Lawfare

$1,599 is the median U.S. asking rent in January, down 0.1% from a year earlier, according to Redfin.

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Total Estimated Cost of German driving license: €1,500–€3,000.

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Many economists have argued that China could better rev up its economy by easing controls on its private sector, strengthening the country as it competes with the U.S., without many of the downsides of its state-led model.
Bad news. Rather than emerging out of a government lab, DeepSeek was built by a Chinese math geek who had founded a hedge fund.

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Lawfare

Strassel has an informative article on the endless Trump litigation and the administration's response.

"The Donald Trump “resistance” is alive and well, though this time it’s centering nearly all its efforts on the legal system. Just three weeks into this administration, nonprofits and coalitions of Democratic state attorneys general have already filed nearly 60 lawsuits in federal court. Don’t think this litigation is ad hoc. Activists and attorneys general have been meeting since Trump won the nomination, debating his likely moves, hiring lawyers, strategizing legal responses and coordinating who would lead cases and where.

One result is that this resistance is on track to dwarf even the legal assault on Trump’s first term—which was itself unprecedented in size and scope. Just one stat: State attorneys general filed 160 multistate lawsuits against the federal government in Trump’s first term, compared with 80 over Barack Obama’s entire tenure."

These cases all have complex elements but it appears in her article that the administration is better prepared for the legal harassment.

A Minority Debt Report

Comedian John Mulaney has a routine:   there’s a horse loose in the hospital . . . !!

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Some Disney insiders worry that the company has become addicted to price hikes and has reached the limits of what middle-class Americans can afford, reports Robbie Whelan.

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Sierra Bille has received $350,00 so far in scholarships and financial aid to attend New York University. The 24-year-old Las Vegas native applied to dozens of assistance programs to afford her longtime dream school, whose published cost for 2022-23 topped $82,000, including housing and living expenses.

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A Minority Debt Report

I don't know where I found this but what is astonishing is that this view is considered a philosophy.

The Federal Reserve has tools to keep interest rates falling, including buying Treasury bonds from its member banks. This drives borrowing costs down. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed used tools like these to hold 10-year interest rates around 2 percent for more than a decade, despite a growing national debt. Why assume that such policies won’t work in the future?

Of the $35 trillion in U.S. national debt, only about $8-9 trillion is held by foreign countries. China, the debt hawk’s No. 1 boogeyman, holds only $816 billion or 2.3 percent of this $35 trillion. The rest — roughly $25 trillion — is held domestically by U.S. government agencies like the Social Security Trust Fund and military retirement funds, as well as private corporations. Foreign and domestic holders earn interest on their holdings, so the debt is a paying investment for them. For China and others, holding dollars also keeps their currencies cheap so they can export more.

Instead of obsessing over a government debt crisis that may never happen, it makes more sense to borrow and spend money to mobilize our immense resources to deal with immediate problems, as we did in World War II. The U.S. needs to support stressed working and middle-class families, respond to dangerous conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, counter China’s growing global influence, and manage the transition to cleaner energy and the rise of artificial intelligence.

This argument avoids the basic question of debt: can the cost of it be maintained without pain? Debt can be productive, as borrowing for seed for a crop. But often debt is malignant and a good signal is when money must be borrowed to maintain it.

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?

 

Feminism and Global Warming

The Halftime Show was a classic arts representation of an intense, popular, minority paradigm: Commercialized revolution.
 
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More countries have produced a nuclear bomb than can mass-produce a jet engine.

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In his 2020 annual letter Larry Fink, the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world, mentioned the the words “sustainability” and “climate” nearly 50 times. In 2023 it was less than 10.

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Feminism and Global Warming

Good news! 'UN Women' is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. They have a research arm. Yes, their own research arm. UN Women researchers find that feminism holds the real key to preventing the planet from global warming. This was reported in Scientific American! Scientific American!

From “How Feminism Can Guide Climate Change Action:”

The current economic system that underpins that status quo is rooted in the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap or unpaid labor, often done by women and marginalized communities. This system therefore drives the climate crisis while perpetuating inequalities based on gender, race and class. It prioritizes the interests of corporations, governments and elites in positions of power and wealth, while destroying the natural environment that poor and marginalized people depend on the most.

So the jihad over faith-based global warming is not just about ending fossil fuel–based economies but a more fundamental transformation of our economic and political systems.

This is truly a rare outbreak of honesty in the so-called warming revolution. This is about political and economic power, achievable only by unilateral surrender of existing Western structures.

The paper focuses upon women from Indigenous and local communities who have used their traditional knowledge of tree species to lead sustainable forestry initiatives in Colombia; and in Bangladesh, during extreme floods, women relied on traditional rural cooking methods to provide food in remote affected areas.

These new systems would prioritize the well-being of people and the planet, over profits and elite power, to enable a more sustainable, resilient, inclusive and equitable future. This feminist vision builds on thinking from a diversity of cultural contexts and growing interest in “well-being economies.” For example, the Buen Vivir (Living Well) paradigm that underpins the development strategies of Bolivia and Ecuador is inspired by Indigenous knowledge and values that promote harmonious relationships between humans and nature.

So we are to abandon our current lives based upon Western knowledge and achievements which have elevated our living standards immeasurably over the last two hundred years in favor of the qualities of impoverished, autocratic, suppressed cultures reminiscent of the circumstances the Western miracle has overcome.

Bolivian and Ecuadorian cultures, as charming as they might be, will not rise to manage the world of Western technology, economy, and philosophy. They can meet only if the West declines to those more suppressed, primitive cultures. 

Strangely, the most important question raised by this plan for this new world is never asked: How will that decline be managed?

 

Sunday/Simon

What explains simultaneous sign language in a world of closed captioning?

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Do our pets eat better than our ancestors 400 years ago?

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Stagecoach was the major means of travel in the early Republic. Since the coaches averaged about two to three miles per hour, the trip from New York to Philadelphia could take at least three days. They were usually mule-drawn, not horse-drawn
A well known mule breeder was George Washington.

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Sunday/Simon

In today's gospel, Christ preaches from a boat off the shore, then says to Simon the gospel's famous quote: "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." Commentators love the symbolism of it but, after the catch, Simon says something puzzling. He says, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."

Why would he say that?

Certainly, as the analysts say, Simon Peter, as a fisherman, may have been rightfully impressed. But enough to make a public confession to a stranger?

And he also took Christ's fishing suggestion against his own experience, then gave up his profession to be a disciple.

Whatever happened, Simon Peter was more than impressed.

Sat Stats

Sat Stats

The results reported in the national exam officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress show New York school districts are spending $89 billion this academic year.

Records show across the five boroughs, public schools spent an average of $21,112 per student in fiscal year 2023-24, though dozens of schools spent more – up to $60,000 a student.,

Despite the sky-high spending, only 33% of New Yoek fourth graders scored proficient in math and just 28% were proficient in reading last year.

Older students’ results were even worse – 23% of city eighth graders were proficient in math and 29% in reading.

Even more troubling is the huge racial gap in test scores within New York City.

The results show only 16% of black and Hispanic fourth-grade students were proficient in math, compared to 53% of white students and 58% of Asian students.

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The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at a cost of $125 million, was a 638-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998, to study the Martian climate. It crashed on entering Mars's atmosphere. The engineers did not take into consideration that the units had been converted. i.e., the acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds^2 for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.

Any confident in climate measurements or effective teaching techniques might ponder on this.

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Only 3 of the top 50 largest Latin American companies are Argentine (22 are Brazilian, 14 Mexican, and 8 Chilean). Moreover, only 7 of the top 100 largest Latin American companies are Argentine.

There are just about $50 billion invested by Argentine companies abroad; compared to $300 billion from Brazil, $215 billion from Mexico, $140 billion from Chile, and $75 billion from Colombia.

Overcoming Chaos in Climate Science

USAID is a 10,000-person, $40 billion agency.

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Philadelphia Eagles offensive linemen average 336 pounds and are 6 foot 6.

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Roland Busch, CEO of Germany-based Siemens, said in an interview there’s overregulation in Europe that stifles competition. “We don't have one market. When you're a startup and you want to scale, I mean where do you go? You go to the United States. You can scale within one market."

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Overcoming Chaos in Climate Science

A characteristic of the limited climate discussion is how caution is only one-sided. Concern is permitted on the climate side but not on the proposed 'solutions.' One-sided openmindedness is an oxymoron, unwise and anti-reflective. It is the hallmark of anti-science, superstition and its derivitives. This is from an interesting article that examins the arruracy of faith-based climate science, the models.

In chaotic systems, the results only appear to be random, but they’re not random at all — they’re entirely deterministic. If you knew exactly the initial conditions of such a system and could precisely describe the physical processes, you could predict tornados. It’s only due to our lack of knowledge these events look random. You can’t average away chaos.

Climate modelers address this problem by taking our limited data and using the uncertainties in the many model parameters to tune the models in order to force a fit to the data [3]. But the fit isn’t unique as there are many ways to tune the models,. They believe this history-matching will neutralize the sensitivity to the initial data, but as soon as the simulation moves from the tuning phase to prediction, numerical dispersion takes over again.

Given this hypersensitivity to initial conditions, just how accurate is the temperature data that’s used in these models? There are certainly problems with the temperature data. Weather station instrumentation changes over the decades. Stations are relocated. There are maintenance and record issues, and very importantly, environmental changes.

The World Meteorological Organisation recognizes this and has set up a system for quality-ranking the location of weather stations, rating them from 1 thru 5. Naturally, meteorological bureaus are rather coy about how good their weather stations are according to WMO rankings. For example, I couldn’t find any data for the Australian Bureau weather station ratings, but I did find this chart for the UK Bureau [4] which seems to be a little more open than our own.

I don’t know how the UK weather station portfolio rates against the rest of the world, but I suspect it would be in the top tier. Station rankings 1 to 3 all have expected environmental errors less than 1 degree. But not even the top sites can measure to a trillionth of a degree. Rankings 4 and 5, 80% of the UK dataset, have errors of 2 and 5 degrees respectively. Basically, they’re junk.

They address this problem by averaging the data. For example, for each 100×100 km grid cell, there might one, ten or no weather stations. They average the good with the bad to come up with a representative temperature for each cell through what’s called a homogenization process, a fancy name for averaging. It’s easier to get Coca-Cola to reveal its secret recipe than getting the bureaus to reveal how this is done, and if a different homogenization algorithm is used, you will get a different temperature, far greater than a trillionth of a degree difference.

It’s clear that the certainty that many climate advocates place on these models and their data is grossly overstated, and more skepticism is required by decision-makers. I believe there should be audits of these models and their data, by statisticians from outside the climate industry. This is unlikely to occur after they saw what happened when McIntire and McKitrick tore apart Professor Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph which was once used as an International Panel for Climate Change logo, but now quietly memory holed.

(This is from an article by Greg Chapman, a former computer modeler. I made a few additions and corrections.)