New American Science

 On this day:

55
Roman forces under Julius Caesar invade Great Britain.
1346
Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights is established at the Battle of Crécy.
1429
Joan of Arc makes a triumphant entry into Paris.
1768
Captain James Cook sets sail from England on board HMS Endeavour.
1789
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France.
1883
The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa begins its final, paroxysmal stage.
1920
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect, giving women the right to vote.
1942
Holocaust in Chortkiav, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei starts driving Jews out of their houses, divides them into groups of 120, packs them in freight cars and deports 2000 to Belzec death camp. 500 of the sick and children are murdered on the spot.
1999
Russia begins the Second Chechen War in response to the Invasion of Dagestan by the Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade.

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It is liberty which is ancient, and despotism which is modern.--Germaine de Staël


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A source familiar with the matter alleged to Reuters that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House because of her ongoing opposition to the Iran war.

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In a recent Science study, a hibernation-like state in mice erased the state of more than half of their synapses, and yet the mice apparently kept their memories. Think anesthesia.

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), a 2028 presidential hopeful, had welcomed data centers as an economic-development boon, boasting last year that an Amazon plan to build $20 billion in AI infrastructure was the "largest private sector investment in the history of Pennsylvania."
On Tuesday, Shapiro, whose Republican opponent in November is campaigning on halting data-center development, went from AI cheerleader to critic and signed an executive order imposing stringent new requirements for data-center developers.
He did the same thing with school vouchers, in favor while campaigning, opposed while governing.

 Calculatingly cynical.

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Musk recently said Anthropic was leading the AI race, his company, Grok, was behind, and that soon AI would become too advanced for humans to control.

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Paul Skenes pitched six innings of three-hit ball, and Oneil Cruz hit the first homer allowed by Mason Miller in over a year with two outs in the ninth Tuesday night, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates a 1-0 victory over the San Diego Padres.


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New American Science

There is a plan to reorganize the country's science funding.

'American science has long been state-funded but not state-directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue: the system was decentralized and not under state control. This ..{new} ..rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.

Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.

Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science.'--Taborrok

The bureaucrat is, by his own assessment, confident, insightful, and high-minded. He is deaf to what history has stammered over and over: short-term control does not lead to long-term direction.

Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

On this day:
565
St. Columba reports seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland.
1485
The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.
1642
Charles I calls the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War begins.
1780
James Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returns to England (Cook having been killed on Hawaii during the voyage).
1831
Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commences just after midnight in Southampton, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.
1910
Korea is annexed by Japan with the signing of the Japan–Korea Annexation Treaty, beginning a period of Japanese rule of Korea that lasted until the end of World War II.
1922
Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army is shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.
1963
American Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reaches an altitude of 106 km.
1992
FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

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The owner of OnlyFans was paid $701m (£523m) in dividends last year

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I’ll not grant the proposition that an effective means of harming a rival nation is to engage in so-called “dumping.” If the Chinese really are selling goods to Americans at prices below the costs the Chinese incur to supply these goods, they are impoverishing themselves as they enrich us. --Bordeaux

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Barring death, in 2029, the queen (consort) of Malaysia will be an Ulsterwoman. Her bio reads like she's the queen of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuanku_Zara_Salim

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Mamdani and the Dreaded NGO

Zohran Mamdani first reached elected office in 2021. He defeated four-term Democratic incumbent state assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, a 46-year-old former lawyer, City Hall staffer, and Community Planning Board member who belongs to the century-old Greek immigrant community of northwestern Queens. Mamdani, then 29 years old, had been rejected from The Nation’s internship program after graduating from college. He then tried to launch a rap career and worked as a music coordinator on a Disney-produced film directed by his mother, Mira Nair. His sole qualification for public office was his relatively brief time as a housing counselor for Chhaya Community Development Corporation, an organization that works with low- and middle-income South Asian communities in Jackson Heights, in central Queens.

To dismiss this résumé as a multinational trust-fund kid’s laughable excuse for a career is also to misunderstand how power is now organized within Democratic Party verticals in major cities. Groups like Chhaya have become one of the primary instruments of public policy in New York, where social programs are often carried out through the public subsidy of nonprofit private-sector partners—groups with the freedom to be less accountable, more sectarian, and more ideological than government tends to be. In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021. Billion. In 2019, Chhaya got $595,000 in government grants, accounting for one-third of the organization’s revenue. This public largesse didn’t mean Mamdani was drawing a large salary at taxpayers’ expense—though, as the son of a renowned historian and a globally famous director, he didn’t really need one. According to the group’s 990 form from 2019, Chayya split $729,000 in nonexecutive compensation between 27 employees.

The public-private trough would prove even more helpful to Mamdani when he entered politics. In New York City, a taxpayer-funded matching program pays candidates eight dollars for every one dollar they raise from city residents whose donations are $250 or lower. This is twice what New York’s public match rate was in 1998, and a generous multiplier by national standards. Actually, by any standards. The taxpayer actually funds the ambitious politician. And this is without regard to his beliefs.

So far, Mamdani’s campaign for mayor has received $2.5 million in private funds and $9.8 million in public funds.

A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mamdani’s. New York is thought of as the sink-or-swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that’s not true anymore. The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in the government sector. Read that again. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce. 17%. And nationally, the rate is 10%. How much is lost to the economy when those guys call off sick?

Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.

Nonprofit-dominated sectors are also adding jobs at a far higher rate than any other part of the city’s economy. Of 67,000 new jobs added in New York City in the year before May of 2025, 63,800 were in “private education and health services.” During the same period, the city created an anemic 600 jobs in trade, transportation, and utilities and lost 4,900 jobs in manufacturing and construction.

Between 2010 and 2015, the time when leadership of the city shifted from the centrist liberal patrician Michael Bloomberg to the progressive Bill de Blasio, the city added 158,000 total jobs in the nonprofit-heavy health care, education, media, and arts sectors, compared to 58,400 total in traditional outer-borough industries like construction, transportation, wholesale trade, manufacturing, and real estate.

The subsidized classes rose in power as the city’s productive industries faded. New York has gone from about 1 million manufacturing jobs in 1955 to fewer than 45,000 today, with construction and wholesale seeing a similar decline during the same period, from 750,000 to a shade under 500,000 jobs. The NYPD, a longtime source of lower-middle-class employment and social mobility, has gone from 40,000 active officers in 2000 to 34,000 today. The multigenerational working class—the remnant of the city’s mid-to-late-20th-century mix of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Italians—has shrunk in relative size and power. New York’s Black population has contracted this century, from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2020. Similarly, the city’s Puerto Rican population plunged from 715,000 to 574,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone.

This is culled from a recent Tablet article and is not presented to be particularly critical of Mamdani. The non-profit world might be an occupation of last resort, but it is also a source of highly leveraged political influence, an influence that many underestimate. And this world, unlike most of the world, is not self-correcting; it fosters isolated and peripheral personal notions and projects--like the inept Mandani and his goofy ideas--that we poor working folks will be forced to subsidize, then clean up.

One wonders, with the government shutting down the economy for eighteen months, subsidizing the economy with unsustainable debt, and redoing failed social and economic experiments, how long the beleaguered working culture can do this.

Abundence

Local. District. National. These are the areas of judicial catchment and influence. A local judge cannot influence national policy. Foreign residents' due process ends with the executive administrators.
These judges may well start interfering with battlefield decisions.

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Kermit the Frog will deliver the address to the University of Maryland’s graduates this summer.

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This security leak molehill shows the real impact devoted media accomplices can have on the national stage.

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Abundence

A recent review in--I think 'The Atlantic'--skims the debate that has roiled this country since its creation: efficiency vs. freedom, fiat vs. evolution, great vs. small, central vs. local. How is power distributed within an organizing entity and its constituent parts? There are vaults of debates on the topic but apparently nothing is new. This is a running commentary on that review.

Two new books are at the heart of this discussion. One is  Abundance, by Ezra Klein, the star New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a journalist at the Atlantic. The other, Why Nothing Works, comes from Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. All three writers are Democrats or sympathetic to the Democratic cause. All dislike Donald Trump. All want blue cities, blue counties, and blue states from coast to coast. 

These books have been very well-hyped. Many feel they offer the Left new direction and hope, the next years' Democrat blueprint.

All three feel the United States, despite its inordinate wealth, is not matching its twentieth century dynamism. Could this government — Republican or Democratic-run — stand up another interstate highway system? A network of railroads? Could this Department of Defense effectively invent the internet?

The Klein-Thompson duo argues that an “anti-growth” mentality has constrained the left for the last several decades. NIMBYism and aggressive regulations have strangled housing supply and innovation. As government support for research and development dried up, science produced fewer society-wide breakthroughs. Once, we built whole subway systems in a decade, sent human beings to the moon, and created the internet. Klein and Thompson do blame neoliberalism — a long-running retreat from government investment and a foisting of responsibilities on the private sector. But they’d prefer lighter zoning and environmental laws to speed up growth.

The dynamism and growth here are obviously not the growth that everyone sees with the nation knocking on the moon's door or developing medications, developing new energy sources, or improving water efficiency. Their growth is more targeted and moral. Like equal housing or educational outcomes. These may well be desirable to many, but their rationale is faith-based and, in our increasingly secular world, that is a hard sell. More, it demands an extension of the traditional constitutional guarantees of equality of all men before the law to equity for all men in growing areas of social sensitivities like housing, more charity-based than legal.

Dunkelman’s thesis is similar. For New Yorkers, there’s plenty in Why Nothing Works to devour. He begins with the great bête noire of the modern left, Robert Moses, and argues that the master builder’s legacy is somewhat misunderstood. Or, at least, we’ve overlearned the lessons of the Moses era. Moses, of course, ran roughshod over much of New York, ramming highways through thriving neighborhoods and thwarting the expansion of mass transit. He behaved like a tyrant and cared little for conventional democracy. Politicians couldn’t move him, nor could protest. For 40 years, he was emblematic of an imperial approach to governing, and it was Robert Caro’s The Power Broker that exposed, finally, many of his excesses.

Under Moses, the government could be unfeeling — but it worked. And it was not Moses-style development that triggered New York’s decline in the 1970s, as Caro strongly intimated. Rather, it was the collapse of the manufacturing sector, white flight, and fiscal mismanagement. The public works Moses left behind were necessary for New York’s post-fiscal crisis renaissance.

Mussolini made the trains run on time. All autocracies struggle with the limited vision of their citizens.  

Dunkelman frames American views of governance as a centuries-long clash between Hamiltonians, who argue for stronger centralized authority, and Jeffersonians, who are wary of government overreach.

But the trouble began when the Jeffersonians kept winning. Beginning in the 1970s, skepticism of government power began getting baked into both political parties.

And projects like the California high-speed train--estimated in 2008 at a cost of $33 billion with a completion date in 2020 is now estimated at over $100 billion, with completion in 2030 and no ridable track exists yet (currently, $10 billion has been spent.)--for some reason are not cautionary tales for these people.

The review, at this point, takes a strange turn. It argues that the Left’s role is poorly understood, and Dunkelman is a wonderful guide. 

Watergate taught a generation of young progressives to distrust federal power, and the left began to favor hamstringing government whenever possible. Numerous new chokepoints, some of them well-meaning, were invented, from arcane local laws to community boards that could stifle building that alienated locals. Preservationists warred to freeze urban neighborhoods in place, hoping to avoid catastrophes like the obliteration of the old Penn Station — but they also, in their zeal for saving the Old, helped to ensure these cities would grow less affordable. Building new affordable housing, commuter railways, or any other type of large infrastructure project became far harder in the era of community control.

If only the stubborn citizenry would succumb to the benign and creative overarching vision of the Left. But it is a lot more complicated than that. There are all sorts of motives in the community movements. One is the aesthetics of government housing. One is energy efficiency. One is the snail darter. One is community home value, i.e., selfishness. And, while a home is a quintessential Amerian achievement, it may not be a successful gift. Housing is more than a construction project; it comes with people. I would bet that the unreliability of government--a huge problem--is way, way down the list.

It gets stranger. 

How to make America dynamic again, he asks? How to build here like they do in China and Japan, where it’s routine to throw up new high-speed rail lines every decade? And if we solved these problems, would it be enough? 

But we are not China nor Japan. We are unique, conceived in liberty and equality before the law. And the deep regard for personal property. These are not impediments to be overcome; these are what we are. The success of this nation is a result of these concepts, an escape from those of the feudal East and Old Europe. These books complain that restoring the grand old days of fiat governments and religious wars will be an uphill fight.

David Sirota, the founder of Lever News and a former Bernie Sanders speechwriter, summed up one stinging progressive critique of the whole project: “Abundance being defined as ‘kill zoning laws and corporate regulation’ but not ‘give everyone decent medical care’ — that’s the tell, and you’re the mark.” It’s true that this is not a focus among the advocates of abundance. Relaxing zoning laws won’t do anything to bring us universal healthcare or bolster the social safety net. It may not even, in the short-term, do enough to create affordable housing. One of the great divides within the YIMBY movement, which can be folded into the abundance push, is how much regulation should exist around what people pay in rent. Some YIMBYs do back stronger tenant protections and versions of rent control while others, like Klein ally Matthew Yglesias, plainly do not. Yglesias is also skeptical of lifting the federal law that effectively bans the construction of new public housing.

Abundance, then, can hold different meanings for different advocates. If the belief is that a robust, efficient federal government should do more to help working class Americans, then we need a new program of mass home-building like we saw in the 1930s and 1940s. Without the New York City Public Housing Authority, the largest city in America would probably have an unfathomably large amount of homeless, the tent cities in the five boroughs making the Tenderloin and Skid Row look like minor, quasi-pastoral encampments. If you believe zoning reform is enough — and the government need only get out of the way — then how much housing must be built, exactly, for rents to start falling enough so a family making well under $100,000 can comfortably afford a market-rate apartment? Turning New York (or any city) into Tokyo is easier said than done.

So neither book nor Sirota accept the idea that local political events and national faith-based concepts are in any way separate. Rather, they are reflections in the same mirror, the expression of an activist core, based upon government-imposed faith-based equity. The stagnation they see is very focused and, dangerously, concentrated in a pinpoint devotion to equity at any cost.

Then, the bland "conclusion:" 

"What abundance advocates do get right is that governments — federal, state, and local — must do far better. We have fallen a long way from the twentieth century; we led the world in building and innovation until we didn’t. We are still a remarkably wealthy nation and we must find a way, as we persevere in this new century, to beat back stagnation. Otherwise, the future is going to be much more frustrating."

Freedom and property as impediments, government as a competent prime mover; little is new.

USAID

Marriages in China plummeted by a fifth last year, the biggest drop on record, despite manifold efforts by authorities to encourage young couples to wed and have children to boost the country's declining population.

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Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.” This is from an informative article in Foreign Affairs, here:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/post-neoliberal-delusion

USAID

On her four-country tour through Africa in 2018 -- her first major solo international trip as first lady -- Melania Trump offered praise for what she described as "successful" USAID programs as she observed them up close.

The $50 million fund, known as W-GDP, was developed to be distributed by USAID with an ambitious goal of empowering 50 million women in developing countries by 2025.

The initiative was led by the president's daughter and then senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.

Apparently Rubio once had kind words for the agency.

These superficial endorsements have been floated as important discrepincies in USAID's recent critical evaluation.

But isn't that what fraud is: a discrepency between stated and planned aims? And isn't secrecy a part of that? “The documents my staff reviewed, on their face, failed to comply with standard classifications protocols. Only after demanding to speak to your USAID Office of Security, my staff uncovered that this data was, in fact, unclassified,” Senator Ernst wrote in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The foolish projects that USAID has supported may not be charactistic of the agency. But don't they prompt a look? And don't they raise questions as to the judgment of the people in the program?

What is it about overseeing the program that is so upsetting?

 

Sat Stats/Transfer Payments

CNN anchor Chris Wallace announced on Monday that he would leave the network at the end of his contract, citing the growing influence of podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Charlamagne tha God.

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We find that performance on both the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) and essay components of the Nevada Bar have little relationship with the assessed lawyering effectiveness of new lawyers, calling into question the usefulness of these tests.--paper
"Effectiveness"

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Noonon on Hegseth:
Pete Hegseth as defense secretary? This is unserious and deeply alarming. He is a decorated military veteran with Ivy League degrees, but he has no serious governmental or managerial experience, no history of international accomplishment. The Pentagon is a mammoth bureaucracy overseeing almost three million employees, including those in the military services. The defense secretary is a world leader: If North Korea launched a nuclear missile, he would be in the room with the president, advising and counseling. In the past 10 years Mr. Hegseth has made his living as a breakfast TV host and culture warrior. This isn’t the right fit. At this point in his life Mr. Hegseth, 44, lacks the stature and depth required of the role.

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Transfer Payments

Payments from government entitlement programs — transfer payments — are the fastest-growing major component of citizens’ personal income.

Such transfers are the third-largest source of personal income: In 2022, the average citizen received almost as much from government transfers ($11,500) as from investments ($12,900), and more than one-quarter as much money as was obtained from work. 

This average citizen received six times more (adjusted for inflation) in government transfer payments than in 1970, during which span income from other sources increased less than half as much. Transfers’ share of total (inflation-adjusted) personal income has more than doubled since 1970, from 8.2 percent to 17.6 percent in 2022.

How are we different from the failing European redistributionist? 

And while those numbers are astonishing, they are not as remarkable as their direction.

Grants

Poland has surpassed Russia in terms of the value of exports for the first time on record, according to new World Bank data for 2023. They also reveal that Poland has risen to become the 19th largest exporter in the world.

Poland’s exports of goods and services reached $469 billion last year (up from $433.7 billion in 2022), compared to $466.6 billion in sanctions-hit Russia (down from $640.9 billion in 2022).

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In the Series' fourth game last night, Mookie Betts leaped at the wall in foul territory and initially caught Gleyber Torres’ pop-up in the first inning, but a fan in the first row with a gray Yankees’ road jersey grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands and pulled the ball out. Another fan grabbed Betts’ non-glove hand.
A nasty moment.

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A 2023 study analyzed by The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler recorded "fewer than 1,000 noncitizen votes out of 3.4 million cast in the 2020 election in Arizona," or 0.0003 percent (assuming 50 percent turnout among registered noncitizens).

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Since pioneering the first corporate purchase agreements for renewable electricity over a decade ago, Google has played a pivotal role in accelerating clean energy solutions, including the next generation of advanced clean technologies. Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.-- Google

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Grants

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups.

By early 2024, that figure had risen to 27 percent.

One can only wonder about the value of a cost-benefit analysis of government programs, perhaps run by Musk.

State-Directed Production

No one is more dogmatically insistent on conformity than those who advocate “diversity.”--Sowell

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Nearly $2 billion of American Rescue Plan funds were earmarked for nonexistent county governments in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
$13 million went to a water park in Danville, Ill

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State-Directed Production

Chinese e-commerce giant Temu is the latest warning sign that the world’s second-largest economy could be headed for a doom loop caused by overproduction and Beijing’s industrial planning.

PDD Holdings, the parent company of Temu and Pinduoduo, stunned Wall Street on Monday with weak quarterly results and a warning that intense competition will dampen future earnings.

Shares sank more than 30%, wiping out $50 billion in PDD’s market value and ending founder Colin Huang’s short-lived reign as China’s richest man.

In an analysis written before the earnings report, a top China scholar described an economic landscape that helped explain PDD’s woes.

Other China watchers have blamed the recent stagnation on the real estate meltdown, the country’s aging population, and President Xi Jinping’s tighter grip on economic policy.

But a longer-term driver is Beijing’s decades-old strategy of favoring industrial production over all else, resulting in enormous overcapacity, wrote Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a China scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Foreign Affairs magazine.

“Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb,” she added. “As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses.”

When profits shrink, companies boost production higher and drop prices lower to generate enough cash to service their debt, Liu explained, adding that government-designated priority sectors also sell products below cost to meet political goals.

This dynamic has been destabilizing the global market with a flood of cheap Chinese exports creating a sharp backlash in the form of stiff tariffs. The domestic market is also marked by overproduction and cutthroat price competition that risks sending the economy into deflation, Liu warned.

“Analogously, although China’s vibrant e-commerce sector might suggest a plethora of consumer choices, in reality, major platforms such as Alibaba, Pinduoduo, and Shein compete fiercely to sell the same commoditized products,” she said. “In other words, the illusion of consumer choice masks a domestic market that is overwhelmingly shaped by the state’s industrial priorities rather than by individual preferences.” (from Fortune)

Interestingly, even though vast sums are pouring into AI, the money is going to companies that can expand the most quickly rather than the most innovative ones.

Government Divestment

Why no Blinkin and Nod parody?

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Should Trump receive reparations for the calumny of the last years?

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$280 billion was stolen from Covid relief program.

Government Divestment

Solyndra can make a guy cynical. How about this.

There is an interesting sidelight to the Higgs discovery made by the mostly European team and announced, provocatively, on the Fourth of July. The Superconducting Super Collider built at the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland was, in the 1990's, funded by American money and the decision to withdraw the money delayed the advances and removed Americans from prominence there. More, Fermilab, built outside of Chicago in 1967, was one of the original potential sites for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but federal funding was withdrawn and the new collider was awarded to Geneva. The Fermilab collider was closed down for lack of funding in 2011. University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane says that had the funding been maintained, the Higgs would have been an American discovery with its eventual collateral advances.

I know that sounds a bit wistful--and regressively nationalistic--but cultures that don't achieve without aspiration. With all the talk about "government investment," this looks like a good one not done.

If you search Fermilab now you get articles about local bison.

Another China Lab

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

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RFK Jr.'s son, Conor, joined Ukraine's Foreign Legion to fight in Ukraine.

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Is it my imagination, or are there a lot of personal attacks on the more conservative Supreme Court justices?

Another China Lab

China’s empty buildings, unused airports, and barren highways are what central planning looks like in practice.

One of the key problems with central planning is that government planners don’t know how much to produce. In the absence of price signals that communicate the need for goods and services, they just have to guess. The guesses aren’t guided purely by practical analysis, of course. Political considerations often play a large role, as do the desire to “uplift” less developed areas.

China’s province of Guizhou is one of its poorest. The government sought to spur development there and commissioned massive construction projects. Bloomberg reports some staggering facts of the government’s overbuilding.

Near the city of Zunyi, one of Guizhou’s largest, the government built three airports. The one furthest from the city only has four flights per week. Guizhou’s mountainous terrain has provided a playground for Chinese civil engineers, and the province is home to nearly half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. It’s “questionable whether it was entirely necessary,” Bloomberg puts it mildly.--Pino

If you build it, they will come?

More Government Investments

India has launched its third Moon mission, aiming to be the first to land near its little-explored south pole.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft with an orbiter, lander and a rover lifted off at 14:35 on Friday (09:05 GMT) from Sriharikota space center.
The lander is due to reach the Moon on 23-24 August.
If successful, India will be only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.

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In the Post, George Will predicts that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

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"The impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations," Sam Singer, a spokesman for the Anchor Steam beer said in a statement.

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More Government Investments

The Los Angeles Times estimated that the government payout to build SolarCity in Buffalo could have been as much as $1.5 billion. In exchange, officials expected the Buffalo factory to create as many as 5,000 jobs and attract further development to the area. Musk promised that by 2020, the factory would make enough products to cover 1,000 roofs per week. But barely a decade since the deal was struck, the factory averages 21 installations per week, and the only new business that has moved into the area is a single coffee shop. And while Tesla reported in February that it had created 1,700 jobs—as the Journal notes, "enough to meet its obligations to the state and avoid a $41 million annual penalty"—the majority of those are Tesla employees who don't work on solar projects.

Those Who Can't Do, Govern

French, writing in the NYT on the rise of critical and aggressive politically activist Christianity, which he opposes, "the need for existential humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings."

***

Senate Intelligence Committee.
Last week, the committee unanimously adopted a provision to cut off all federal funding to any secret UFO reverse-engineering program, whether conducted by the US government or hidden away in the private sector via a defense contractor.
The Intel committee chose their words carefully, broadly targeting any reverse-engineering programs involving unidentified craft of 'non-earth' or 'exotic' origin.

Now that's just nuts.

***

John Kerry negotiated with the Iranians when he was out of office.

Those Who Can't Do, Govern

Joe Biden wants to take a page from China’s economic playbook. In a recent speech, the president officially embraced the term “Bidenomics” to describe his economic policies, which he characterized as the federal government “investing in key industries of the future, making targeted investments to promote domestic production of semiconductors, batteries, electric cars, clean energy.” In other words, the administration is pursuing a government-directed industrial policy using taxpayer subsidies and mandates to pick economic winners and losers.

The administration is partly motivated by fears that the U.S. is falling behind China, where firms are openly subsidized by the government and have been gaining market share in industries once dominated by American companies. But three recent studies jointly authored by American economist Lee G. Branstetterand Chinese economist Guangwei Li suggest China’s industrial policy “successes” are overblown. China’s various industrial policies, such as “Made in China 2025”—which, like Bidenomics, targets direct subsidies, tax incentives and government loans to key sectors such as aerospace, robotics, energy-efficient automobiles and biopharmaceuticals—don’t just fall flat. They do more harm than good.--Hodge

For some reason, this thought process never dies. Their eight tyrants are better at business than our incredible innovators who are always moving the world. So, our eight tyrants have to take charge and save the day. And they show up with huge scissors and cut the ribbon at the Solandra and Solar City plant openings. 

Maybe things would be better if they also showed up and cut the ribbon for the bankruptcy filing, too.

A Better Philanthropy

“Ticket from Miami to Port-au-Prince: $124. Ticket from Port-au-Prince to Miami: $1,000-3,000”

***

In our testing, when given a full battery of USMLE [medical licensing exam] problems, GPT-4 answers them correctly more than 90 percent of the time.
And it can give very good explanations.--forthcoming book

***

Côte d’Ivoire citizens pay the highest income taxes in the world according to this year’s survey findings by World Population Review.

While both its sales and corporate tax regimes may be considerably lower than those of other countries globally, at 60%, Côte d’Ivoire’s income tax rates are markedly higher compared to developed countries.

Only Finland (56.95%), Japan (55.97%), Denmark (55.90%), and Austria (55%), closely follow Côte d’Ivoire to round up the top five countries with the highest income tax, in a study that surveyed over 150 countries.

A Better Philanthropy

At its best, lots of philanthropy is very useful, but may not be sustainable over time—a sugar high that rarely enables that “teach a man how to fish” thing. Effective altruism may be an oxymoron. And it’s hard to miss that much of philanthropy is to fix government failures in education, welfare or medicine. I think that was Bono’s point.

But at its shadiest, philanthropy drives the misallocation of capital, overvaluing professors, the U.N. and climate poets and undervaluing those who can productively increase societal wealth to fund solutions to the future’s harder problems.

If only there were a way to use capital to provide opportunity, train workers, pay middle-class wages, help people build wealth … wait, it just came to me. How about starting new companies and investing in entrepreneurs and world-changing technology? Sure, that’s “a hazardous journey,” but so what? Actually, part of OpenAI is now a for-profit. Yes, it turns out the perfect cure for the flaw in capitalism is, voilà, more capitalism. You may not get that warm fuzzy feeling or media adulation—in fact, you’ll likely be labeled greedy—but you might fund future economic powerhouses. Scolds will throw shade. Ignore them.--Kessler

Margin Call

 Margin Call

Deborah J. Lucas is the MIT Sloan distinguished professor of finance and director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy. She analyzed the impact of the bailout from the Sub-Prime fiasco in 2008.

Popular accounts of bailout costs tend to severely overstate or understate their economically relevant value, Lucas writes in a paper to be published in the Annual Review of Financial Economics

Lucas draws selectively from existing cost estimates, such as those from the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, which uses that method, and she augments those numbers with calculations based on various data sources from that period.

By those calculations, the total direct cost of crisis-related bailouts on a fair value basis was about $498 billion, which amounted to 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product in 2009.

As for who directly benefitted, Lucas found that the main winners were the large, unsecured creditors of large financial institutions. While their exact identities have not been made public, most are likely to have been large institutional investors such as banks, pension, and mutual funds, insurance companies, and sovereigns.

Privatizing Social Security

Intellectuals feel the need to be smarter than the truth.--Thomas Larkin


Pirates would be a lot more fun if they had any pitching at all. Today another triple A guy. A fill in for a guy on maternity leave.

Dick Groat's basketball jersey was the first ever retired by Duke. He was the third pick in the basketball draft and made the NBA all rookie team.

America is an idea. Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country, but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history.--Bono. Bono!
Trump's revelation that the Revolutionary troops took over "the airports" gives some idea just how forward -thinking the American Revolution really was.

Despite low rates and the "prosperity" of the stock market hitting new all time highs new vehicle deliveries, combining fleet sales and retail sales, were down 1.5% in Q2 to 4.5 million vehicles, according to Wolf Street. For the first half of the year, vehicle deliveries fell 2.4% to 8.4 million vehicles. This puts the pace for new vehicle sales on track to fall below 17 million for the year, which would be the worst level since 2014.

In Griggs v. Duke Power, the first major Supreme Court ruling to address Title VII’s employment-testing restrictions, the Court opted for a very broad reading of the anti-discrimination conditions of section 703(h). The plaintiffs averred that the high-school diploma and aptitude-testing requirements used by Duke Power Company, a public utility corporation, discriminated against African-American workers, thus violating Title VII. They also argued that section 703(h) required that employment tests be used only to measure the ability to do a specific job, thereby prohibiting more general tests and requirements. For their part, Duke Power argued the law said no such thing, as it specifically allowed a “professionally developed ability test” as long as it was not intended or used to discriminate.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court rejected Duke Power’s argument and the lower court’s straight-letter interpretation of section 703(h). 

So, why are college application and degree requirements treated differently from other employment tests?

Olson had an opinion piece on Amash's decision to leave the Republican Party. He said this: "Rep. Justin Amash’s announcement that he is leaving the Republican Party to become an independent surprised no one who has followed the principled libertarian’s career. It shows, however, the opposite of what he intended it to demonstrate: Parties matter, and principled libertarians are too tiny to form an effective one." So the principled position is to be scorned in favor of the unprincipled one because the unprincipled one works better?

Russia confirms plans to send S-400 anti-aircraft system to Turkey. Whose idea was it to let Turkey into NATO?

On Thursday morning, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake rocked portions of southern California and southern Nevada.  The quake was so powerful that it was felt by people living in both Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  It created giant cracks in major highways, it caused countless fires, and it was even picked up by a seismograph in Pennsylvania.  We are talking about a major seismic event, and over the last 24 hours there have been an astounding 1,217 aftershocks.  

A new Progressive narrative: "Obama’s failure to adequately press for the instatement of Justice Merrick Garland in 2016, ensured the Court’s conservative majority."

Because progressivism had such high hopes for power, and because progressives had an urgent desire to free power from institutional circumscriptions, this desire translated into impatience with the constitutional architecture through which the Founders codified their prudence about power and human nature.--Will

                          Privatizing Social Security

The accumulated values of a $100 investment at the end of 1927 in: a) the S&P 500 Stock Index (including dividends), b) 3-month Treasury bills and c) 10-year Treasury bonds, over the 91-year period from 1927-2018 based on historical return data from the NYU Stern School of Business would be: S&P 500 $382,850, T-bonds $7309, T-bills $2,063.. On an annual basis over this period, the return on the S&P 500 averaged 9.5% per year, T-bonds 4.8% and T-bills 3.4%.

Social Security's trust funds are invested exclusively in Treasury securities, which is scheduled to run out of money by 2035 and has unfunded obligations of nearly $14 trillion in present value ($700 billion more than the projected deficit of $13.2 trillion a year ago) according to the latest annual report by the trustees of Social Security and Medicare?

Imagine if this huge amount of money had been invested in the economy instead of government.

Fed Funding of Science and Tech

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. --Anne Frank

Mom gets back today.
Howe closed today because a big tree was knocked down on a car and blocked the street during last night's storm.

Conflict magnet Pelosi said  the Trump administration’s decision to delay putting former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was “an insult to the hopes of millions.”

Kine can be the pleural of "cow." Stigmata of stigma. Charismata of charisma.

After Iran shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone, Washington was preparing to launch a retaliatory strike, but the mission was called off at the last minute, U.S. officials said. (wsj)
The commentators on the Right are unhappy.

If you do a Google search for the phrase “Man drowns saving….” you’ll find about 11,000 results for a general Google search and 3,550 results for a Google news search. Then do a search for “Woman drowns saving…..” and you’ll get only 277 general results and 9 results for a Google news search. Girls are probably better swimmers.

John Kay, a well-known economist and Financial Times columnist,  cannot allow himself to be discouraged about political institutions. Here he says,  “The guiding purpose of the legal and regulatory framework should be to impose and enforce the obligations of loyalty and prudence, personal and institutional, that go with the management of other people’s money.” The government enforce virtue? I'm not sure which crisis is the more important here, the decline of virtue or the faith in government.

Hermeneutic: adjective: Interpretive or explanatory. From Greek hermeneutikos (of interpreting), from hermeneuein (to interpret), from hermeneus (interpreter). After Hermes in Greek mythology, who served as a messenger and herald for other gods, and who himself was the god of eloquence, commerce, invention, cunning, theft, and more. Earliest documented use: 1678..
Other words that Hermes has given us are hermaphrodite, hermetic, and herm.

Combined oil production in America’s Big Three oil fields (Bakken, Eagle Ford and the Permian Basin) will top 7 million barrels per day next month — an amazing seven-fold (and 600%) increase in just a decade thanks the twin revolutionary advances in drilling and extraction technologies (hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling) that have accessed oceans of oil resources trapped in shale formations miles below the ground were previously inaccessible using conventional extraction technologies.

On this day in 1787, New Hampshire became the ninth and last necessary state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby making the document the law of the land. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted by two votes to ratify the document, and the last of the original 13 colonies joined the United States. Today the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

                            Fed Funding of Science and Tech

Is America falling behind the technological and scientific frontier? Does public funding effectively drive scientific innovation?
Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT. He has long been involved in crafting public health policy, and is considered a key architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare. He has a new book,  “Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream,” and is promoting it. This is from an interview:

"When Hitler blitzed across Europe, meanwhile in 1939 the US produced six tanks. We had torpedoes that didn’t explode when they hit the ships. Soldiers practiced with broomsticks instead of guns. And Vannevar Bush knocked on FDR’s door. He was a prominent scientist, former Dean at MIT, and he said, “I think we can win the war if you give me unlimited money to hire as many scientists as I want to invent the technology we need to win the war.” And FDR amazingly said, yes, and at one point Vannevar Bush’s organization employed two-thirds of all the physicists in the US, and did in fact invent the technology that was crucial to us winning the war. For example, radar, which was originally invented in the UK, but was perfected here in the US and turned the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic. But more importantly, it set up not only wartime applications but peacetime applications. Remember, what was the first microwave called? The Radar Range.

So much of our private sector innovation came out of these public sector investments. And then after World War II, Vannevar bush really had his greatest insight, which was, “look, we won the war with science, let’s win the peace with science.” And he wrote a famous report called “Science the Endless Frontier,” which proposed that the federal government continue massive science funding. Now interestingly, coming to the politics point from a few minutes ago, that report kind of languished for a while, until Sputnik and then the man on the moon, which got people excited. That led to the ramp-up. And the ramp-up, as I said, was that by the mid-1960s we spent about 2% of GDP on public R&D."

This is an important topic and raises the question of invention vs. innovation.
https://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2018/10/invention-vs-innovation.html

Puerto Rico

Pierre Lemieux writes on a review by The Economist of Puerto Rico and its great and glorious leader, Rexford Guy Tugwell:



"The Economist of October 19 observes that, one month after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, 82% of the island's residents still lacked power and that the government's goal is 95% restoration by Christmas (Christmas 2017, of course). As of October 27, the Department of Defense says that 74% of the island's electricity customers remain without power. Speaking about the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), the government monopoly that produces and distributes electricity, The Economist explains:

The island operates a centralized electricity grid ... the suffering from weeks without power have almost as much to do with mismanagement as they do with wind and rain. ... Declining revenues [of PREPA] were exacerbated by political patronage, corruption, and inefficiency.

The Economist adds, a bit cryptically, that the utility was "created by a New Deal governor in 1941."
​

It was not any New Deal governor who created PREPA, but Rexford Guy Tugwell himself. Tugwell owed his governorship to Franklin D. Roosevelt, to whom he had been a close advisor. A professor at Columbia University and a high-level civil servant, Tugwell was one of the most famous of the progressive economists of his time. On June 25, 1934, he made the cover of Time Magazine.


Tugwell thought that competition was a waste and should be replaced by government planning and industrial democracy. Or else, he wrote in his 1933 book, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, "we are surely committed to revolution." It is not clear how he reconciled central planning and industrial democracy, by which he meant that firms would be run by their workers and engineers. He was an admirer of the Soviet Union.
Tugwell professed a purely engineering and bureaucratic notion of efficiency. In an article titled published in the 1932 Papers and Proceedings of the American Economic Review, he argued that government - probably committees of bureaucrats - should decide which industries should be launched:

New industries will not just happen as the automobile industry did; they will have to be foreseen, to be argued for, to seem probably desirable features of the whole economy before they can be entered upon.

Is it surprising that, with this sort of heritage, PREPA was a floundering government bureaucracy, totally unprepared to face Maria or its consequences? Puerto Rico itself is bankrupt, and 12% of its debt is due to PREPA."


As is always the case in these kinds of occurrences, everyone seems surprised.