Like the Maytag repairman, things are so quiet that the FBI doesn’t have much to do these days.
That’s why fifteen FBI Special Agents were urgently dispatched to the
Talladega Superspeedway to conduct an investigation of the pull rope in
Garage Number 4.
The pull rope in Garage Number 4, was probably much the same as the pull
ropes in all the other garages, but last week, old number four had been
assigned to Bubba Wallace, a NASCAR driver who wore an, “I Can’t
Breathe” t-shirt and painted “Black Lives Matter” on his car. And so,
15, count ‘em, Feds were dispatched to investigate the provenance of the
pull rope in Garage Number 4.
After "a thorough review of the facts and evidence surrounding this
event", the 15 FBI Special Agents determined that the rope was not a
noose and had been there since October 2019.
To paraphrase, Churchill, never was so little owed to so many for a reason so stupid it’s beyond belief.
Those 15 Special Agents might have been put to better use investigating
the Birmingham riots at the beginning of the month when mobs tore down a
statue of Charles Linn, a Finnish immigrant and prominent local
businessman, who had also served as a Confederate sea captain, attacked
the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Linn Park, and
vandalized the Hugo L. Black United States Courthouse and Robert S.
Vance Federal Building. Black, aside from being FDR's progressive
Supreme Court justice, was also a Klansman, but the mobs don’t know any
history that isn’t in Howard Zinn.
The mob also smashed windows, set fires, and burned an American flag in
one of those usual peaceful protests turned violent that has racked up
over $100 million in insurance claims nationwide.
Not to mention hundreds of law enforcement officers wounded in battles with the leftist thugs.
U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town, and FBI Special Agent in Charge Johnnie
Sharp, Jr, who were also in charge of the Great Pull Rope Robbery,
issued a statement warning, "we have zero tolerance for those who
incite, organize, encourage, or engage in civil unrest, violence, and
destructive behavior anywhere in the Northern District of Alabama. And
make no mistake, we will bring those individuals to justice who do.”
That was on June 1st.
It would be good to know just how many FBI Special Agents have been assigned to that one.
But fake noose is a serious problem that’s popping up around the country.
There was shock and outrage in Oakland, California when five pull ropes
were discovered around Lake Merritt. It was especially shocking because
black people are the single largest group in Oakland.
The claim originally came from a Twitter account with the hashtags
#Noose, #EndRacism, #MyLifeMatters, #BlackLivesMatter, #BLM, and
#NoJusticeNoPeace, when it only needed one hashtag.
#FakeNoose.
Local black residents had actually put them up as exercise equipment.
“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by,
no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have
used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we
tried to create,” Victor Sengbe said.
A hate crime investigation was opened anyway and more patrols were dispatched to Lake Merritt to watch out for pull ropes.
"Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our
city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate
crimes," Mayor Libby Schaaf ranted at a press conference.
“We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” the
white Democrat warned the local black resident. “We cannot take these
actions lightly. These symbols are symbols of racial violence, and it is
incumbent on all of us to have that sensitivity; to have that
knowledge.”
At this rate, Victor may end up being the first black man charged with being a member of the KKK.
Over in New York City, a known hangout of the Klan, in the Bronx
borough, which is about a third African-American and half Latino, more
nooses were discovered in Van Cortland Park.
"I looked up and saw a noose hanging," Alexandra Haridopolos squawked.
"It felt like it was meant to be seen. The other two were right by a
walkway, in very good lighting."
Haridopolos is, predictably, a blond white woman, who writes up things
like, "Using Postcolonial Theory to Create Writing Opportunities in ESL
Classrooms" and "Gender F Extravaganza challenges stale gender roles".
But while Haridopolos knows a lot about postcolonial theory, she doesn’t
know her nooses.
The NYPD determined that the nooses were actually nylon strings from a
pinata. There had recently been a party in the area. And the Bronx is a
majority Latino area. But Haridopolos doesn’t buy the NYPD’s
explanation, complaining that the police refused to file a complaint
about the pinata noose.
"It's clear what this is," she fumed. "Someone knew what they were doing."
Leftists usually do.
Jamaal Bowman, a leftist congressional candidate backed by Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, appeared at a rally and declared, "We will not
be intimidated."
By the pinatas.
The rally was organized by Jennifer Scarlott, an elderly white woman who
founded Bronx Climate Justice North, which has 98 members, who
complained that the NYPD hadn't properly investigated the pinata.
Local Democrats released a statement declaring that, "the location where
the rope was found is a common gathering site for family parties, and
we cannot allow it to be taken over by fear and racism."
Too late for that.
The noose truthers won’t give up until the FBI dispatches 15 Special
Agents to track down the little girl that pinata belonged to and makes
her confess her privilege while being yelled at by Jennifer Scarlott.
Noose fever continued in New York City's Harlem where one of the many
Klansmen who can be found wearing hoods while striding down nearby
Malcolm X Boulevard, apparently ducked into Marcus Garvey Park to plant
yet another noose. Marcus Garvey, the original black nationalist, was
fond of saying things like, “between the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP
group, give me the Klan" and “hats off to Hitler the German Nazi." But,
even so, the Klan isn’t known to hang out in Marcus Garvey Park.
The panic in Garvey Park was once again sparked by someone on social media who decided a construction rope was really a noose.
Governor Cuomo quickly got on the case, sending the New York State Police to help out.
"I am disgusted by the recent discovery of a noose, the epitome of
hatred and an evil icon of our nation's racist past in Harlem's Marcus
Garvey Park," Cuomo, whose policies are responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of black senior citizens in nursing homes in the state,
declared.
The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force "thoroughly" investigated the incident
and determined that the rope “was left over from a construction
scaffold that was removed in the fall. The rope was used to hoist
construction materials."
And then got back to investigating anti-Asian and anti-Semitic assaults by mostly black suspects.
But the noose truthers weren’t done yet. Like their fellow 9/11
truthers, they began analyzing photos to determine the exact nature of
the rope and its topography, while claiming that there was a cover-up.
Fake noose is a nationwide problem.
In San Francisco, a noose found in a park turned out to be a child’s
swing. But the noose truthers went on insisting that it must be a noose.
“It seemed intentional,” the crank who started the problem complained.
In Oklahoma City, a swing set that had been set up by a Latino man for
his grandson was misidentified as a noose. “That’s for the great
grandkid. And whenever he doesn’t use it, I just took the swing set off
because the birds sit there and get the swing set dirty. That’s why it’s
hanging when the ropes are by there themselves,” he explained.
Practice gear hanging in a New Jersey fire station was misidentified as a noose and havoc ensued.
“I am appalled by the situation, and hopefully this is an isolated
incident,” Mayor Bert Steinmann raved. “I don’t know what to say. Words
escape me here. It should have never been there in the first place.”
Much like Mayor Steinmann.
Back in Birmingham, yet more nooses turned up in a city park. And these were actual nooses.
The police investigated and found that they had been hung up for
Juneteenth as part of an art project protesting George Floyd’s death.
Finally, the owner of Dave’s Tropical Sno in Pittsburg, Kansas got in
trouble because he was selling a watermelon, grape, and cotton candy
concoction called Burning Noose.
The black man who came up with the flavor has apologized to the white leftists who were offended.
“I really, truly, want to apologize because I meant no harm and I did not mean for any of this to happen,” Keenan Carter said.
Perhaps Keenan’s apology to white leftists for the historical wrongs done to his people will appease them.
This
article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of
ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology
innovation. Is John Ioannidis’ controversial study a ‘black mark’ on scientific integrity?
By many measures, John Ioannidis is a lion of medical science. The Stanford University professor is the author of some of the most cited
journal articles in medical history. His research in statistics and
biomedicine has arguably changed the practice of medicine. A 2010
article in The Atlantic said “Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive.” And you would never know any of this from reading comments about him today.
It started on March 17, when Ioannidis published an opinion essay
in STAT saying that the data on Covid-19 were not sufficient to know
the disease’s true prevalence and fatality rate. He also argued that
scientists were in the dark with respect to which distancing and
lockdown measures work, which don’t, and what the measures’ downstream
harms might be. All of which was true — even if his very early estimate
that as few as 10,000 might die
in the U.S. turned out to be wrong. Ioannidis went on to say that
preventing people from working or leaving their homes could cause more
harm than the virus itself.
It was this last bit that set off the firestorm of criticism. A typical comment on Twitter
came from Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical
biology at Rutgers University, who called the essay “content-free,
logic-free drivel.” For detractors, Ioannidis’ argument that the data on
both the virus and lockdowns were insufficient was tantamount to
saying, “Do nothing.”............. the attacks on Ioannidis from the medical community and the
popular press are different. They are tinged with partisanship..........On the left, The Nation published an article calling Ioannidis’ work a “black mark” on Stanford University. ........
For nearly 100 years, a federal law known as the Jones Act has
restricted water transportation of cargo between U.S. ports to ships
that are U.S.-owned, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-registered, and U.S.-built.
Justified on national security grounds as a means to bolster the U.S.
maritime industry, the unsurprising result of this law has been to
impose significant costs on the U.S. economy while providing few of the
promised benefits.
This paper provides an overview of the Jones Act by examining its
history and the various burdens it imposes on consumers and businesses
alike. While the law’s most direct consequence is to raise
transportation costs, which are passed down through supply chains and
ultimately reflected in higher retail prices, it generates enormous
collateral damage through excessive wear and tear on the country’s
infrastructure, time wasted in traffic congestion, and the accumulated
health and environmental toll caused by unnecessary carbon emissions and
hazardous material spills from trucks and trains. Meanwhile, closer
scrutiny finds the law’s national security justification to be unmoored
from modern military and technological realities.
This paper examines how such an archaic, burdensome law has been able
to withstand scrutiny and persist for almost a century. It turns out
that, as in so many other cases of rent seeking, there is an asymmetry
of motivations among those who benefit from the Jones Act’s protections
and the vastly greater number who bear its costs. The protected domestic
shipbuilding industry has a captive market from which it benefits
handsomely and seeks to preserve by promoting fallacious arguments about
the law’s necessity to national security, while the vast costs are
dispersed across the economy in the form of higher prices,
inefficiencies, and forgone opportunities that few people can even tie
to the cause. That so many federal agencies and congressional committees
have at least partial jurisdiction over different facets of the Jones
Act also helps to explain its longevity. Lastly, this paper presents
a series of options for reforming this archaic law and reducing its
costly burdens...........
To Read More... What is the Jones Act? Separating Fact from Fiction.
Sep 29, 2017 By CHARLIE PAPAVIZAS, Partner @ Winston Strawn LLP
The active 2017 hurricane season has put a spotlight on the “Jones
Act,” a section of the Merchant Marine Act, 1920. The issuance of Jones
Act waivers after Hurricanes Irma and Maria is receiving much attention,
but like most information circulating during a crisis, much of it is
inaccurate. So what is the Jones Act? And why does it matter so much?
The Jones Act regulates U.S. domestic maritime commerce by
restricting the transportation of “merchandise” between points in the
United States to U.S.-flag vessels built in the United States and owned
and operated by U.S. citizens. U.S.-flag vessels are registered and
operated under U.S. law and are generally required to have U.S. citizen
crews.
Following are some facts about the federal statute.
The Jones Act is not a World War I creation.
The law we call the Jones Act is a section (section 27) of the
Merchant Marine Act, 1920. Senator Wesley Jones, a Republican from the
State of Washington, was the Act’s chief sponsor. The main purpose of
the Merchant Marine Act, 1920, was to deal with a huge surplus of
vessels that the U.S. had built in WW I, which were costing the
government a fortune to maintain and operate, and were no longer needed.
The section of the law that we call the Jones Act was largely an
afterthought, and Senator Jones stated in the Congressional proceedings
that section 27 was not intended to make substantive changes in existing
law.
Restricting U.S. maritime commerce to U.S. vessels did not start in 1920.
Restricting U.S. domestic maritime commerce to U.S. citizens has been
the law of the land since 1789. The third act of the Republic (before
Congress established any department of the U.S. Government) imposed a
tariff on all domestic cargo movements, with foreign ships paying a
tariff eight times greater than the U.S. ship tariff. In 1817, Congress
changed the law more or less to the way it is today—and was prior to the
Merchant Marine Act, 1920—restricting U.S. trade to U.S. ships. The
Jones Act has changed over time since 1817, but the main principle of
reserving U.S. domestic maritime commerce to U.S. citizens has remained
consistent.........To Read More....
Communist China has decided it must crush Hong Kong because it knows the city presents an information-streaming ethnic, geographic, political and ideological alternative to the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian police state.
The CCP
police state promises China’s citizens prosperity’s material
goodies—cellphones, electric cars—in exchange for silently accepting
communist dictates no matter how harsh and malign. Hong Kong, however,
is not a promise. It is an existing democratic example of 21st-century
Chinese prosperity.
Why add “information streaming”?........Information about Hong Kong’s political, economic, social and cultural
vitality manages to spread throughout mainland China...........Recent economic news suggests China is teetering. A China-EU
investment and trade deal has snagged. Bloomberg reported defaults “in
all sectors” of China’s offshore bond market have exceeded $4 billion,
double that during the same period of 2019..........Big Picture: The goodie-producing economic engine that braces the
CCP’s domestic political strategy needs international markets. China’s
domestic economy can’t sustain it..........
Border war with India:
In the long run, it’s worse than Hong Kong. Asia’s two nuclear-armed
giants contest Himalayan routes that make it easier for China to invade
India. The unresolved 1962 Sino-Indian War revives............The CCP’s espionage and bribery wars suffer reverses...............Military pushback in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.............New Delhi tells Beijing, “your maritime economic supply lines can be cut..............To Read More.... My Take - I think this article confirms my positions in my piece, China Reset
Let’s rile everyone up with an uncomfortable statement: Mexico should be a failed state. The issue isn’t cultural, political, or policy-driven, but rather, geographical. Most powers of significance share two geographic features:
First, they’re in the temperate climate zones, therefore boasting reliable rainfall, warm seasons for growing crops, cold seasons for deterring pests, recharging the soil, and avoiding extreme heat and cold that wrecks health and infrastructure.
Second, they’re pretty flat. Flatness simplifies the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. It means their cities can spread out, and keep land prices low. It means agriculture and industry alike can establish mass scaled economies, keeping food, power, and manufactured goods’ prices within reach. This not only boosts national power, but it also provides a backstop to help keep economic inequality-related issues under control.
Mexico has none of that.
Its north is a barren desert. That means agriculture is only possible by diverting the region’s few rivers. Its south is a rugged jungle, which reduces the general population to subsistence living. Plus, multiple mountain chains crisscross the country, with the two largest (the Sierra Madres Occidental and Oriental) prominently jutting up from the coast, complicating interior access to the one feature Mexico has going for it: its extensive coastline. All those mountains shatter Mexico’s people into multiple, often competing, zones.
Any of these features would be severely problematic, all sufficient enough to keep Mexico out of the ranks as one of the major powers. But all of them? Together? Across a territory as big as Spain, France, Germany, and Poland combined? With all these points, Mexico, arguably, has the world’s worst geography from an economic-development point of view. Mexico shouldn't just be a failed state, it should exist in a degree of organizational chaos rivaling Afghanistan.
Yet not only is Mexico not a failed state, rather it's the world’s 15th richest country, and among the most industrialized states of the developing world. Does this mean geographical lessons don’t apply to Mexico and its people? Hardly. But it indicates we need to add more layers of information.
First, Mexicans can read maps and thermometers. They know their country is in the tropics. Rather than staying in the tropics, the majority moved up their omnipresent mountains until they, literally, rose above the oppressive heat and humidity. Over half the Mexican population resides in a series of highland valleys and plateaus in the country’s midsection, with most living above 7000 feet. In doing so, Mexicans, at least in part, addressed some of their issues with agriculture and economies of scale and health. Other Latin American countries have followed similar paths, but none of them have proven as successful as Mexico.
Which brings us to the second layer of information: Mexico shares a 2000-mile-long border with the United States. There are plenty of historical chapters the two countries share that are, shall we say, less than cooperative. The United States defeated Mexico on the battlefield, and in the aftermath, drew the border to their own liking. As such, the United States owns the demographic and especially economic heft of the borderland. Still, the normal economic rules apply:
By imposing American security levels on the northern borderland’s bulk, northern Mexico has found itself somewhat freed of multiple “normal” stresses that plague borderlands in general (mountainous terrains specifically). And since Mexican labor is less expensive than American labor, the propensity for trade and economic integration among the two lobes of the borderland is amongst the strongest globally.
The American cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, and Houston all sit less than 300 miles from the border – a border they are linked to by excellent infrastructure. The cities on the southern side of the borderland – the Mexican metro regions of Tijuana, Juarez, Hermosillo, Chihuahua, and Monterrey – might be culturally Mexican, but economically, they function as satellite cities of the United States.
And because Mexican-American relations have been stable and fruitful these past thirty years, those Mexican cities have painstakingly developed and increased their local educational standards to the American norm. This isn’t simply a relationship that simply works, it works well. Mexico figured out its geography, and northern Mexico in particular decided to get in-bed with its northern neighbor.
The third layer to Mexican success is more institutional: In the 1980s, Mexico was transitioning from single-party rule to democratic norms, a touchy, fraught process for any country – triply so for a country with as riven geography as Mexico has. Under George HW Bush and Bill Clinton's leadership, both to expand the American economic footprints and provide Mexican democracy with a more stable footing, the United States negotiated a free trade deal with Mexico City (and invited the Canadians along for the ride). And so, NAFTA was born.
Access to American capital and consumer markets provided Mexico with the opportunity to shift away from a resource-export-driven system into something more value-added. The results are almost unprecedented. Most developing Latin American countries are relatively closed, with most export income coming from things like crude oil, coal, coffee, fish. In the early 1980s, Mexico was no different. But now, Mexico is the most trade intensive Latin American country by a factor of three, and over 80% of its exports are manufactured goods, with nearly all its products flowing north. Hiccups and exceptions abound, but Mexico has taken maximum advantage of the formation of North America’s trade space.
Fourth and finally, Mexico got lucky. This one takes a bit of exposition:
Normally, trucks are the dumbest way to move things from points A to B. Dragging stuff around via semi truck-towed container costs approximately twelve times more than floating them via container ship. Courtesy of the Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Tennessee, Ohio, Sacramento, Colombia, Alabama, Tombigbee, and Hudson Rivers (plus about five dozen of their smaller lesser-known brethren) the United States doesn’t just boast an internal, naturally navigable water-network larger than anyone else’s, but instead, a system larger than everyone else’s.
The United States’ rivers proved a key feature in empowering America’s breakneck growth to world power in the 19th century. Not to mention, the United States’ subsequent maritime acumen proved key to the Americans’ rapid and thorough defeat of the Mexicans in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. (Cliff-notes version: American forces baited the Mexican army into a multiweek march across Mexico’s northern deserts, while the Americans simply sailed the Marines to the Mexican port of Veracruz and marched directly onto Mexico City.)
Mexico lacks a single navigable river, and in moving the bulk of the Mexican population up mountain, most Mexican ports have become wildly underutilized relative to the size of the Mexican economy. In an industrialized and globalized world dominated by massed waterborne shipments, this is a kiss of death. All imports or exports must first deal with a mountain chain. Any goods part of an integrated multi-step manufacturing supply chain where goods come and go via Mexico’s ports would need to navigate such chains at least twice. One of the many reasons East Asia does so well in electronics manufacturing is because the bulk of East Asian cities are either on the Pacific Coast or, at worst, only separated from the coast by a relatively short stretch of (relatively) flat land. Mexico should not be able to play.
But it can, because the United States continues to do something monumentally stupid.
Back in 1920, the United States adopted the Jones Act (aka the Interstate Commerce Act) which among other things, forces any cargo being transported between any two American ports to use American built, owned, captained and crewed ships – a restriction the United States declined to place on any internal transport method. The result was a century of massive investment in rail and truck infrastructure that dramatically reduced the cost of internal overland shipments and an atrophying of the American waterway system.
The Americans deliberately muffled their sublime geography’s most glorious benefits.
Within a few years of Jones’ adoption, the Americans lost their coveted spot as having the world’s lowest internal transport costs. Today, instead of internal American shipments using waterways, Americans primarily use trucks to shuttle about over two-thirds of their internal commerce.
If the Americans utilized their waterways like other countries, Mexico simply couldn’t compete in the American market. But if the Americans insist on doing everything the hard way, and limiting themselves to trucks…well, on that field of competition, the Mexicans are in their element.
And it shows.
Mexico became America’s largest trade partner in 2019, a position they will not give up in our lifetimes. So to best understand what’s going on south of the border, as well as with American-Mexican economic and diplomatic relations, sign up for our videoconference on June 16 below.
Dr. Wessam Atif breaks down what we do and don’t know about the
worldwide death rate, or case fatality rate, from COVID-19. The problem
with simply compiling the rates published by the world’s nations is that
they don’t always know what they are doing — and those stats may be
calculated differently from nation to nation. “News flash: These numbers
are mostly flawed and inaccurate,” Atif says in the video.
A more effective way to get a handle of the death rate is to study
the case of the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its 3,711 passengers.
This ship was quarantined in Japan during the early stages of the
pandemic, creating what some see as a perfect environment for studying
the virus. Among its attributes, according to Atif:
Whole population
Almost like a small village
No ethical concerns
Locked in with a virus for weeks
Everyone was tested
No other variables or confounding factors
Naturally randomized
“As a public health professional, this is by far the best type of study I could dream of,” he said.
I’m a long-time critic of the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac, but I had no idea they would produce something as bad as the 2008 financial meltdown. It’s not easy to predict the timing and severity of a crisis. Unless we’re talking about the ticking time bomb described in this video.
In theory, of course, state politicians and their local counterparts
are supposed to set aside enough money to pay the lavish future benefits
they promise their bureaucrats.
Far too often, however, that doesn’t happen. And that means the governments (to be more accurate, their taxpayers) have a big “unfunded liability.”
This racket is a good deal for the bureaucrats – who get lots of pay now
and lots of promised benefits in the future. And it’s a good deal for
the state and local politicians who get votes and campaign contributions
from the bureaucrats.
But, as explained in a new report
from the American Legislative Exchange Council, it is a fiscal disaster
that is going to explode at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Unfunded state pension liabilities total $4.9 trillion or
$15,080 for every man, woman and child in the United States. State
governments are often obligated, by contract and state constitutional
law, to make these pension payments regardless of economic conditions.
As these pension payments continue to grow, revenue that would have
gone to essential services like public safety and education, or tax
relief, goes to paying off these liabilities instead. …Most state
pension plans are structured as defined-benefit plans. Under a
defined-benefit plan, an employee receives a fixed payout at retirement
based on the employee’s final average salary, the number of years worked
and a benefit multiplier.
There are several ways to measure the degree to which a state has dug a big hole by promising big goodies to bureaucrats.
Figure 2 shows per-capita unfunded liabilities on a state-by-state
basis. Tennessee is in the best shape, followed by Indiana and Wisconsin
(thanks in part to former Governor Scott Walker). Alaska has the
biggest fiscal hole, along with Illinois (no surprise) and Connecticut
(no surprise).
It’s important to recognize, though, that some states have more income than others. So in addition to a per-capita estimate of pension liabilities,
here’s a map showing the burden as a share of each state’s economic
output. Once again, Tennessee, Indiana (the #22 is a misprint), and
Wisconsin rank the highest. Alaska stays at the bottom, joined by
Mississippi and New Mexico.
Let’s also give credit and blame to states that are the top 10 and bottom 10 on each map.
In addition to Tennessee, Indiana, and Wisconsin, good states include
Utah, Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas (honorable mention to Florida, which just missed).
Bad states are led by Alaska, with Nevada, New Mexico, Mississippi,
Illinois, and Ohio also being governed by particularly short-sighted
politicians.
So what’s the solution for the bad states? The ALEC report gives the answer.
Ultimately, one of the best ways to solve the pension
crisis is to change the way pension plans are structured. Changing from
the current defined-benefit system toward a defined-contribution system
for new employees will improve the health of state pension plans by
giving employees full control over their retirement savings.
By the way, it’s worth noting that blue states may have a bigger problem than red states, but this is a bipartisan mess. In a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Malanga says there is plenty of blame to share.
The crisis in state pension systems is a result of
decades of fiscal mismanagement. The problem, however, goes well beyond
deeply indebted Illinois and New Jersey. Many state and municipal
retirement funds have been on an unrelenting downward trajectory…
This fiscal nightmare stems in part from politicians’ habit of
increasing employee benefits while markets are booming, thereby
squandering fund surpluses. …Politicians have consistently neglected to
contribute to these systems even during good budgetary times, preferring
to fund more popular programs. …Meanwhile, elected officials and
pension administrators have endorsed overly optimistic economic
assumptions that made their systems look affordable.
Let’s close today’s grim column with another way of measuring the problem. Here’s a map from the Tax Foundation that shows how much money is set aside in pension programs compared to the level of benefits that bureaucrats are promised.
Looking at the data from this angle, Kentucky has the biggest hole,
followed by New Jersey, Illinois (the only state to be in the bottom 10
on all three maps), and Connecticut, while the good states are led by
Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Tennessee.
The bottom line is that some states have a very grim future, which is why even Warren Buffett is advising investors and entrepreneurs to steer clear of doing business in those places.
We’ve lived through the most bizarre experience of human folly in my
lifetime, and perhaps in generations. Among the strangest aspects of
this has been the near universal failure on the part of regular people,
and even the appointed “experts” (the ones the government employs, in
any case), to have internalized anything about the basics of viruses
that my mother understands, thanks to her mother before who had a solid
education in the subject after World War II.
Thus, for example, are all governments ready to impose new lockdowns
should the infection data turn in the other direction. Under what
theory, precisely, is this supposed to help matters? How does reimposing
stay-home orders or mandating gym closures mysteriously manage to
intimidate a virus into going away? “Run away and hide” seems to have
replaced anything like a sophisticated understanding of viruses and
immunities.
So I decided to downloadMolecular and Cell Biology for Dummies
just to check if I’m crazy. I’m pleased to see that it clearly states
that there are only two ways to defeat a virus: natural immunity and
vaccines.
The book completely left out the option that almost the entire world
embraced in March: destroy businesses, force everyone to hide in their
homes, and make sure that no one gets close to anyone else. The reason
that the text leaves that out is that the idea is essentially
ridiculous, so much so that it was initially sold as a strategy to
preserve hospital space and only later mutated into a general principle
that the way to beat a virus is to avoid people and wear a mini-hazmat
suit.
Here is the passage:
For all of recorded history,
humans have done a deadly dance with viruses. Measles, smallpox, polio,
and influenza viruses changed the course of human history: Measles and
smallpox killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans; polio killed
and crippled people, including US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt;
and the 1918 influenza epidemic killed more people than were killed
during all of World War I.
For most viruses that attack
humans, your only defenses are prevention and your own immune systems.
Antibiotics don’t kill viruses, and scientists haven’t discovered many
effective antiviral drugs.
Vaccines are little pieces of
bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an
education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that
you’re ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without
becoming sick first. However, for some viral diseases no vaccines exist,
and the only option is to wait uncomfortably for your immune system to
win the battle.
A virus is not a miasma, a cootie, or red goo like in the children’s book Cat in the Hat.
There is no path toward waging much less winning a national war against
a virus. It cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles. A
virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies
have evolved to be suited to do just that. Vaccines can give advantage
to the immune system through a clever hack. Even so, there will always
be another virus and another battle, and so it’s been for hundreds of
thousands of years.
If you read the above carefully, you now know more than you would
know from watching 50 TED talks on viruses by Bill Gates. Though having
thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into cobbling together some
global plan to combat microbes, his own understanding seems not to have
risen above a cooties theory of run away and hide.
There is another level of virus comprehension that came to be
observed in the 1950s and then codified in the 70s. For many viruses,
not everyone has to catch them to become immune and not everyone needs a
vaccine if there is one. Immunity is achieved when a certain percentage
of the population has contracted some form of virus, with symptoms or
without, and then the virus effectively dies.
This has important implications because it means that vulnerable
demographics can isolate for the active days of the virus, and return to
normal life once “herd immunity” has been realized with infection
within some portion of the non-vulnerable population. This is why every
bit of medical advice for ederly people has been to avoid large crowds
during the flu season and why getting and recovering for non-vulnerable
groups is a good thing.
What you get from this virus advice is not fear but calm management.
This wisdom – not ignorance but wisdom – was behind the do-no-harm
approach to the polio epidemic of 1949-1952, the Asian flu of 1957-58, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69.
Donald Henderson summed up this old wisdom beautifully: “Communities
faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the
least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is
least disrupted.”
And that’s what we did for the one hundred years following the
catastrophic Spanish flu of 1918. We never again attempted widespread
closures or lockdown precisely because they had failed so miserably in
the few places they were attempted.
The cooties theory attempted a comeback with the Swine flu of 2009
(H1N1) but the world was too busy dealing with a financial crisis so the
postwar strategy of virus control and mitigation prevailed once again,
thankfully. But then the perfect storm hit in 2020 and a new generation
of virus mitigators got their chance to conduct a grand social
experiment based on computer modeling and forecasting.
Next thing you know, we had this new vocabulary shoved down our
throats and we all had to obey strangely arbitrary exhortations. “Go
inside! No, wait don’t go inside!” “Stay healthy but shut the gyms!”
“Get away from the virus but don’t travel!” “Don’t wear a mask, wait, do
wear a mask!” (Now we can add: “Only gather in groups if you are
protesting Trump”)
People started believing crazy things, as if we are medieval
peasants, such as that if there is a group of people or if you stand too
close to someone, the bad virus will spontaneously appear and you will
get infected. Or that you could be a secret superspreader even if you
have no symptoms, and also you can get the virus by touching almost
anything.
Good grief, the sheer amount of unscientific phony baloney unleashed
in these terrible three months boggles the mind. But that’s what happens
in any panic. Apparently.
Now, something has truly been bugging me these months as I’ve watched
the incredible unravelling of most of the freedoms we’ve long taken for
granted. People were locked out of the churches and schools, businesses
were shuttered, markets were closed, governors shoved through shelter
in place orders meant not for disease control but aerial bomb raids, and
masks were mandatory, all while regular people who otherwise seem smart
hopped around each other like grasshoppers.
My major shock is discovering how much sheer stupidity exists in the population, particularly among the political class.
Forgive a defense of my use of the term “stupid” but it is
technically correct. I take it from Albert Camus and his brilliant book The Plague
(1947). “When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t
last long.’ But though a war may well be ‘too stupid,’ that doesn’t
prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”
Indeed it is true.
It was only last February when we seemed smart. We had amazing
technology, movies on demand, a smartphone in our pockets to communicate
with everyone and reveal all the world’s knowledge. There was peace
more or less. There was prosperity. There was progress. Our medical
systems worked. It seemed that only a few months ago, we had it all
together. We seemed smart. Until suddenly stupid took over, or so it
seemed.
Actually we weren’t smart as individuals. Our politicians were as
dumb as they ever have been, and massive ignorance pervaded the
population, then as always. What was smart last February was society and
the processes that made society work in the good old days.
“Please explain.”
I shall.
Consider the social analytics of F.A. Hayek. His major theme is that
the workings of the social order require knowledge and intelligence, but
none of this essential knowledge subsists within any individual mind
much less any political leader. The knowledge and intelligence necessary
for society to thrive is instead decentralized throughout society, and
comes to be embedded or instantiated within institutions and processes
that gradually evolve from the free actions and choices of individuals.
What are those institutions? Market prices, supply chains,
observations we make from the successful or unsuccessful choices of
others that inform our habits and movements, manners and mores that work
as social signals, interest rates that carefully coordinate the flow of
money with our time preferences and risk tolerances, and even morals
that govern our treatment of each other. All these come together to
create a form of social intelligence that resides not in individual
minds but rather the process of social evolution itself.
The trouble is that a well functioning society can create an illusion
that it all happens not because of the process but rather because we
are so damn smart or maybe we have wise leaders with a good plan. It
seems like it must be so, else how could we have become so good at what
we do? Hayek’s main point is that it is a mistake to credit individual
intelligence or knowledge, much less good governments with brainy
leaders, with civilizational achievements; rather, the real credit
belongs to institutions and processes that no one in particular
controls.
“To understand our civilisation,” Hayek writes, “one must appreciate
that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but
spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain
traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to
dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose
validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly
spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase
of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow
them.”
The lockdowns took a sledgehammer to these practices, processes, and
institutions. It replaced them nearly overnight with new bureaucratic
and police-state mandates that herded us into our homes and arbitrarily
assigned new categories: elective vs non-elective medical procedures,
essential vs nonessential business, permissible vs. impermissible forms
of association, even to the point of measuring the distance from which
we must be separated one from another. And just like that, via executive
order, many of the institutions and processes were crushed under the
boot of the political class.
What emerged to take its place? It’s sad to say but the answer is
widespread ignorance. Despite having access to all the world’s knowledge
in our pockets, vast numbers of politicians and regular people
defaulted back to a premodern cognition of disease. People did this out
of fear, and were suddenly and strangely acquiescent to political
commands. I’ve had friends tell me that they were guilty of this back in
the day, believing that mass death was imminent so the only thing to do
was to shelter in place and comply with the edicts.
The seeming intelligence that we had only in February suddenly seemed
to turn to mush. A better way to understand this is all our smartest
institutions and practices were crushed, leaving only raw stupidity in
its place.
Truth is that we as individuals are probably not much smarter than
our ancestors; the reason we’ve made so much progress is due to the
increasing sophistication of Hayek’s extended orders of association,
signalling, capital accumulation, and technological know how, none of
which are due to wise leaders in government and industry but are rather
attributable to the wisdom of the institutions we’ve gradually built
over decades, centuries, and a millenia.
Take those away and you reveal what we don’t really want to see.
Looking back, I’m very impressed at the knowledge and awareness that
the postwar generation had toward disease mitigation. It was taught in
the schools, handed down to several generations, and practiced in
journalism and public affairs. That was smart. Something happened in the
21st century to cause a kind of breakage in that medical knowledge
chain, and thus did societies around the world become vulnerable in the
presence of a new virus to rule by charlatans, hucksters, media howlers,
and would-be dictators.
With lockdown finally easing, we will see the return of what seems to
be smart societies, and the gradual loss of the influence of stupid.
But let us not deceive ourselves. It could be that we’ve learned nothing
from the fiasco that unfolded before our eyes. If economies come to be
restored, eventually, to their former selves, it will not be because we
or our leaders somehow beat a virus. The virus outsmarted everyone. What
will fix what the political class has broken is the freedom once again
to piece back together the institutions and processes that create the
extended order that makes us all feel smarter than we really are.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, most recently The Market Loves You. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email. Tw | FB | LinkedIn
Future historians with an eye for inflection points may well focus on the Wall Street Journal of June 12, 2020. A page 1 banner reads, “Companies Pledge Actions to Promote Racial Justice” and recounts how in response to the George Floyd killing, Apple and Google are pledging millions to promote racial inclusion. Less than a week later, Google was more specific: allocating $175 million to sharply increase the number of black Google
executives (30% by 2025), upping the firm’s anti-racism efforts, $100 million for black owned start-ups, $15 million for improved training for black job applicants and $3 million to schools to close gaps in computer education and STEM fields.
If Wall Street Journal readers flipped it over to the last page of Section A, they would have seen the banner, “China Pours Funds Into Tech Push.” The story told of China’s trillion-dollar investments in computers to overtake the U.S. in cutting-edge technology. Now more than a dozen
Chinese cities will launch projects ($935 billion), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s five-year program will invest $14 trillion in artificial intelligence, data projects, and communications. Private Chinese firms, notably Alibaba and Tencent, are similarly upping their high-tech investment.
These figures of course tell only a partial story -- American firms are only putting millions into “woke” enterprises, but billions will continue to be invested in high-tech to match Chinese efforts. Also excluded are U.S. government-funded agencies such as DARPA and, conceivably, U.S. brainpower toe-to-toe will outperform the Chinese despite their lavish spending.
Nevertheless, it is certainly fair to ask why these U.S. tech companies embrace million-dollar racial justice schemes when every similar past diversity effort has failed? Have Google, Apple, Oracle and others, unlike their Chinese rivals, recently discovered that a diverse workforce builds a better supercomputer? Might the Chinese Communist Party now send spies to infiltrate these Tech giants to acquire the secrets of diversity as they now steal advanced chip designs? Most important, does this divergence in priorities harbinger a slow decline in U.S. technological preeminence?
Valley’s diversity push began in 2014 when Jesse Jackson set up shop there along with other more community-based groups such as Hidden Genius, Kapor Center, and Greenlining coalition. Jackson and his allies enjoyed initial success -- Intel, for example pledged $300 million to help boost workforce inclusiveness while Apple donated $40 million to historical black college and universities. Google sent its engineers to black colleges to teach introductory computer science and help graduates find technology jobs. It also created a
one-year residency at the firm for students at HBCU’s. In 2017 Apple announced that it number of “under-represented minorities” had increased from 19% of its workforce to 23% and, of the utmost importance, 50% of its new hires were from these underrepresented groups.
Oddly, the underlying premise of this pressured diversity contradicts the dog-eat-dog, innovate or die mentality dominating Silicon Valley. With billions at stake, and hungry startup rivals galore, everybody seeks an edge, and overlooking any advantage is suicide. Intel, for example, heavily invests in chip development in Israel. Successful firms routinely recruit talent from overseas. Surely if pools of talented minority software engineers existed, firms would uncover them with being pressured by social justice activists
Unfortunately for diversity devotees, however, a review of hiring in Wired reveals that such hidden talent is nearly nonexistent. In the all-important field of technical workers such as coders, the share of black and Latinx workers rose less than one percent since 2014 when the big bucks diversity push began (the proportion of women did, however, rise substantially). Yes, tech executives can tout progress, but this is deceptive since the burgeoning number of hires overall post-2014 means that the blacks and Hispanics workforce must be sharply expanded just to keep proportions steady (Facebook during this period quadrupled its workforce).
Would employing workers from historically under-represented groups give U.S. firms an edge when competing against Chinese rivals? Alas, claims regarding the diversity benefit seem over-heated rhetoric. One data-free claim, for example, asserts that upping diversity would add an additional $400 billion in revenue to the tech industry. As these advocates put it, “…more diverse companies, we believe, are better able to win top talent and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making, and all that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns (italics added for emphasis).” Yes, profitable companies may relish diversity but equally plausible is that ample profits versus being almost broke permits the luxury of diversity while polishing corporate images.
Another advocate claims that “More than ever, companies mired in culturally myopic ideas are
finding it more difficult to get ahead in a society that has embraced different backgrounds and lifestyles.” A further claim is that many potential employees cherish diversity and thus want to work in a diverse environment which, in turn, is a supposed recruitment advantage. Again, no hard evidence, and such claims would counsel company directors
to fire current Tech executives for leaving billions on the table for ignoring diversity.
If the past foretells the future, merit is in trouble over the long haul. Today’s pressures are immense, and merit grows increasingly unfashionable. Diversity activists are attending stockholder meetings
and harangue everybody with horror stories about working sans diversity. One female Google engineer explained how the absence of diversity and inclusion initiatives “…left many of us feeling unsafe and unable to do our work.” She further added, “The chilling effect of harassment and doxxing has impaired productivity and company culture.” Keep in mind that Silicon
Valley is in California, home of rampant ill-advised social engineering so compulsory diversity may arrive soon. Predictably, discrimination lawsuits have been filed by terminated Google employees who were queer or transgendered, a tactic whose likely real purpose is to prod Google into hiring by gender/sex quota to pre-empt future diversity
discrimination.
While it may seem impossible to imagine the demise of Google, Apple and other contemporary deep-pocket high-tech firms, the “creative destruction” of capitalism is relentless. Websites recount the demise of Alta Vista, Netscape, Infoseek, Webcrawler, and Zune. Not even Microsoft has made Bing a success or could save Explorer, and Google itself bombed with Nexus Q. AOL was once a multi-billion-dollar firm with a near web and e-mail
monopoly. No firm can survive endless bad decision-making, and hiring people by skin color, not ability, surely invites failure.
The university is the parallel -- diversity hiring began small but as additional diversicrats were hired and handsomely rewarded, racial bean counting exploded. Traditional merit became disparaged as “white male standards” whose devious purpose is to exclude historically under-represented groups. As today’s universities drop the SAT in admissions, Google’s “bias” against communities of color may eventually be eliminated. If so, white and Asian males will stop even applying for Big Tech jobs just as white males currently shun academic positions.
If the diversity mania goes unchallenged, American Big Tech may slowly lose its edge as consumers gravitate to better software and communications gear built in China though engineered by Americans unable to advance up the Google or Apple career ladder. When you consider the stakes here, one can only suspect that China is secretly funding the
diversity push.
A Minnesota neighborhood where many residents vowed not to call the cops on people in their community following the death of George Floyd, are finding it difficult to come up with alternatives after about 300 homeless people have set up camp in a local park.
Those
who live nearby where Floyd was killed at the hands of cops on May 25
welcomed dozens of tents to Powderhorn Park while the displaced people
look for permanent accommodation, urging officials not to evict them for
now.
But in the past two weeks since they've been using the open
space, people living near the park have complained about a heavy flow
of traffic keep them up at night as drug dealers. Two people in the
encampment have already been taken away in ambulances after overdosing............To Read More.....
Only a few days after Orthodox Jewish synagogues and schools were
targeted by black supremacist rioters and their allies, Shais Rishon,
the Content Manager for Bend the Arc, posted a hateful image of an
Orthodox Jew in a Klan hood wearing handcuffs and nooses over his Tallit
surrounded by text from Jews complaining about Black Lives Matter
anti-Semitism and violent riots by the racist hate group.
Rishon accused Jews, who had anti-Semitic slurs shouted at them, seen
synagogues defaced, congregants attacked, and stores looted, of “cluck
clucking” about the black supremacist riots.
The Bend the Arc content manager had previously defended Farrakhan
supporter Tamika Mallory’s slur that Jews uphold white supremacy by
claiming that there is “white supremacy aplenty” in synagogues.
Shais Rishon, who goes by Ma Nishtana on social media, is a black
nationalist activist who claims to have been secretly ordained as a
rabbi: a common claim made by radical leftists who want the status of
clergy. And Rishon/Nishtana fits in perfectly at Bend the Arc and its
various bigoted arms.
Alexander Soros, on behalf of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a PAC he
founded, had endorsed Keith Ellison, a longtime member of the Nation of
Islam hate group with an even longer history of antisemitism. Bend the
Arc’s CEO is Stosh Cotler is a former sex club dancer and anti-Israel
activist.
Like its cousins J Street and If Not Now, Bend the Arc claims to be Jewish while violently hating Jews.
When Black Lives Matter added support for BDS to its platform, Cotler
blamed the Jews. Yavilah McCoy, a Bend the Arc board member who serves
as a coach for the Presbyterian Church’s Auburn Theological Seminary's
Pastoral Coach Training Program, had accused Jews of white supremacy.
“When Jews accepted a white identity in America, they participated in
sustaining white supremacy," she ranted.
When Bend the Arc talks about defeating white supremacism, it really means defeating Jews.
When House Democrats tried to deal with their internal anti-Semitism
problem, they invited Bend the Arc to send in a facilitator. That
facilitator got things off on the right foot with an anti-Semitic joke.
None of that is surprising because Bend the Arc is as Jewish as a ham sandwich with cheese.
Cotler had been plucked from obscurity by a project run by “Rabbi”
Rachel Cowan, a Unitarian descendant of the Mayflower, who went on to
wreak havoc on the Jewish community. And considering the non-Jewish
billionaires who fund it, it’s a good thing that the leftist group
changed its name from Jewish Funds for Justice to its current name based
on a quote from an anti-Semitic Unitarian minister.
Bend the Arc scored over $14 million from Warren Buffett’s son. Why is
the son of a Presbyterian agnostic pouring a fortune into an
organization that claims to be promoting Jewish issues?
The group also gets $1.5 million a year from the Rockefeller Brothers
Fund. The Rockefeller clan has been accused of being many things, but
being Jewish isn’t one of them. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund however
does provide major funding for a spectrum of anti-Israel hate groups
that back BDS. A significant amount of the funding for the
infrastructure of the BDS movement comes from RBF.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also given millions to the anti-Israel
J Street lobby along with aggressively backing the propaganda campaign
in favor of legalizing Iran’s nuclear program. One of its major
recipients, the Ploughshares Fund, had aggressively campaigned for the
Iran Deal. Its board members included Valerie Plame, who had tweeted an
Unz site article titled, “America’s Jews are driving America’s wars”.
This is the sort of gutter anti-Semitism that Bend the Arc is conjoined
with.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund had been set up by the sons of John D.
Rockefeller and funded partly by him. But that’s not all he funded.
Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak credited the Rockefeller Foundation
with essentially providing the blueprint for the ideology utilized in
the Holocaust.
As Black noted, “The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German
eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked
in before he went to Auschwitz.” Alexis Carrel, a Rockefeller
beneficiary, proposed gassing "defectives" and cheered the Nazi regime
for its "energetic measures against the propagation of the defective."
Rockefeller money was used to fund an institute run by Otmar Freiherr
von Verschuer who promised a "total solution to the Jewish problem." His
assistant was Mengele: the Nazi regime’s Frankenstein.
As his boss later noted, Mengele was "presently employed as
Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this
concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS
Reichsführer."
The Rockefellers have always been interested in diversity.
Only in the upside-down world of the progressive movement can a Nazi
collaborator’s fund that helped finance the Holocaust and has gone on to
champion Iran’s nuclear program, which is meant to kill millions of
Jews again, be funding programming that accuses Jews of being the real
white supremacists.
A Nazi collaborator’s fund is paying black people to call Jews, “white supremacists”.
If Bend the Arc’s folks want to find the real white supremacists, they can follow their own paychecks.
Bend the Arc’s big backers, the Soros clan and the Rockefeller clan,
were at best complicit in the Nazi oppression of Jews. Now they’re
financing black supremacist trolls who arrogantly tell Jewish people
that if they don’t like their synagogues being vandalized, they’re white
supremacists.
If you oppose the new Kristallnacht, you’re a Nazi.
This obscene inversion turns Jews into Nazis, and racial supremacists
who quote Hitler-lover Stokely Carmichael into the new Jews.
Perpetrators became victims and victims are turned into perpetrators.
The police are the criminals, and the criminals are oppressed victims.
Jews who don’t want their synagogues vandalized are Nazis, and
anti-Jewish groups funded by Nazi collaborators are the real Jews.
Bend the Arc's Twitter account tweeted an article by Rebecca Pierce, an
anti-Israel activist with JVP and If Not Now, who had accused Jews of
white supremacy, in which she wrote of the riots, "property destruction
becomes a symbolic tool." Much like Kristallnacht. There was a lot of
symbolism there too.
The new Klan are Orthodox Jews cleaning Black Lives Matter graffiti off their synagogues.
Bend the Arc has gone on championing behavior that threatens Jews while
working closely with Black Lives Matter, an anti-Semitic group that
endorses BDS and whose activists have triggered attacks on Jewish
establishments. Meanwhile the hate group keeps claiming that it’s Jewish
and represents Jews.
As Jewish as John D. Rockefeller, George Soros, and Peter Buffett.
What would inspire Buffett’s son and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to
plow a combined $26 million into Bend the Arc? As Sean Cooper’s Bending
the Jews notes, neither have a history of giving to Jewish causes. But
Bend the Arc isn’t a Jewish cause. It’s a radical lefty cause that
occasionally targets Jews, preying on them as useful idiots or targets
for its inflexible hostility to the American way of life.
Unlike its partner If Not Now, Bend the Arc hasn’t even bothered appropriating a Jewish expression.
Bend the Arc’s name, as its CEO Stosh Cotler noted, “comes from a sermon
by a 19th century Unitarian Minister named Theodore Parker.”
Parker was a transcendentalist minister in the Unitarian Church who hated Jews.
In all fairness, Parker hated a lot of people. The Unitarian minister,
whose phrase about the moral arc of the universe always bending toward
justice became Obama's go-to line, was a career bigot.
The abolitionist hero was prone to saying things like, "the Irishman
will always lie if it is for his momentary interest" and describing the
Irish as the "N___ of the South". And while he fought vigorously for the
rights of slaves, he also insisted that there was "no doubt the African
race is greatly inferior."
The minister, whose sermon gave its name to Bend the Arc, reserved a
special contempt for Jews, which may be because he disliked the bible,
which he believed, was the work of “bigoted Jews.”
The Jewish intellect, Parker ranted in one letter, was “pinched in those
narrow foreheads”. Jews are "lecherous", "incline to despotism", and
"were always cruel".
"I doubt not they did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover," he speculated.
That is the origin of Bend the Arc’s name. Jews are being accused of
white supremacy by an organization named after a line from an actual
white supremacist whose funding derives from a Nazi collaborator.
The moral arc of Bend the Arc will always bend toward antisemitism.
This is why I have no problem with a community based on voluntary socialism. History tells us that approach doesn’t work (largely for the reasons captured in this cartoon), but people should be free to try over and over again.
Which brings us to “CHAZ.”
For those who haven’t been following the news, protestors in Seattle (motivated in part by legitimate concerns about police misbehavior) have seized control of a neighborhood and declared it to be the “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.”
Some people see CHAZ as an example of self-government based on a strange mix of libertarian impulses (pro-gun, for example) and leftist impulses (anti-cop, for example).
For the past several days, Ochoa, 28, has been serving as
an unarmed volunteer “sentinel,” or guard, in the protest zone. Ochoa, a
self-described leftist libertarian recently furloughed from the Seattle
International Film Festival, and other volunteers have been serving
four-hour shifts to help to keep the peace. …Core
to the zone is a vision of a self-governed community with no formal
policing. Instead, volunteers, many of them avowed police abolitionists,
have begun to organize their own safety force. …Volunteers say this
work is a way to highlight what a city without police might look like.
“We have a chance to really build something here, so I have a vested
interest in defending that as a part of my community,” said Ochoa, who
lives in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. …Markinson describes
himself as an anti-fascist, anti-racist community defense advocate. He
is a gun owner… Markinson views Seattle’s ongoing experiment as part of a
lineage of anarchist neighborhoods… a sentinel who gave his name as
James Madison stood at the southern barricade with an AR-15 draped over
his chest, as he has done on other nights. …“There are a few of us who
are armed.” …a hand-painted sign approaching the barricades offers
watchwords: “In a world without cops we must never again become the cops
ourselves.”
If nothing else, CHAZ is anti-authority, at least if traditional city government is the definition of authority.
But is it a viable system?
Robert Tracinski, in an article for the Bulwark, discusses potential problems.
…the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, endearingly nicknamed
CHAZ…is the product of anti-police protests in Seattle that led the
mayor to order the abandonment of one of the city’s downtown police
precincts, ceding a six-block area of Seattle’s downtown to the
protesters, who have turned it into a kind of anarcho-socialist utopia,
with free food, free music, no cops, and lots of peace and love, man......
…CHAZ certainly set a record for socialist utopias when it comes to
running out of food. Within the first day, they were already sending out
the alarm:
“The homeless people we invited took away all the food at the Capitol
Hill Autonomous Zone. We need more food to keep the area operational…” I’ve checked to see whether this is parody, and as far as I can tell,
it’s not. …
Another area where they are well ahead of schedule for a
socialist utopia is in putting up walls and establishing checkpoints
with internal passports. … This leads us to the big question about the
“autonomous zone”: Whose “autonomy” is it? Certainly, it’s not the
autonomy of the people who actually live there, who did not invite the
protesters and never had the opportunity to vote on whether they wanted
to reject the protection of the Seattle PD and establish new protectors.
…
With leadership seemingly up for grabs, CHAZ is the scene of sporadic
petty scuffles, which activists are asking people not to film because it
might make them look bad. Yes, well, I’m sure the Minneapolis PD felt
the same way. …
My favorite description of CHAZ is from a Seattle Times
article which says it has “mostly been peaceful.” That’s a favorite bit
of journalistic spin. “Mostly peaceful” is how you describe something
that’s violent when you don’t want the reader to draw that conclusion.
Tracinski certainly is correct that existing property owners haven’t consented to the new system. And he’s probably correct in that the new form of authority in CHAZ
may be even more arbitrary and unfair than the old system (time will
tell).
But he only scratches the surface of the issue that is of greatest
interest to me, which is whether CHAZ has a viable economic system.
Ideally, local businesses will be free to operate and to transact
with the outside world. And if there are no taxes and nobody to enforce
red tape, we might almost see an example of anarcho-capitalism. For what it’s worth, I’m guessing Seattle bureaucrats intend to retroactively collect taxes and take other steps to make sure there is no long-run reduction in the burden of government for CHAZians. What about in the short run? In a column for Spectator USA, Ben Sixsmith suggests that authorities should adopt a hands-off attitude and let CHAZ sink or swim.
A group of anarchists and leftists collected in Capitol
Hill, known for its hipster and LGBT scenes, they have barricaded
themselves into a small area and established an anarchic intentional
community…
Seattle’s aspiring revolutionaries had only just announced
the creation of CHAZ, as a place in which progressives can live free of
corporate consumerism and police violence, when a local rapper-cum-warlord
named Raz Simone began stalking the place with an armed militia. …
I
believe that the state and federal authorities should leave them alone.
If people are being raped and killed in CHAZ then the officials will
have to get involved, of course, but otherwise they should be left to
their own devices. …for radical leftists to establish their own
territory is, frankly, refreshing. For years they have been insisting
that the culture, communities, education, religious beliefs et cetera of
their fellow citizens be transformed in accordance with their own
idiosyncratic ideas. Everyone has had to conform with their progressive
beliefs. The CHAZers? They aren’t trying to reshape America. They are
trying to build a place of their own. How is that not preferable? …
Of
course, I think CHAZ will be an embarrassing failure. I suspect it will
collapse in a heap of shortages, grievances and recriminations… If it
all collapses of its own accord, then a lot of radical progressives are
going to have a tough, useful lesson in the value of civilized
institutions.
In other words, let’s allow CHAZ to be a test case.
If it adopts a bunch of leftist policies (which seems likely), then
we’ll almost surely see another example of socialism failing, even when it’s voluntary.
Though I’m crossing my fingers that the CHAZians adopt a libertarian approach to economics.
Given that Seattle has a very left-leaning government, we then might finally get an example to disprove Jacob Leddy.
Sadly, I don’t think that will happen. The city’s crazy politicians
will be more than happy to tolerate CHAZ if it’s a socialist
experiment, but they’ll send in the cops if it morphs into a libertarian
experiment.
Austin Bay June 24, 2020
Far too often, however, that doesn’t happen. And that means the governments (to be more accurate, their taxpayers) have a big “unfunded liability.”
Unfunded state pension liabilities total $4.9 trillion or $15,080 for every man, woman and child in the United States. State governments are often obligated, by contract and state constitutional law, to make these pension payments regardless of economic conditions. As these pension payments continue to grow, revenue that would have gone to essential services like public safety and education, or tax relief, goes to paying off these liabilities instead. …Most state pension plans are structured as defined-benefit plans. Under a defined-benefit plan, an employee receives a fixed payout at retirement based on the employee’s final average salary, the number of years worked and a benefit multiplier.
The crisis in state pension systems is a result of decades of fiscal mismanagement. The problem, however, goes well beyond deeply indebted Illinois and New Jersey. Many state and municipal retirement funds have been on an unrelenting downward trajectory… This fiscal nightmare stems in part from politicians’ habit of increasing employee benefits while markets are booming, thereby squandering fund surpluses. …Politicians have consistently neglected to contribute to these systems even during good budgetary times, preferring to fund more popular programs. …Meanwhile, elected officials and pension administrators have endorsed overly optimistic economic assumptions that made their systems look affordable.
Cotler had been plucked from obscurity by a project run by “Rabbi”
Rachel Cowan, a Unitarian descendant of the Mayflower, who went on to
wreak havoc on the Jewish community. And considering the non-Jewish
billionaires who fund it, it’s a good thing that the leftist group
changed its name from Jewish Funds for Justice to its current name based
on a quote from an anti-Semitic Unitarian minister.
This is why I have no problem with a community based on voluntary socialism. History tells us that approach doesn’t work (largely for the reasons captured in this cartoon), but people should be free to try over and over again.
If it adopts a bunch of leftist policies (which seems likely), then
we’ll almost surely see another example of socialism failing, even when it’s voluntary.For the past several days, Ochoa, 28, has been serving as an unarmed volunteer “sentinel,” or guard, in the protest zone. Ochoa, a self-described leftist libertarian recently furloughed from the Seattle International Film Festival, and other volunteers have been serving four-hour shifts to help to keep the peace. …Core to the zone is a vision of a self-governed community with no formal policing. Instead, volunteers, many of them avowed police abolitionists, have begun to organize their own safety force. …Volunteers say this work is a way to highlight what a city without police might look like. “We have a chance to really build something here, so I have a vested interest in defending that as a part of my community,” said Ochoa, who lives in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. …Markinson describes himself as an anti-fascist, anti-racist community defense advocate. He is a gun owner… Markinson views Seattle’s ongoing experiment as part of a lineage of anarchist neighborhoods… a sentinel who gave his name as James Madison stood at the southern barricade with an AR-15 draped over his chest, as he has done on other nights. …“There are a few of us who are armed.” …a hand-painted sign approaching the barricades offers watchwords: “In a world without cops we must never again become the cops ourselves.”
…the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, endearingly nicknamed CHAZ…is the product of anti-police protests in Seattle that led the mayor to order the abandonment of one of the city’s downtown police precincts, ceding a six-block area of Seattle’s downtown to the protesters, who have turned it into a kind of anarcho-socialist utopia, with free food, free music, no cops, and lots of peace and love, man......
A group of anarchists and leftists collected in Capitol Hill, known for its hipster and LGBT scenes, they have barricaded themselves into a small area and established an anarchic intentional community…
