts up. Senator Bernie Sanders writes an op-ed; Rashida Tlaib lectures Biden. Biden leans on Bibi to conclude a ceasefire, which occurs (and which Hamas will savagely destroy on 10/7.) "Something had clearly changed," Ward recounts on that week. "The White House could no longer count on Democrats supporting their [Israel] policy."

Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley gets tossed under various buses in the accounts Biden loyalists give Ward. Milley and Secretary of Defense Austen wanted to abandon Bagram Air Force Base. The Intel said the Afghans could hold out two years or at least one, (and, later, the Ukrainians a week if lucky.)

But the surprise is complete. Biden doesn’t even mention Ukraine at his speech to the General Assembly. CIA Director Burns gets dispatched to Moscow to talk one-on-one with Putin to stop the madness. But Putin’s not there. He’s gone to his fortress in Sochi. Burns is granted a phone call from Moscow to Sochi. Long way to go to make a call. But that’s Team Biden. Next, the Brain Trust dispatches State’s #2, Wendy Sherman, she of the Iran and North Korea nuclear deals, to a NATO-Russia last gambit to avert the invasion. The Russians first ignore her. She gets mad and insists they listen to her tale of Ukrainian roots. Then she cries. We can only guess what the Russians think.

The U.S. closes its embassy in Kyiv and Ukrainian President Zelensky is outraged (as he has been with Biden, Blinken, and Milley throughout.) Milley predicts the Russians will roll into Zelenskyy’s capital city in two or three days. Zelenskyy won’t leave. He’s furious with the Americans. After the invasion Biden strides to the cameras. "Every asset they [the Russians] have in America will be frozen," Biden tells the U.S. on February 24. It’s a lie as it passes his lips for as Ward points out, Team Biden had already exempted to Russian energy sector from sanctions.

The most revealing passage in the book? When an unnamed aide tells Ward about the war in Ukraine, that the Administration’s fumbling there "wasn’t a do-over of Afghanistan."

"Nothing could be that," the aid continues. "But this does help ensure that it won’t be the only thing Jake and Tony are remembered for." Jake and Tony. Not Joe.

And it doesn’t even include 10/7 or Xi Jinping’s unimpeded buildup across the Taiwan straight, though North Korea’s return to missile launching is mentioned. As the president declines before our eyes, don’t expect his national security team to get stronger in response. It’s the same guys who brought us President Obama’s red line in Syria. With the same result. It’s deadly to be our friend when Democrats are in the White House, and there’s never been an easier time to be our enemy than in this age of "The Internationalists."

Memorial Day

Since the lockdown, thousands of running clubs have emerged all over the world which have acted as inadvertent matchmaking services.


***

90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0". This does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world.

…What online dating does is enable hypergamy on a massive scale. Hypergamy is the tendency for women to want to date the best men, no matter where the woman is in the hierarchy.

…What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them.--I can't remember where

***

UK Conservative Party suggests national conscription.

***

                                         Memorial Day

War is man's most evil pursuit. Every single human motive morphs into something horrible and destructive; the most noble of man's qualities become misapplied. Somehow the diffident grasshopper becomes the predatory locust. 

Yet within the world of men, some things must be done. Individuals must live and act within the admitted abomination that is war. In the Second War the Germans and the Japanese were asked to fulfill their destiny, to complete history. This involved destroying or subjugating everyone who was not them. The Allies' children were asked to fight for their lives. Their behavior in this gargantuan struggle should always stand as a testament to man's higher elements in the midst of man's lowest. Yet questions always arise.

When Obama was in Japan and visiting Hiroshima, new discussion of the WWII atomic bombing began. An article in the LA Times asserted the bombing was cruel, gratuitous, and not a factor in the ending of the war. "Most Americans have been taught that using atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 was justified because the bombings ended the war in the Pacific, thereby averting a costly U.S. invasion of Japan. This erroneous contention finds its way into high school history texts still today," the article states. More, the cause of Japanese surrender was actually the Russian invasion of Manchuria. "It was not the atomic evisceration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Pacific war. Instead, it was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese colonies that began at midnight on Aug. 8, 1945 — between the two bombings." Indeed the sentiment at least seems to be in line with current thinking; the majority of Americans in polls think the bombs should not have been dropped.

Of course, people will differ in their assessment of history. Some assessments will be more accurate--sometimes more honest--than others. And many military men did not want to drop the weapons. But of all the wars in history, World War Two is the least ambiguous to analyze.

The History website has this summary:
Early on the morning of July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device–a plutonium bomb–at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

By the time of the Trinity test, the Allied powers had already defeated Germany in Europe. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific, despite clear indications (as early as 1944) that they had little chance of winning. In fact, between mid-April 1945 (when President Harry Truman took office) and mid-July, Japanese forces inflicted Allied casualties totaling nearly half those suffered in three full years of war in the Pacific, proving that Japan had become even more deadly when faced with defeat. In late July, Japan’s militarist government rejected the Allied demand for surrender put forth in the Potsdam Declaration, which threatened the Japanese with “prompt and utter destruction” if they refused. (Italics added)

General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders favored continuing the conventional bombing of Japan already in effect and following up with a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” They advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. In order to avoid such a high casualty rate, Truman decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb in the hopes of bringing the war to a quick end. Proponents of the A-bomb–such as James Byrnes, Truman’s secretary of state–believed that its devastating power would not only end the war, but also put the U.S. in a dominant position to determine the course of the postwar world. (italics added)

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion wiped out 90 percent of the city and immediately killed 80,000 people; tens of thousands more would later die of radiation exposure. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.”

So the Emperor cites the bomb as a factor. And the alternative was an island-by-island attack on Japan that the experts accepted would cost one million--MILLION--American lives.

The LA Times article suggests the U.S. ignored a Japanese peace approach to the U.S. requesting only the Emperor survive. But that is not entirely true. Their proposal was to keep the Emperor and the current governing militaristic system intact, something the Allies thought nonnegotiable. Another element overlooked in the LA Times article is the continuity of events. Over 200,000 people were killed in the atomic attacks. Isolated, that is horrific. One wonders how the essayist saw those deaths in the context of the war itself. Or do they spare themselves the difficulty? China suffered between 15 and 17 million--MILLION--deaths directly related to combat--many described as "crimes against humanity." The Russians lost 25 to 27 million. MILLION. Certainly, we need kinder, gentler wars.

Nonetheless, the LA Times article was quite critical of American behavior and motives in one of the world's most easily evaluated conflicts, the American democracy vs. Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Applying morality to war is tricky and can be practiced only by our best and brightest. Fortunately, a look at the by-line has the reassuring information that the LA Times article was authored by none other than Oliver Stone, the esteemed and awarded movie director. He is certainly qualified. As a member of the exclusive self-absorbed entertainment cult and the reliable creator of the movie JFK, one of the cult's more astonishing productions of historical analysis, we can certainly rely upon his opinion.

And I'm sure he would have been willing to talk to the widows, the orphans, and the parents of those million Americans, explaining that those soldiers had to die assaulting the Japanese islands because we were true to our inner nature and did not drop the cruel bombs that could have ended the war. That was not who we are.

A Downside of Diversity

Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.”

***

President Biden repeated a claim about turning down an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he purportedly wanted to play football, during his commencement address at West Point on Saturday.
Biden told West Point graduates that Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, whom he defeated to become a U.S. senator, had "appointed" him to the Naval Academy years before they ran against each other in 1972.
The president recounted that before his interview, "I found out two days earlier they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach, and a halfback named Joe Bellino. And I said, I'm not going there. I went to Delaware. Not a joke."

***

A Downside of Diversity

For the first time, the number of Americans who use marijuana just about every day has surpassed the number who drink alcohol that often, a shift some 40 years in the making as recreational pot use became more mainstream and legal in nearly half of U.S. states.

In 2022, an estimated 17.7 million people reported using marijuana daily or near-daily compared to 14.7 million daily or near-daily drinkers, according to an analysis of national survey data. In 1992, when daily pot use hit a low point, less than 1 million people said they used marijuana nearly every day.

On the regulatory side, the U.S. is about to downgrade the medical concerns for the drug from Schedule One to Three, based on the available research.

So, a question. 

The major problem holding back the successful commercialization of marijuana is its inconsistency. The industry is fragmented in almost every way. The product has no standardization, with different plants grown in different sites with different characteristics and chemical concentrations, some of which have never been examined. There are different preparations, packaging, and shipping processes. Consequently, the product is unreliable as a brand and major efforts are underway to standardize them. 

That said, how can the safety experiments on the drug be relied upon?

SatSats

SatSats

In 2014, the academic journal Electoral Studies published a study by three scholars who estimated how frequently non-citizens were illegally voting. Based on data from the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, the study found that:
-“roughly one-quarter of non-citizens” in the U.S. “were likely registered to vote.”
-“6.4% of non-citizens actually voted.”
-81.8% of them “reported voting for Barack Obama.”
-Illegal votes cast by non-citizens “likely” changed “important election outcomes” in favor of Democrats, “including Electoral College votes” and a “pivotal” U.S. Senate race that enabled Democrats to pass Obamacare.


The study’s voter registration rate was estimated with data from two key sources:
A national survey in which 14.8% of non-citizens admitted that they were registered to vote.
A database of registered voters reveals what portion of the surveyed non-citizens “were in fact registered” even though “they claimed not to be registered.”

By combining these data, the author’s “best” estimate was that 25.1% of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

Bear in mind, much of this data is indirect.

***

The New York Times recently wrote that “America is the richest country” in the OECD, “but we’re also the poorest, with a whopping 18% poverty rate—closer to Mexico than Western Europe.”

But that 'poverty' comparison is a comparison within the U.S. itself.

After accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps—the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest.

***

The United States is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations. According to UN data, the U.S. contributed a total of $9.7 billion ($9,718,025,938) to the United Nations in 2016.

That is 20% of the U.N. budget.

***

In 2011, Palestine applied for full membership in the United Nations. The Security Council’s membership committee was “unable to make a unanimous recommendation” regarding the application. 

In 2011, the Obama administration threatened to veto any Security Council resolution recommending Palestinian membership.

As of 2019, Palestine was formally recognized by 137 countries.

 

The Shieldmaiden

Pittsburgh police said the Walgreens pharmacy in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood was robbed at gunpoint on Thursday night.

***

A 2017 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine examining road closures for marathons found a small but significant increase in mortality among people with heart trouble on marathon days, apparently caused in part by ambulance delays.

***

An American-funded project, listed as “Gender-inclusive demining for sustainable futures in Ukraine,” has a funding budget of $4 million.

***

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has initiated discussions about selling existing shares at a price that could value the closely held company at roughly $200 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

***

The Shieldmaiden

A wonderful sobriquet has appeared, applied to the fierce Duch conservative with the wonderful name,
Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

 

Eva Vlaardingerbroek

She has been nicknamed the "Shieldmaiden of the Far Right."

She is an unashamed Christian Dutch Nationalist and she hates immigration in Europe. She spoke recently at CPAC Hungry and, as usual, drove everyone nuts. (Her speech has been blocked on YouTube. The one place I found the written speech was infected.)

One of her recurrent notions is that nationalism is not inherently bad, dangerous, or a prelude to war-- but expansionism is.

Shieldmaiden!

Notes and Notable 6

Nothing – nothing – is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust.--will

***

Notes and Notable 6

In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.--from City Journal

***

No technology exists today to enable railroads to comply with California’s diktat, rendering the whole exercise fanciful at best.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board explained last November that while Wabtec Corp. has introduced a pioneering advance in rail technology with the launch of the world’s first battery-powered locomotive, the dream of a freight train fully powered by batteries remains elusive. The challenges of substituting diesel with batteries—primarily due to batteries’ substantial weight and volume—make it an impractical solution for long-haul trains. Additionally, the risk of battery overheating and potential explosions, which can emit harmful gases, is a significant safety concern. As the editorial noted, “Even if the technology for zero-emission locomotives eventually arrives, railroads will have to test them over many years to guarantee their safety.”--deRugy

***

History teaches that while unions can improve wages and working conditions for those working in the mills, they can’t make the mills economically sustainable. --sracic

***

The latest evidence of actual clinical incompetence is its 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, announced Tuesday. If the goal is to get Americans to use EVs, how does it make sense to raise their cost to consumers? It doesn’t. The real explanation is the familiar process by which bad policy begets bad policy—in this case, the disaster unfolding in Detroit saddled with billions in losses for EVs the public won’t buy at anything resembling the cost of building them.--wsj

Crime, Death, and Taxes

The free market depends on virtues it rewards but can’t create itself.

***

John Eastman was disbarred and may be indicted for the crime of representing Donald Trump. In April he announced that at least two banks with which he had done business were terminating his accounts. His crime? Providing legal advice to Donald Trump in his effort to challenge the integrity of the 2020 election.--Kimball

***

Word of Day

Obloquy:
Invective implies vehemence comparable to vituperation but may suggest greater verbal and rhetorical skill; it may also apply especially to a public denunciation, as in "blistering political invective." Obloquy, which comes from the Late Latin ob- (meaning "against") plus loquī (meaning "to speak"), suggests defamation

***

Crime, Death, and Taxes

The guy who attacked Pelosi's husband with a hammer has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
It could have been more except that Judge Corley said in court that she had taken into account Mr. DePape’s lack of a previous criminal record and his vulnerability to conspiracy theories.

It's probably kind that the judge pulled the punch on the maniac but it should not be confused with justice.

What does she mean, lack of a previous criminal record? He was in the country illegally. His tourist visa expired in 2008. He had been residing in the country illegally for fourteen years. Doesn't that qualify as a crime?

The Times then branched into a strange concept of cause-and-effect that the Times feels made the attack inevitable:

"Mr. DePape reflects the underbelly of American politics: a man driven by online conspiracy theories who seemed to embrace the rhetoric of many right-wing figures, who have used dehumanizing language for years to describe Ms. Pelosi and call her an enemy of the United States."


So, DePape wasn't really viciously attacking anyone as much as completing a part in an evolving chain of Rube Goldberg influences culminating in his attack on Pelosi. This absolves him of personal responsibility.
The devil made him do it.

And ducks the other obvious element: DePape sounds nuts.

The message here is not that benign guys can be influenced by goofy ideas. Or that there are a lot of poorly tied-down cannons out there. That's a gimmie. Look at some of the dominant political and social notions loosed upon the land today. But 300 million people in the culture are complicated. Simplistic answers are worse than unhelpful, they are dangerous. And, often, so are illegal immigrants.

 

 

Eliminating the Middle Man

 

Could our personalized AI companions of the future be subpoenaed to testify against us in court?--Altman

***

The (London) Times reports "Nervous drivers pay to be whisked across America’s scariest bridge." 10-30 clients daily, each paying $40 per trip to cross a Maryland bridge.

***

Eliminating the Middle Man

Ciudad Juárez’ International Airport has become the main turf fought over by the Sinaloa and the Juarez cartel for being where thousands of migrants arrive every day in hopes of making it across the border into Texas.

But above both criminal organizations is a new cartel: the Mexican Institute of Immigration (INM for its Spanish acronym). The top immigration authority in Mexico is now operating as its own criminal entity extorting, kidnapping and smuggling migrants all across the country.

Although the two main cartels in Juárez are still fighting each other to get full control of the juicy business of human smuggling, the INM is making bigger bucks by selling immigration permits to foreigners to be able to freely travel through Mexico, an advantage Mexican officials have over criminal organizations.

Each permit, according to sources who have acquired one, is being sold for up to 50,000 Mexican pesos, roughly $2,000. Without one of these, migrants are stuck at the Mexican southern border for months and end up having to pay sometimes more as a bribe to the same INM officials to let them out of Mexican southern border towns like Tapachula.

INM officials offer to get them in touch with a human smuggler right outside the airport, for a few extra thousands of pesos. The INM officials are making a circular business by asking migrants for cash in exchange for a “plug” and asking cartels a fee to hand over business to them. --Saga

Stop or be Stopped

The founder of the Slovakian group “Against Violence" just shot the country’s prime minister.

***

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change.--Easterly

***

Judge Merchan made nominal contributions to the 2020 United States presidential election, donating $15 to Joe Biden's campaign, $10 to the "Progressive Turnout Project," and $10 to "Stop Republicans." What does that mean? Why would he make such small contributions at all?

***


Stop or be Stopped

America is on what Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell calls “an unsustainable fiscal path.” 'Unsustainable' means 'stop or be stopped.'

Well into the business cycle, we are pumping fiscal stimulus equal to an unprecedented 6% of GDP and a quarter of all government spending into the economy, with no end in sight. Federal debt has risen from 70% of GDP after the financial crisis to nearly 100% today, following $5 trillion of pandemic spending to close what was likely a $1 trillion shortfall.

Tax revenues as a share of GDP are projected to remain above their 50-year average, but spending has grown to a historically high 23% of GDP from 19% before the financial crisis. Only half that increase is driven by retiring baby boomers, whose growth is expected to increase spending by another 2% of GDP over 10 years. And, importantly, government spending does not seem to be subject to reflection or analysis.

A political resolution doesn’t seem likely. Retirees seem intent on keeping what was promised them and avoiding benefit cuts. Policymakers are unlikely to raise middle-class taxes—they are engineering cuts by expanding the child tax credit. Heavy tax increases on the highest earners are estimated to contribute less than 2% of GDP.

The only answer here is economic growth--serious growth in a pro-growth economic and political atmosphere--and restrained spending, qualities absent in most political toolkits. And such policies are impossible among those hoarders of outmoded, confiscatory, redistributing (and hostile) weak-minded philosophies periodically exhumed from ancient European graveyards.

Mendacity/Policy

Nearly 2,000 people who claim to be Columbia University alumni have signed a letter pledging to “withhold all financial, programmatic, and academic support” from the institution until it meets the demands of anti-Israel protesters, claiming that $77 million in donations is at risk.

***

Man had entered the Nineteenth Century using only his own and animal power, supplemented by that of wind and water, much as he had entered the Thirteenth, or, for that matter, the First. He entered the Twentieth with his capacities in transportation, communication, production, manufacture, and weaponry multiplied a thousandfold by the energy of machines.--tuchman

***

Intel has a “chief government affairs officer”

***

Mendacity/Policy

Mendacity continues to be policy.

Ms. Katherine Tai, the U.S. Trade Representative, responded to a question about the higher prices caused by Trump’s tariffs, saying “That link, in terms of tariffs to prices, has been largely debunked.”

Well, how do tariffs work, then? Why do we do them?

Tariffs protect domestic producers only by raising the prices of protected goods and services. Raising the price makes a more expensive domestic product more competitive against a cheaper import. That's the purpose of the tariff. It is about as close to 'law' as economics has and is reiterated in every textbook, lecture, and teaching encounter.

Yet the U.S. Trade Representative says this universally accepted connection has been 'debunked.'

What could she possibly mean?

 

SatStats/Modern Crime

Many developing nations never shared the Western elite’s obsession with reducing emissions. Life for most people on earth is still a battle against poverty, hunger, and disease. Corruption, lack of jobs, and poor education hamper their futures. Tackling global temperatures a century out has never ranked high among the priorities of developing countries’ voters—and without their cooperation, the project is doomed.--lomborg

***

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) health authorities recently reported that KP.2, the dominant COVID-19 strain currently spreading around the world, has been mutating in China.

***

Over 80 percent of NBA 3s involve an assist. Typical 3-pointers are catch-and-shoot attempts that punctuate playmaking sequences that occur far away from the actual shot location, and that’s where James comes in. James is the NBA’s all-time leader in assisted 3s. He may never surpass John Stockton for total assists, but James has had his hand in more 3s than anyone else, period. He’s assisted on more 3s than Curry has made, and he’s had an outsized impact as a producer of corner 3. As a playmaker, James has extended what [Bruce] Bowen and the Spurs began.

…Six of the 10 most prolific corner-3 shooters of all time have been assisted by James, and that’s no coincidence.

…On the list of the NBA’s greatest scorers ever, James is the best playmaker, and it’s not close.

--- Goldsberry

***

SatStats/Modern Crime

Nyib Bukele, the 43rd president of El Salvador, is solving El Salvador's crime problem.

Bukele’s “iron fist” approach won’t work in the long term, columnist Eduardo Porter argued in The Washington Post. He has repeatedly come under fire from human rights groups who say El Salvador is depriving detainees of their civil rights, pointing to high numbers of deaths behind bars. Porter said the country will eventually have to grapple with what to do with 100,000 people imprisoned, who make up 1.6% of the country’s population and are mostly young men. “The challenge is to come up with viable alternatives that do not require giving up civil liberties, accountability, and justice,” Porter wrote.

But the crime problem in the Americas is bad. And safety usually trumps liberty.


Intentional Homicide Rate per 100,000 people

El Salvador: 7.8

Honduras: 35.1 = WOW!

Venezuela = 19.3

Brazil = 21.3

Colombia = 25.4

Mexico = 26.1

US of A = 6.4

So the US is beating all of those countries. However, if you want to look at developed, industrialized countries with Gun control, compare to

United Kingdom = 1.0

Canada = 2.3

France = 1.1

Italy = 0.5

Homicides in El Salvador^[16]

Year	Per 100k inhabitants	Total
2015	106.3
2016	84.1
2017	83.0
2018	53.1	3,346
2019	38.0	2,398
2020	21.2	1,341
2021	18.1	1,147
2022	7.8	495
2023	2.4	154

Pot

Two Jordanian nationals were arrested trying to break into a U.S. Marine base in Virginia. A local report stating that one of the two individuals was a Jordanian foreign national who “recently crossed the southern border into the U.S.” and also that one of them is on the U.S. terrorist watch list has, strangely, not been clarified or even addressed.

***

President Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio of his two-day interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, as Republicans threatened to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to relinquish the recordings.

***

The leftist approach to government creates inequality that far exceeds the inequality produced by the market. --kling

***

A 2017 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine examining road closures for marathons found a small but significant increase in mortality among people with heart trouble on marathon days, apparently caused in part by ambulance delays.

***

Pot

This is a bit long, cut out of an interview with Dr. Bertha Madras, an established marijuana researcher. But there are some important ideas--as well as some admittedly strange, subjective elements--that most people would see as cautionary. The pivotal point is the suggestion to reduce marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Last week media outlets reported that the Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug—on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine—which would provide tax benefits and a financial boon to the pot industry. A crucial change is that Schedule III drugs are easier to bring across state lines--and thus sidestep state regulation.

Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.

A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans aged 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes.

In 2015 the World Health Organization asked Madras to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.

She says, the “addiction potential of marijuana is as high or higher than some other drugs,” especially for young people. About 30% of those who use cannabis have some degree of a use disorder. By comparison, only 13.5% of drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Sure, alcohol can also cause harm if consumed in excess. But Ms. Madras sees several other distinctions.

One or two drinks will cause only mild inebriation, while “most people who use marijuana are using it to become intoxicated and to get high.” Academic outcomes and college completion rates for young people are much worse for those who use marijuana than for those who drink, though there’s a caveat: “It’s still a chicken and egg whether or not these kids are more susceptible to the effects of marijuana or they’re using marijuana for self-medication or what have you.”

Marijuana and alcohol both interfere with driving, but with the former there are no medical “cutoff points” to determine whether it’s safe to get behind the wheel. As a result, prohibitions against driving under the influence are less likely to be enforced for people who are high. States where marijuana is legal have seen increases in car accidents.

"My lab showed unequivocally that blood levels and brain levels don’t correspond at all—that brain levels are much higher than blood levels. They’re two to three times higher, and they persist once blood levels go way down.” Even if people quit using pot, “it can persist in their brain for a while.”

Levels of THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in pot—are four or more times as high as they were 30 years ago.

There’s mounting evidence that cannabis can cause schizophrenia. A large-scale study last year that examined health histories of some 6.9 million Danes between 1972 and 2021 estimated that up to 30% of young men’s schizophrenia diagnoses could have been prevented had they not become dependent on pot.

Another cause for concern, she notes, is that more pregnant women are using pot, which has been linked to increased preterm deliveries, admissions of newborns into neonatal intensive care units, lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences. THC crosses the placenta and mimics molecules that our bodies naturally produce that regulate brain development.

“What happens when you examine kids who have been exposed during that critical period?” Ms. Madras asks. During adolescence, she answers, they show an increased incidence of aggressive behavior, cognitive dysfunction, and symptoms of ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorders. They have reduced white and gray matter.

What about medicinal benefits? Ms. Madras says she has reviewed “every single case of therapeutic indication for marijuana—and there are over 100 now that people have claimed—and I frankly found that the only one that came close to having some evidence from randomized controlled trials was the neuropathic pain studies.”

Instead of bankrolling ballot initiatives to legalize pot, she says, George Soros and other wealthy donors who “catalyzed this whole movement” should be funding rigorous research: “If these folks, these billionaires, had just taken that money and put it into clinical trials, I would have been at peace.”

It’s a travesty, Ms. Madras adds, that the “FDA has decided that they’re going to listen to that movement rather than to what the science says.”

                                            ***

There is plenty to concern us here. The big question is the quality of research. One element limiting marijuana's commercial success is the fragmentation of the industry. There is no consistency of product--from day to day, producer to producer, facility to facility--so a consistent user base has not developed. Think Sam Adams or Lowenbrau where the customer never knew what taste he was buying. While that is a problem for manufacturers, it is a nightmare for research. There is simply no way to assess the drug in the world because there is no prototypical plant. Second, there is a very strange concentration of popular social pressure at work. Why do these radical political groups have such uniform support for these drugs? It's like seeing the Climate Child at the pro-Palestine demonstrations; that is simply peculiar.

And if a researcher like this has reservations, enthusiastic fast-tracking seems peculiar as well.

Sacrifice Inequality

Trump has a long-standing relationship with Vince McMahon and the WWE. He has been involved with the company for more than three decades. His involvement includes multiple appearances at WWE events, including as a guest ring announcer, on-screen talent, and even as the "owner" of WWE's flagship show, "WWE Raw." In 2013 he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

***

SpaceX plans to launch 90 rockets into space from a Santa Barbara County military base by 2026.

***

The world’s big banks have handed nearly $7tn (£5.6tn) in funding to the fossil fuel industry since the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions.

***

Sacrifice Inequality

The -50% for "other countries" is, of course, an error. It should be +50%. But there are a lot of errors to share space with. Certainly, the efforts to qualify 'climate change' in a culture that has obvious disdain for rigorous science investigations and has spent months withdrawing studies and reports, bankrupting some journals, and undermining the very notions of science and integrity have damaged such a movement. And the grafting of 'climate change' onto other radical world movements has raised serious questions.

And there is the practical. A 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, announced Tuesday, will make American EV cars more competitive--but at a much higher price. 

As the graph shows, some will sacrifice for the perceived greater global good, and some will not. And the Americans will be doing the sacrificing.

Notes and Notable 5

 

Notes and Notable 5


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Tuesday to show support for Ukraine amid the ongoing war.

During his trip, Blinken rocked out on stage at a local bar with a band from Kyiv.

“I know this is a really, really difficult time. Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously,” Blinken said on stage. “They need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you and they’re fighting, not just for Ukraine, but for the free world.”

Blinken then performed “Rockin’ in the Free World” by Neil Young, strumming along on the electric guitar and even singing the chorus.--Connel

***

Of the richest 10 congressional districts in the country, all are represented by Democrats.

***

Future historians, if there are any, will be dumbfounded. Today, uncountable dollars and unquantifiable hysteria are devoted to the distant threat of climate change milder than some changes Earth has experienced. A recent peer-reviewed study of scientific estimates concludes that the average annual cost of what the excitable U.N. secretary-general calls “global boiling” might reach 2 percent of global gross domestic product by 2100. Meanwhile, negligible public anxiety accompanies the intensifying danger of global incineration from nuclear war.--will

***

"My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. I am particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination. Prior to joining Columbia, I worked as a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes and remain active in the higher education labor movement."--from the bio page of Columbia demonstrator Johannah King-Slutzky, Ph.D. candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia.

Because It's There

Why are student loans more deserving of forgiveness than any other kind of debt?

***

The overall union membership rate in the U.S. last year was a record-low 10 percent, and it was only 6 percent in the private sector.

***

According to one survey, the number of children aged six to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria surged from roughly 15,000 to 42,000 in the years between 2017 and 2021 alone. The number of kids prescribed hormones to block puberty more than doubled.

***

Because It's There

Rules and regulations no longer have to be based on traditional observation and testing. For one reason, it's just too hard. Imagine the rigor of proving an everyday exposure is good or bad for people.

So now we just make things up.

A Consumer Reports study in 2022 found that popular chocolate bars contained more than California’s recommended allowable doses of cadmium and lead. However, no research has linked eating chocolate to a higher risk of birth defects or metal toxicity.

But a regulatory agency will always fill a space.

Dandelion Chocolate said, “Cadmium is a naturally occurring component in soil, and many plants take it up as they absorb nutrients, which is how it gets into our cocoa beans. According to the CDC, cadmium is commonly found in vegetables, and in relatively high concentrations in leafy greens like spinach. The law won’t allow us to say much more about how the tiny trace amounts in our product will affect your health, but if you want to reduce your exposure to cadmium generally, you might consider eating fewer leafy greens.”

Organized Voters

Two economists from the Harvard Growth Lab (Shah and Sturzenegger) estimate that the average transport costs for those who are employed in South Africa are equal to 57% of net wages when the time to commute is accounted for

***

US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, has emphasized the remarkable success of Indian immigrants in the United States, noting that over 10% of Fortune 500 company CEOs as Indian immigrants who studied in the US.

***

“[W]e have close to zero studies that have tracked gender dysphoric kids who went on blockers over significant lengths of time to see how they have fared.” --Singal

***


Organized Voters

Organized crime groups are turning Mexico’s elections into a literal battleground, making the campaign this year one of the deadliest in the country’s modern history. More than two dozen candidates have been killed leading up to the June 2 vote; hundreds have dropped out of the race. More than 400 have asked the federal government for security details. The campaign of intimidation and assassination is putting democracy itself at risk.

The armed groups’ goal is to install friendly leaders in local offices so they can better exploit Mexican communities. Once largely focused on shipping drugs to the United States, the cartels now also smuggle migrants, extort businesses and win contracts for firms they control. They want to name towns’ police chiefs and public works directors.

Assassins have targeted candidates from all of Mexico’s major parties. In Maravatío, a municipality of 80,000 in the central state of Michoacan, three candidates for mayor have been killed — two from Morena, López Obrador’s party, and one from the opposition National Action Party, or PAN.

Carlos Palomeque, head of the PAN in Chiapas, says nearly two dozen mayoral candidates from the party have dropped out of their races. It used to be the cartels bought off voters, he says. Now, “they force candidates from the race. It’s cheaper.”--WashPo

SPECTRE

Billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin called on his alma mater Harvard University on Saturday to embrace "Western values."

***

District of Columbia police are refusing to help George Washington University re-establish order on campus.
On Thursday Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith said there had been “no violent behavior, no confrontations” and so police wouldn’t be coming to campus. “We allow people the opportunity to have freedom of speech, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.”--WSJ

***

Climate activist Greta Thunberg was detained by Swedish police in Malmö on Saturday for attending a pro-Palestinian protest outside the Eurovision venue. Why do these outrages always seem to overlap?

***

 

SPECTRE

The return of the 'little guy.' Government crime is going populist.

FT has some stories about Russia's efforts to bring vandalism, petty crime, and well-poisoning to a state level.


Two German-Russian nationals were arrested in Bayreuth, Bavaria, for allegedly plotting to attack military and logistics sites in Germany on behalf of Russia.

Two men were charged in the UK in late April with having started a fire at a warehouse containing aid shipments for Ukraine. English prosecutors accuse them of working for the Russian government.

In Sweden, security services are investigating a series of recent railway derailments, which they suspect may be acts of state-backed sabotage. Russia has attempted to destroy the signaling systems on Czech railways.

In Estonia, an attack on the interior minister’s car in February and those of journalists were perpetrated by Russian intelligence operatives, the country’s Internal Security Service has said.

France’s Ministry of Defense also warned this year of possible sabotage attacks by Russia on military sites.

Questions have been raised over a so-far unexplained explosion at a BAE Systems munitions factory in Wales that supplies shells used by Ukraine.

In October 2014 a Czech arms depot where weapons for Kyiv were being stored was destroyed; Russian military intelligence agents were later revealed to have planted explosives at the site.

A huge fire broke out on Friday at a factory in Berlin owned by the arms company Diehl, which also supplies Ukraine.

Felonies in the national interest.

SatStats/U.S. Census Immigration Numbers

Solar is powering a large share of California’s energy needs during the day and batteries are now powering a significant share at night.
Since 2020, California has installed more giant batteries than anywhere in the world apart from China. They can soak up excess solar power during the day and store it for use when it gets dark.
Those batteries play a pivotal role in California’s electric grid, partially replacing fossil fuels in the evening. Between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on April 30, for example, batteries supplied more than one-fifth of California’s electricity and, for a few minutes, pumped out 7,046 megawatts of electricity, akin to the output from seven large nuclear reactors.--nyt

***

“A pro-Biden coalition does not exist, but an anti-Trump one does.”--a quote appearing in Peggy Noonan

***



SatStats/U.S. Census Immigration Numbers 

More than half of the foreign-born population in the United States lives in just four states — California, Texas, Florida, and New York — and they grew older and more educated over the past dozen years, according to a new report released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2022, the foreign-born population was estimated to be 46.2 million people, or almost 14% of the U.S. population, with most states seeing double-digit percentage increases in the last dozen years, according to the figures from the bureau's American Community Survey.

In California, New Jersey, New York, and Florida, foreign-born individuals comprised more than 20% of each state’s population. They constituted 1.8% of West Virginia's population, the smallest rate in the U.S.

Half of the foreign-born residents in the U.S. were from Latin America, although their composition has shifted in the past dozen years, with those from Mexico dropping by about 1 million people and those from South America and Central America increasing by 2.1 million people.

The share of the foreign population from Asia went from more than a quarter to under a third during that time, while the share of African-born went from 4% to 6%.

The Micromanager of Afghanistan Glances Eastward

The Hilary campaign paid for the Steele dossier, accounted for it as "legal expense" and litigated that decision in court.

***

About 30 percent of fast-food workers are teens, and another 30 percent are between twenty and twenty-four years old. With 60 percent of its workforce twenty-four or younger, the fast-food industry stands in sharp contrast to the other industries, in which only about 13 percent of workers are that young.

***

The Micromanager of Afghanistan Glances Eastward

"I need ammunition, not a ride."--Zelensky

Robert Gates, who served as secretary of Defense in the Obama-Biden administration, famously disparaged Joe Biden’s 40-year involvement in foreign policy before he became president: “He has been wrong on nearly every major issue.” This, combined with the traditional Liberal arrogance, has led the Americans to an embarrassing--and possibly dangerous--situation in the Middle East.

Biden also seeks consistency. In 1982, at a closed-door meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had threatened Begin with cutting off military aid for Israel’s offensive campaign in Lebanon. As Tevi Troy noted in the Wall Street Journal, the story went that Begin responded in fiery outrage:

"Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles. I’m not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid."

Biden is also consistent in his understanding of leadership as being some measure of extortion. But the calm smugness of the Left, so wonderfully personified by Obama, distains results. Do they really see Israel negotiating with their enemies from a position of compromise?

Exploring the Unknown

Let me see. So Hamas created a cease-fire discussion with the U.S. without Israeli participation and then agreed to the terms they created. Israel was sandbagged and when they couldn't agree they were vilified in the press. A great Hamas coup.
Then the U.S. withheld their weapons shipment because Israel wouldn't agree to the unilateral Hamas proposal.
Has the U.S. been out-maneuvered by Hamas terrorists?

***

Why did the judge allow Stormy Daniels to appear in court when her testimony had nothing to do with the accusation?

***



Exploring the Unknown

In 2018, scientists discovered something unexpected living aboard the International Space Station. This surprise visitor turned out to be five strains of a multi-drug-resistant bacteria known to as Enterobacter bugandensis. Now, researchers say at least 13 strains have been discovered. This means that the original strains have mutated into several new strains of bacteria never seen before on Earth.

This bacteria is an opportunistic pathogen, which means on Earth it will only cause disease in a person if they are already battling a disease or have a weakened immune system. But that doesn't mean that this new organism, unseen before--ever, will be a similar organism to the one we know.

So we are launching structures into space and seeing the development of unique organisms with unknown activity and potential. So far, so good?

Did any of these guys read The Andromeda Strain?

Notes and Notable 4

Notes and Notable 4

A  personal injury attorney has died after being shot outside a McDonald's while trying to de-escalate an incident with a customer over his order.

***

“I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.”-NYT interview

Putting homeschooling in a new light.


***

Portugal

A least half of a population of ten million depend on the state in some way—35% are retirees, 10% government workers, and another 5% receive either unemployment benefits or integration benefits. They would see a country with less youth than they once saw; they would see what is in fact, after Italy, the second-oldest country in Europe, with 23% of the population being older than 65. And they would further see that like so many other democratic and less democratic countries, Portugal is having elections and that this election will, once again, pit the country’s aging population against its young people.

So-called “seniors” are reliable voters, while young people aren’t, and so this perverse incentive ensures that seniors vote, effectively, to extract rent for themselves from young people through the state. This is reflected in voting intentions: people over 54 are disproportionately likely to vote for the Socialist Party, while those who are under 25 are disproportionately unlikely to vote for it.

***

Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change. This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes. Drawing on a database covering the quasi-universe of protests held in the United States, we identify 14 social movements that took place from 2017 to 2022, covering topics related to environmental protection, gender equality, gun control, immigration, national and international politics, and racial issues. We use Twitter data, Google search volumes, and high-frequency surveys to track the evolution of online interest, policy views, and vote intentions before and after the outset of each movement. Combining national-level event studies with difference-in-differences designs exploiting variation in local protest intensity, we find that protests generate substantial internet activity but have limited effects on political attitudes. Except for the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, which shifted views on racial discrimination and increased votes for the Democrats, we estimate precise null effects of protests on public opinion and electoral behavior.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Amory Gethin and Vincent Pons.

***

Homicides in American cities are falling at the fastest pace in decades, bringing them close to levels they were at before a pandemic-era jump.--nyt

***

When it launched its fully automated stores four years ago, Germany’s regional supermarket chain Tegut billed the experiment as a window into the future of shopping. But the Fulda-based retailer has since been embroiled in a legal fight over a centuries-old principle enshrined in the German constitution: Sunday rest. Be they robotic or staffed by humans, most shops in Germany are not allowed to open on the last day of the week — and courts have upheld that ban.

MMT and its Discontents

Did Hamas accept a cease-fire that they wrote with the Americans and that the Israelis did not see? Did the U.S. delay arms to Israel because Israel declined it?

If the American State Department thinks that Israel is like Puerto Rico, Israel probably should know.

***

Nathan Wade calls relationship with Fani Willis 'American as apple pie'

***

MMT and its Discontents

Modern Monetary Theory is a recent notion that states that deficit spending has no real negative consequences for either inflation or economic growth.

"The central idea of modern monetary theory is that governments with a fiat currency system under their control can and should print (or create with a few keystrokes in today’s digital age) as much money as they need to spend because they cannot go broke or be insolvent unless a political decision to do so is taken. While supporters of modern monetary theory acknowledge that inflation is theoretically a possible outcome from such spending, they say it is highly unlikely and can be fought with policy decisions in the future if required."--Investopedia

The Biden White House has proposed a $6 trillion budget, which will keep deficits above a trillion for the next 10 years.

10 years.

That budget will not be fully paid for with tax increases or spending cuts. It will increase the deficit, according to Stephanie Kelton, and that constitutes an implicit if not explicit adoption of the principles of modern monetary theory (MMT)

Kelton is a professor at Stony Brook University and was an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders for his two presidential campaigns.

She is the author of The Deficit Myth and is an outspoken advocate of MMT

“[T]he idea that taxes pay for what the government spends is pure fantasy,” she writes in The Deficit Myth. “[I]t is the currency issuer — the federal government itself — not the taxpayer, that finances all government expenditures.”

“The carpenter can’t run out of inches,” she tweeted in 2019. “The stadium can’t run out of points. The airline can’t run out of [frequent flier] miles. And the USA can’t run out of dollars.”

But an idea is not given value just by being strange or obtuse.  (The best line about MMT is that it is Lysenkoism.)

A Bard College e-pamphlet examined an interview given by Representative John Yarmuth (D, KY-03), Chair of the House Budget Committee, in which he explicitly adopts an MMT approach to budgeting. Chairman Yarmuth also lays out a path for realizing the major elements of President Biden’s proposals.

Jared Bernstein chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He recently had some publicity because he struggled to explain Modern Monetary Policy.

Bernstein is a longtime economic aide to President Biden, although he lacks an academic background in economics. He earned a bachelor's degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music, as well as a master of social work from Hunter College and a doctorate of social work from Columbia University.

He has taught at several colleges, including Columbia and New York University, and worked as an economist for the Department of Labor during the Clinton administration. Bernstein has also worked at liberal think tanks, including the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Bernstein worked as the chief economist and economic adviser to then-Vice President Biden from 2009 to 2011 during the Obama administration. He was an advisor to the Biden-Harris Transition Team, and after President Biden's inauguration, Bernstein was appointed to the CEA.

He was confirmed as the chair of the CEA on a 50-49 vote by the Senate in June 2023.

Meanwhile, at the State Department, ...

Our best and brightest.