Racism and how to create it

Jonathan Turley’s blog at www.jonathanturley.org is a good place to find out about the continuing effort by extremists – our new tyrant class - to eliminate “inappropriate speech” and racism – in both cases by attacking those who they deem to have transgressed.  However, it strikes me that what they consider to be inappropriate speech often is not and that those they accuse of being racist often are not.  Moreover, the nature of many of their racist accusations strikes me as themselves being racist behavior.

 My guess is that these extremists are creating racists and producing divisiveness.  It is time to call a spade a spade – these extremists are dangerous to the health of our civilization and need to be exposed for what they are.

 For those who do not know English, here is Wikipedia’s definition of “call a spade a spade”.  My use of the term is as explained there.  I do not favor redefining words or eliminating them to appease our new tyrant class.

 "Call a spade a spade" is a figurative expression. It is also referred to as "let's call a spade a spade, not a gardening tool", which refers to calling something "as it is",[1] that is, by its right or proper name, without "beating about the bush"—being outspoken about it, truthfully, frankly, and directly, even to the point of being blunt or rude, and even if the subject is considered coarse, impolite, or unpleasant.

 The idiom originates in the classical Greek of Plutarch's Apophthegmata Laconica, and was introduced into the English language in 1542 in Nicolas Udall's translation of the Apophthegmes, where Erasmus had seemingly replaced Plutarch's images of "trough" and "fig" with the more familiar "spade." The idiom has appeared in many literary and popular works, including those of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson,[2] W. Somerset Maugham, and Jonathan Swift. 

Carrier landing

 

Masks and COVID-19

 Wouldn't it be nice if there were devices that could be carried around that, somewhat similar to a vacuum cleaner, sucked in air laden with Coronavirus, destroyed it and then released the cleansed air into the environment?  That probably is too good to hope for, but there is a rough approximation - people who have recovered from Coronavirus.

Presumably, people who have recovered from Coronavirus and are immune to it destroy any Coronavirus that enters their body.  In other words, they scavenge Coronavirus and destroy it.  If so, the rest of us benefit to the extent they do not wear masks and are out doing all the social contact they can.

The downward spiral of US economic health

 John Cochrane gets it right.  The political trend will continue to hurt the US economy as it has in the past.

For those who confuse growth with "not hurt", growth may have been higher.

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The Dec 14 Wall Street Journal amplifies my warnings on the movement to de-fund fossil fuels by financial regulation, citing "climate risks."

 
"The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis recently issued a report detailing how the Fed and eight other regulatory agencies should penalize investment in fossil fuels and promote green energy. They claim financial institutions are underpricing the risk that carbon-intensive assets will become “stranded.”

Mind you, their worry isn’t about how climate change per se would devalue investments, which financial institutions already account for. They want a warning about the costs of government climate policies. “Because Congress has not advanced any comprehensive climate policies in the last decade, the market has not priced in the possibility of significant federal action,” the report notes."

As reported this is at least a refreshing breath of honesty. In all I have read (not everything, it's a mountain) of the BoE, ECB, BIS, OECD, IMF treatment of "climate risk," there is a vague insinuation that climate itself poses a "risk," which is utter nonsense. Beyond nonsense, it is a directive for banks to make up numbers in order to justify de-funding politically unpopular fossil fuel projects. (In case that's not obvious, climate is not weather. The tails of the weather distribution and their minor effect on the profitability of large corporations are better known than just about any other risk, at horizons where bank supervision and risk management operate.) Here, it is at least clear that the relevant "risk" is the risk that Congress or the administrative state will shut down businesses.

Actually, if taken seriously, honestly and generally, I might be all for it. Yes! Let our financial regulators require that firms and the banks who fund them disclose and account for all of the political risks that future government action might take to harm them -- law, regulation, administrative decisions, and prosecution. Indeed, state every possible nitwit regulation, idiotic tariff (Dec 29 WSJ is a masterpiece of how arbitrary administrative decisions make or break companies), or ridiculous law or politicized prosecution might harm the company or investment. Let's make this really tough -- criminal penalties for failing to disclose ahead of time that, say, the government might challenge a decade-old merger, or decide with a secret algorithm that it doesn't like the interest rates you charged or who you hired. While we're disclosing financial risks, let's disclose the risk that a future Congress might remove the long list of subsidies and protections that your green projects live on. The long lists of well documented potential mischief would be edifying!

OK, I'll stop dreaming. This isn't serious, it isn't about climate in any vaguely sensible cost-benefit way, it's about fossil fuels. It's about de-funding fossil fuels before alternatives are available at scale, by capturing the regulatory system because the people's elected legislators are not about to do it. (In the US.)

And it's really clever. Or sneaky. That the US Congress will take an action which strongly hurts the finances of fossil fuel companies is not a given. There are a few still who recognize, say, that fracking for natural gas has lowered US carbon emissions dramatically, and improved our economy and geopolitical situation. A ban on fracking, or on nuclear power (Germany) would be a clear disaster. Will Congress really do it? Will the Department of Energy or the EPA really go so far on their own? It's not likely, is it.

Banks and bondholders have taken a sober look at just how much damage Congress is likely actually to impose. They don't think it's likely to happen. So the effort is clever: Try to get a financial run going ahead of time to avoid a risk that doesn't exist.

The unintended consequences

The title of this post is "unintended consequences." Here is the real question: How is it that the government has the power to force the financial system de-fund politically unpopular industries, under the guise that they might be "risky?" Do we not have a nearly constitutional right to bet on an industry, be wrong, and lose a lot of money? When everyone else is shunning so-far legal fossil fuels fearing government action, do we not have a right to take the contrarian bet?

Well, no. And here is the really interesting story of a dramatic expansion of administrative power in only 10 years, all unintended. But once the avalanche gets going it keeps going.

It really goes back to 1933. After that bank run, the US chose not to follow the "Chicago plan," narrow deposit taking and equity-financed banking, and instead chose the path of deposit insurance, and bank asset risk regulation. With each crisis, we doubled down.

2008 was the most recent immense crisis, and basically a run. Once again, we needed to fix one of two things: either financial institutions have to get their money by issuing equity and borrowing long-term in ways that cannot run, or an array of bureaucrats has to monitor how they invest their money, making sure they don't take too much "risk." Our government doubled down on the second option. (Newcomers: A more detailed version of this little old lady who swallowed a spider history is in "toward a run-free financial system" and "a blueprint for effective financial reform.")

And over the next 10 years the ambition of our regulators to regulate "risks" expanded dramatically. If they regulate only banks, financial activity moves outside the banking system, which it did. So now the government "monitors" and regulates "risks" throughout the "financial system." (Scare quotes indicate fuzzy words.)

And the early restriction that risk had somehow to be "systemic," threatening not an individual loss of money but a systemwide panic, faded away. "Systemic" now means "anywhere in the system," not "threatening a run to the entire system, not individual failures." At the cost of repetition, let me emphasize this point. As I travel around and read the output of central banks and other institutions, in 10 short years it is now universally understood that regulators job is to "monitor risks" everywhere in the financial system. not just those risks that might conceivably cause a run, panic, or crisis.

For example, a company wishing to borrow to finance a (heavens) fracking project to bring low-carbon natural gas to market or a pipeline, to avoid shipping oil in rail tank cars, frozen out of banks, might simply sell corporate bonds. Those bonds would be bought by a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund. That poses zero risk of a run. But mutual funds too must disclose "risks," and can be effectively regulated.

The ability of the Fed to tell banks what to do, to shun fossil fuels if the Fed so desires is essentially total and arbitrary. But the danger is not just the Fed, which the WSJ article points to. As Michael Norbert writes in Forbes the larger target is the FSOC,

Environmental activists are hopeful that Janet Yellen, Joe Biden’s pick for Treasury Secretary, will lead a major shift in public policy toward actively addressing climate change. ...activists are calling for her to use the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) in the “campaign against global warming.”...

What, exactly, is the FSOC?

Created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, it is a council of all the major federal financial regulators. The Treasury Secretary serves as the council’s chair. Section 112 of Dodd-Frank defines the FSOC’s basic purposes, such as identifying risks to U.S. financial stability that come from “outside” the financial marketplace, and responding to “emerging threats” to financial stability.

However, the Dodd–Frank Act does not spell out how the council may respond to emerging threats to financial stability. In fact, it doesn’t even define emerging threats or, for that matter, financial stability. This sort of ill-defined government authority is dangerous in its own right.

Separately, section 120 of Dodd-Frank authorizes the council to recommend more stringent regulations for an “activity”— if the council determines that the “conduct, scope, nature, size, scale, concentration, or interconnectedness” of the activity could “increase the risk of significant liquidity, credit, or other problems spreading” through other companies or markets. ...

Thus a Biden administration would have the authority to restrict/redirect practically any climate-related economic activity based on nothing more than a belief that it might cause “problems” in the future.

If you are iffy on climate goals, social-justice goals are not far behind. Michael again

Congress should never have given such authority to unelected officials running regulatory agencies and, arguably, should not have such power to begin with.

Congress did have, I think, a fairly narrow concept in mind. Nobody really knew back then just how a "systemic run" evolves, so it hoped with vague language that the FSOC and subsidiary agencies would figure it out and define a limited scope. That is the vain hope. The institutions instead have interpreted their mandate for action ever more broadly. And here we are.

Michael is thoughtfully even handed

Many climate activists will probably scoff at this objection, but the FSOC could just as easily make life miserable for the companies that they like. For instance, the FSOC could slap solar energy companies (or their investors) with stringent regulations and fees. In the last year, two major solar companies filed bankruptcy. These cases provide concrete examples of renewable energy companies posing a risk to “financial stability,” thus justifying (under Dodd-Frank) virtually any new regulation that the council comes up with.

It is common to both parties, but strikes me as especially common on the left to forget that someday you might lose an election and your opponents use the tools you just created against you. Filibuster anyone?

But this is an important point. For my objection has nothing to do with climate policy, it is an objection to untrammeled power that can de-fund anyone's crusade. A new Republican administration might de-fund industries that trade with China, as both administrations have de-funded pot farmers, for-profit schools, payday lenders, and a range of other unpopular industries. Who is next?

The Rabble moves the US closer to China’s version of freedom

 Here is Jonathan Turley on freedom.

A substantial minority of US citizens, mostly Democrats, have been successful in de facto reducing our freedom of speech.  This rabble is moving us rapidly toward the Chinese version of freedom.  This is only possible because the rest of us do not speak out and stop it.

Censorship is the kind of thing where you give it an inch and it takes a mile.  The consequences of censorship are far worse than the abuses of free speech.

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Zhang Zhan, 37, is a citizen journalist who reported on the early evidence of a pandemic in Wuhan. In its latest abuse of basic human rights, the Chinese regime has sentenced Zhang to four years in prison for her courageous reporting. She was reportedly convicted under the absurd criminal allegation that she was “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

According to a The New York Times report, the sentence is meant to silence any others who would share information on the failures and responsibilities of the Chinese government for spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Chinese government has denied any such failures despite overwhelming evidence of a cover-up that denied the world critical time to contain and fight the spread of the virus.

Notably, the Chinese continue to scrub any discussion of its role in social media. It is a chilling example of the censorship that is now being embraced by many in the United States. The Atlantic published an article by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods calling for Chinese style censorship of the internet. They declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” and “significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with society norms and values.”

At the same time, Democrats have embraced censorship and speech controls. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. The erosion of free speech has been radically accelerated by the Big Tech and social media companies. The level of censorship and viewpoint regulation has raised questions of a new type of state media where companies advance an ideological agenda with political allies.

Law’s Ahab: Weissmann Makes The Case For A Trump Self-Pardon

 Here is Jonathan Turley on the case for a Trump self-pardon.

The message for me is not the case for a self-pardon.  Rather, it is the appalling state of affairs that allows an Andrew Weissmann to continue as a member of the Bar.

With respect to Trump, it is clear that if AW was unable to come up with a defensible charge, Trump should be viewed as squeaky clean.

Of course, AW is not the only person who's anger or dislike of Trump dominates their behavior.  That may be true, judging from the election, of about half the population.

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Below is my column in the Hill on claims by former Deputy Special Counsel Andrew Weissmann that the recent pardons by President Donald Trump reinforce a possible obstruction of justice case against him. We have previously discussed how Weissmann has proven critics correct in their description of his animosity and bias toward Trump. For my part, his book and recent statements reinforce the view of an abusive prosecutor, particularly in his untethered view of obstruction. Indeed, Weissmann seems intent on making the best case for Trump to grant himself a self-pardon. He is calling for prosecutors to use grand juries to pursue Trump and others in an unrelenting campaign based on unfounded legal theories.

Here is the column:

In the debate over pardons, some Democrats seem to be making the case for Donald Trump and against themselves. Consider Andrew Weissmann. After the recent pardons, he declared that Trump effectively proved the case for an obstruction charge against himself and called on prosecutors to summon those who were pardoned into grand juries with the threat of later perjury charges. It was unfounded and dubious. It was also vintage Weissmann, who made the case against himself as someone who shows bias against Trump that overwhelms all other considerations.

If Trump wants a rationale to pardon himself, he can look no further than Weissmann, who was appointed as a top aide to special counsel Robert Mueller. Trump and numerous Republicans denounced him as a donor to Barack Obama, and he was said to have attended the election night party for Hilliary Clinton in 2016. My objection was not to his affiliations but to his history, which included extreme interpretations that were ultimately rejected by courts. Weissmann was responsible for the overextension of an obstruction provision in a jury instruction that led the Supreme Court to reverse the conviction in the Arthur Andersen case in 2005.

Weissmann is now a MSNBC analyst who teaches at a New York University. After he left the office of the special counsel, he fulfilled every account of someone with uncontrolled bias against Trump, including his book that attacks prosecutors for refusing to take on his extreme views. Weissmann called on prosecutors to refuse to assist John Durham in his investigation and, after the pardon of Roger Stone, called for Stone in a grand jury.

Even staunch critics of Trump like former prosecutor Randall Eliason described Weissmann’s book as a “betrayal of Mueller” that “trashed” his colleagues and threw them “under a bus for not agreeing with him.” He added that Weissmann’s “dishing may sell a lot of books” but he “himself violated the norms about how prosecutors should behave.”

After leaving the Special Counsel’s office, Weissmann seemed intent on proving critics correct in saying that he was a uniquely poor choice by Mueller to serve as his deputy. Now, Weissmann is openly voicing the extreme interpretations that have led many of us to criticize his tenure at the Justice Department. His most recent column is illustrative. Many of us called out the recent pardons by Trump, ranging from corrupt former members of Congress to the father of Jared Kushner. However, Weissmann insists that the pardon of figures tied to the special counsel investigation is evidence of obstruction.

But these individuals were not pardoned to stop them from testifying or, with the case of Michael Flynn, from working with prosecutors, nor were they pardoned before they were tried and convicted. Former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, for instance, served time in prison before he was released due concerns of the coronavirus. Former campaign aide George Papadopoulos and attorney Alex Van Der Zwaan served sentences. Flynn was convicted and should have been sentenced years earlier if not for a series of bizarre actions by the federal judge who heard his case.

Trump did not pardon his lawyer, Michael Cohen, when Cohen angled for his pardon. Instead, Cohen worked with Mueller, testified against Trump, and was sent to prison. That is a curious pattern for obstruction. Wait until everyone testifies and most are sent to prison before they are pardoned. It did not seem to have been obstruction that Bill Clinton notably pardoned his own friend and business partner in the Whitewater scandal.

Weissmann insists that, when Trump is out of office, there is no barrier to indict him for obstruction and have all these figures appear before grand juries. The problem is the same one Weissmann faced for his disastrous role in the prosecution of Andersen. Weissmann simply misunderstands criminal obstruction. Indeed, he may have the longest learning curve in legal history on this issue. Not even an unanimous rejection of his views by the Supreme Court for the case of Andersen seems to register with him, particularly when the law stands in the way of pursuing Trump.

I testified in the impeachment hearing on the flaws with this obstruction theory. Mueller himself did not find a case for an obstruction charge. He listed the alleged acts of obstruction discussed in the media but did not find the critical element of intent to support the charge. That was also the point that former Attorney General William Barr tried to make in his press conference on the summary of the special counsel investigation. Despite different ideas of obstruction, there was no doubt that it would take intent to prosecute. Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who appointed Mueller and was widely praised by Democrats for his independence — also said under oath last year that there was no evidence of obstruction.

None of this matters to Weissmann, who comes across as a legal Captain Ahab, so blinded by rage that he would lay waste to the criminal code to nab his white whale. This same kind of rage could be cited by Trump for a controversial pardon of himself. I believe a president can pardon himself but should not do so. Even if someone had standing to challenge that, the Constitution is silent on any such limitation on the pardon power. That is the same reason I believe a president can be indicted in office. Yet, while constitutional, I still view self-pardons as a misuse of the power.

There are solid arguments on both sides of this debate, which has gone on for decades. From my view, the main obstacle is political rather than constitutional, but Weissmann and others are now working to remove that barrier. These critics demand prosecutions of Trump and his associates with the same blind fury as Captain Ahab, who said, “From heart of hell I stab at thee. For the sake of hate I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.” Their long-standing rage could be the long-sought rationale for the president.

Mike Solana gets it mostly right on San Francisco and its likely demise

Here is the sequence of events that kills a City.

• City budget and taxes rise, often due to Do-Gooders spending other people's money to eliminate poverty, fund excessive pensions, etc.
• Tax base narrows because there would be no problem if the Rich would only pay their fair share.
• Companies are taxed excessively because they are not people and can afford to pay their fair share.
• Rich people and companies leave.
• City budget does not decline, hence taxes for everyone else become excessive - but are not enough to maintain services and keep the City an attractive place to live.
• City declines.

Once the City has declined, there is no going back.  A rich person or company that moves in faces an excessive tax burden and an unattractive environment.

Here is MS's post.

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Digging for microcode. As the catastrophic state of California’s finances finally begins to set in among politicians, anti-tech media personalities, and far left cultural influencers, the narrative on California’s techxodus — that is, the migration of California’s technology industry out of the state — has shifted from mockery, and “we’ll be better off without you,” to a far more sober, and increasingly-desperate “leaving California is immoral.”

As it is simply too embarrassing for politicians to admit the state needs the technology industry after more than a decade of antagonizing the men and women who built it, and as it is political suicide for incumbent politicians in a one-party state to admit that every one of the problems we’re facing has been created by our elected leaders, a moral argument for tech’s responsibility to California, and specifically the Bay Area, has recently been produced. It goes something like this: young ambitious people moved to the state, and struck gold. But rather than “give back” to the land, they’re leaving with resources they “took” from the region. Like the milkshake guy from There Will Be Blood, sucking oil from the earth. Like the evil army people from Avatar, and their unquenchable thirst for unobtanium. It’s the Substack Billionaire Boy’s Club at it again, but this time with shovels and axes and the exploitative fantasy of eating up all the “low-income” 29 million dollar mansions in Miami Beach.

One of the most popular, early threads on the subject, retweeted by a handful of high-profile tech journalists, began as follows:
Tiffani Ashley Bell @tiffaniThe thing I like least about the folks who leave SF + Silicon Valley for Texas and Miami and wherever else is the crapping on the place they left *after* they've extracted all they can from it. The Bay Area helped you build your immense wealth and that's the thanks it gets. smh.

December 9th 2020252 Retweets3,162 Likes

“Extracted,” she says. Smh. A week or so later, in the psychotic San Francisco Board meeting where our local representatives voted 10 to 1 to officially condemn Mark Zuckerberg for donating 75 million dollars to a hospital (really, this happened), the word came up again. When the floor was opened to the public, an activist downplayed what was, as Teddy Schleifer reports, “the largest single private gift to a public hospital ever,” and accused Zuckerberg of “extraction.” Our local politicians did not think this strange.

The following week, Jeff Lawson, cofounder and CEO of Twilio, echoed the extraction sentiment. In a viral thread of his own, he sharply critiqued the industry for thanklessness and immorality.
Jeff Lawson @jeffiel🧵 With many of the Valley’s richest companies fleeing the Bay mid-pandemic, I feel compelled to speak out. There’s no question that California is imperfect. The cost of living, taxes and policies, among other things, make it difficult for lots of people to succeed here. (1/9)

December 18th 2020378 Retweets2,387 Likes

And here, his essential point:
Jeff Lawson @jeffielWhat I take issue with is our leaders—people of means— abandoning our community when it needs us most. Reaping the benefits of Silicon Valley’s talent, tech incubators, mentors, professional network, and culture until they no longer need it. (3/9)

December 18th 202075 Retweets828 Likes

I don’t know Jeff. I have no sense of the personal or professional reasons that have so passionately committed him to the region, and I do think it’s commendable to stay and fight, even if donating to charities doesn’t constitute fighting, nor will it correct the Bay Area’s cascading series of political disasters. But I take extreme issue with the notion that industry leaders have taken something from the “community,” defined here as the “talent,” the “incubators,” and the “mentors.” This is precisely the opposite of reality. The men and women leaving are the talent, they have started the incubators, they have built the companies, they have funded the startup ecosystem, and they have mentored countless young people. This is the “network.” They are the network. Technology workers do not “extract” value from the region, they are what makes the region valuable.

California is beautiful — San Francisco is truly, I think, one of the most beautiful cities in the world — but the soil isn’t made of magic, there’s no such thing as digging for microcode, and the Bay Area’s nativist, anti-immigration political climate has certainly not created the tech community, which is populated largely by immigrants, be they from out of the state or out of the country.

Among many things, including talent, opportunity, and soft power, the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. This latter piece is important, as it appears to be the only thing our Board cares about. This is because significantly increasing the local housing supply would decrease the value of the multi-million dollar homes almost every single one of our Supervisors owns, and we could never have that.

These past ten years I often wondered where the city’s money went. Could the leadership really be this stupid, or was there corruption? Turns out both. We’ve recently discovered our politicians are literally criminals, but they’re also bad at crime.

The San Francisco ruling class did secure a few wins this decade. They managed to ban vapes, scooters (effectively), electric bikes (kind of), and those little plastic swords that free men in free countries are still allowed to stick in cocktail fruit. They failed to ban busses and cafeterias, though somehow succeeded in turning both into symbols of billionaire greed. They also instituted the “San Francisco Office of Emerging Technology,” which in theory prohibits almost every future company and technology from existing in the city without prior approval from the local government. Laws aren’t enforced in San Francisco, so the OET hasn’t really come up. But a company in this city can now be attacked by the Board at any moment, for almost any reason. This is the nature of ambiguous laws in one-party states. In a country where nothing is technically legal, punishment can be meted out for almost any whim or unjust personal reason that can be imagined by small-minded people with political power.

The Bay Area housing, homeless, and drug crises are all exacerbated by the state government, which is as incapable of managing its finances as it is incapable of managing its public land; we are now teetering on the edge of true financial ruin in a state of endemic, constant wildfire. But let’s take a closer look at this issue of money. On one hand we have insane, nativist property tax codes, which punish new homeowners at the expense of longtime landlords, and on the other our income taxes have skyrocketed. Since income taxes are structured progressively, the state has backed itself into a position of extreme uncertainty, as the top one percent of earners pay half the state’s taxes — while politicians argue the state’s wealthiest men and women, who already pay more in taxes than the wealthiest men and women of any other state and most free countries in the world, are not paying their “fair share.” As if rudimentary economic threats were not enough, politicians have made cultural platforms of their anti-technology, anti-industry attitudes, and have done everything in their power to drive our top one percent of earners out of the state. In this, our politicians are succeeding.

Such success in driving top earners from the state only further exacerbates the state’s political disasters, with our government of bloated, corrupt services now starving for income. This has in turn increased the political appetite for all manner of draconian, anti-business practices among politicians with no apparent ability to conceive of the second order effects of their legislation, a deficiency in basic intelligence that led, for example, to the unmitigated disaster that was AB5. In other words, everything is structured to further deteriorate.

A donation to the food bank? Not gonna fix this.

For the last half century, entrepreneurship in tech has been positive sum, which is to say almost everyone who participated won. For decades, new companies and technologies were built almost from nothing. They were not discovered, and they were not mined from the earth. They were created by the men and women who, for the tremendous, historical wealth they brought to the state of California, and specifically to the Bay Area, have in turn been demonized, scapegoated, and punitively targeted by a land lording political class of leeches who have themselves built nothing.

Fortunately, tech industry “extraction” is something other regions of the country are welcoming with open arms.
Mayor Francis Suarez @FrancisSuarezHow can I help?

delian @zebulgarok guys hear me out, what if we move silicon valley to miami

December 5th 2020310 Retweets5,712 Likes

Taking the L. A lot of people just tuning in don’t understand why the relationship between the technology industry and the governments of California appears to be so broken. There’s the sense the technology industry “lost” some kind of fight. But with such tremendous wealth and creativity, how was this possible?
John Coogan @johncoogan@micsolana I need you to write a Pirate Wires explaining HOW tech lost SF. The tech community has plenty of wits, capital, motivation, and every other resource I can think of. Why hasn’t SF tech won? You’d think it would be a problem they could solve. Very genuine question.

December 16th 20208 Likes

It’s pretty simple, really. We never actually fought.

There is a tremendous irony in the notion that tech workers have ruined the region, for which we are now constantly being blamed while at the same time being told that leaving is tantamount to violence. The truth is, had tech workers actually assumed a significant measure of political influence, and led in local politics, San Francisco would today be one of the greatest cities in the world. But not only was such political influence not achieved, it was never attempted. Throughout the most recent technology boom of the last fifteen years, there has been almost no meaningful engagement in local politics from the industry.

As has now been well established, the Bay Area’s landed gentry class, which is in complete political control of the region and has been for decades, did almost everything in its power to block construction as demand to live in the region skyrocketed. This artificially ballooned real estate values — along with the cost of rent — to historic, national highs. While the technology industry generates tremendous sums of money for the region in tax revenue, the number of actual technology workers has always been relatively small. In San Francisco, we were never anything close to a voting majority, and of the minority of workers who lived in the city most were not politically active. From here, it was a tale as old as time: politicians in San Francisco scapegoated tech workers for the housing crisis the government created. The scapegoating, amplified by a thoughtless press, catalyzed anti-tech sentiment that increasingly influenced ballot propositions and local political races. Tech workers, ensconced in the world of their work, remained more or less oblivious of these developments.

I do think the technology industry can and should be blamed for one thing: taking this bullshit for as long as it has. While the industry has caused none of the problems it’s accused of causing, absence of tech workers from local politics has been problematic, if understandable. The technology industry is ripe with opportunity, and attracts people excited by the prospect of building technologies and companies that have never before existed, unencumbered by bureaucracy, and limited only by the bounds of their imagination. No one moved to San Francisco because they wanted to run for the local Board of Supervisors. I get it. But if 2020 proved anything, it’s local politics is almost the only thing that matters in terms of our day-to-day existence, and if the deterioration of San Francisco can’t be stopped, I at least hope it will be remembered. We can ignore local politics, but local politics will nonetheless shape our lives, and a sufficiently unhinged City Hall can destroy almost anything.

Many tech workers have promised to stay in San Francisco, and to help fix the system. Among the few who aren’t merely throwing a few guilty millions into the black hole of local non-profits and calling it a day, a grim and shocking reality will quickly be discovered:

Nothing in San Francisco can be set on a path to slow correction until at least six of the eleven district board seats along with the mayorship belong to sane, goal-oriented leaders cognizant of our city’s many problems, and single-mindedly focused on solving them. These politicians will likewise need to be extremely well-funded. This is to say we need a political class, funded by a political machine, neither of which currently exist. Even were both the class and the funding apparatus to rapidly emerge, and even were the new political coalition to win an undefeated string of miracle elections, it would take four years to seize meaningful political power from the resident psychotics in charge, who, as per the last election, appear to be very popular among close to ninety percent of voters (a curiosity for another wire). This is to say nothing of the broader Bay Area political toxicity, nor the state political dynamics, which are poised to exacerbate every one of our problems. It is a multi-front political catastrophe.

Fight or flight? There is no right answer here. I’m still figuring it out myself. The only thing I know for sure is “extraction” didn’t do this, and if what the technology industry has given the Bay Area constitutes “exploitation,” then for the love of God, Mark Zuckerberg, exploit me next.

In any case, regardless of the city we land in, we have to get involved. There’s no ignoring the rest of the world anymore. Grab your shovels, folks, we’ve got work to do.

Extract or die.

The economics of Christmas giving

 Here is Steve Landsburg's Merry Christmas message.

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If you’re wealthy enough to be sure you’ll never spend it all, you might be thinking — especially at this time of year — about giving away some of the excess. Unfortunately, that’s impossible.

What you can do is force some people to give to other people, and you might very well want to do that. But as for your own excess wealth, you can’t give it away, because you already have.

There are two ways to explain this. Pretty much everyone agrees that one explanation is much clearer than the other, but it seems like they’re split about evenly as to which is the clearer one. So I’ll offer both and you can take your choice.

I. Follow the Goods

You give $100 to a guy named Laszlo. Laszlo uses it to buy a turkey. That turkey had to come from somewhere, and it didn’t come from you, so it must have come from someone else.

There are only two possibilities: Either someone somewhere gives up a turkey or someone somewhere raises/butchers/markets an extra turkey.

So here is one scenario: Laszlo buys a turkey that would have gone to Jenny, who instead buys a ham that would have gone to Junfei, who instead buys a rib roast that would have gone to Pablo…and somewhere down the line, someone goes hungry. Your “gift” to Laszlo was not a gift from you at all, but a forced gift from some total stranger. Maybe you feel okay about that, which is fine — but you shouldn’t fool yourself about it either.

Or here is another scenario: Horace the butcher works overtime to provide Laszlo’s turkey, either taking time away from his family, or sacrificing his daily exercises, or maybe spending less time driving his Uber, which means that his would-be passenger Olga waits a little longer for a different Uber, which means someone else misses out on that Uber and so on down the line until either Freddy can’t get an Uber at all and has to walk or his sister Frederika gives him a lift, taking time away from her own family or ….

If you were poorer, it would be easy to give a gift to Laszlo. Give him $100 and you’ll be the one who has to go without a turkey or without an Uber ride or (if you decide to work a little harder to make up that $100) without a little family time. But when you’re rich and you give away $100 you were never going to spend anyway, you’re not really giving anything up — so someone else has to.

(A different, and perhaps slightly cheerier perspective, is that you can’t give away that $100 because you already gave it away on the day you realized you’d never spend it. That was the moment when you decided you wouldn’t be claiming the turkey or the Uber ride or the hour of leisure your $100 entitled you to, leaving that turkey or Uber ride or hour of leisure for someone else. You can’t give away the same thing twice.)

II. Follow the Money

You give $100 to a guy named Laszlo. Where do you get that $100? If you were poor you might get it by working harder or eating a little less. But if you’re rich you probably get it from your bank account, or maybe from that bathtub full of cash you like to swim in.

If you take it from your bank account, you’re making it harder for someone to get a loan. That person, whose name might be Jenny or Pablo or Horace or Freddy, is now short of funds, and responds by buying one less turkey or one less rib roast or one less Uber ride, or by taking time away from family to work overtime.

If you take it from your cash pile, you put more cash in circulation, which drives up prices and has the same effect — Jenny or Pablo or Horace or Freddy responds with either less consumption or more work.

You might be wanting to object that injecting an extra $100 bill into the US economy is going to affect prices by such a minuscule amount that it will be impossible for almost anyone to notice. You’re right about that, but that’s actually why the story works — the effect only has to be large enough (and no larger!) so that one person out of three hundred million gives up a turkey.

Coda

The two stories — the ones I’ve labeled “follow the goods” and “follow the money” — are two different correct perspectives on the same situation, so they have to lead to the same conclusion, and they do.

It’s not giving unless it hurts.

Some truth about our politics and its disgusting players

 I vote based on policies and actions, not likability.  I prefer the competent SOB surgeon to the likable incompetent one.

Here is Victor Davis Hanson's "Our upside-down postelection world".

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After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones?

Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks?

The old pre-election truth was that new vaccines take years to develop. The new postelection truth is that it's no big deal to bring out new vaccines in nine months.

Impeaching a first-term president after his first midterm election — on a strictly partisan vote, for political reasons other than the Constitution's "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" — is now a terrible idea.

Worse would be to appoint a special counsel to harass a president on unfounded charges of collusion with China. An even scarier notion would be a conservative dream team of partisan lawyers hounding President Joe Biden — using a 22-month, $40 million blank check.

It would be unprofessional for university psychologists and physicians from a distance to diagnose, in pop fashion, the mental faculties of a President Biden.

Certainly, there would never be talk about Department of Justice officials contemplating wearing a wire as part of an entrapment scheme to remove a President Biden through the 25th Amendment. That would almost constitute a coup attempt.

Almost as bad would be for the holdover FBI director to start "memorializing" his private conversations with Joe Biden on FBI devices. He might then leak such memos to the press — just in case he were to be fired for secretly investigating Biden for "Chinese collusion" and then lying about such a probe.

What happened to the Logan Act? Not long ago it was assumed to be a critically needed guardrail. Wouldn't it now ensure that presidential transition team members were not calling foreign leaders while Donald Trump is still president? How has it suddenly become a defunct, ossified relic?

Leaking classified material would be about the worst thing government officials could do. Imagine if a Trump holdover, burrowed into the new Biden administration, released a transcript of Biden's private conversations with the Mexican president or the Australian prime minister.

Such a breach of trust would be almost as bad as a turncoat anti-Biden mole seeking to resist presidential directives. Imagine if this anonymous staffer were given an op-ed in the New York Tines to claim that a cadre of old-time Democrats were shocked by Biden's cognitive decline and resisting his directives.

Is extending security clearances to former high-level officials turned cable-TV pundits still a bad idea? Who would wish to see, for instance, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issuing warnings each night on Fox News? With a wink-and-nod hat tip to his "confidential sources," Ratcliffe could spin conspiracy theories that Biden is facing bombshell disclosures about his family misadventures with the Chinese.

Is it still important that we keep the tradition of retired high-ranking military officers — all subject to the requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — not disparaging the president? Who would want former Pentagon officials, some of them serving on the boards of military contractors, warning us that Biden should be removed because of cognitive challenges? Certainly, generals and admirals should not compare a President Biden's policies to those of Mussolini or the Nazis.

At least "dark money" no longer exists. The old idea of right-wing billionaires pouring money into candidates' political campaigns was supposedly a dangerous practice. It would be far more civic-minded for left-wing billionaires to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of nonpartisan state bureaucracies entrusted with guaranteeing the sanctity of national elections.

And apparently after, not before, an election is the proper time to announce critically important news.

Like the rollout of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine?

Like a $900 billion stimulus package?

Like a revised upward Fannie Mae report on the economy?

Like the ties between a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee and a suspected Chinese spy?

Like a federal investigation of Joe Biden's son and his possible profiteering with rich Chinese elites affiliated with China's government?

To keep track of our brave new American world is easy.

Just consider everything said to be bad by the "Animal Farm" media before Nov. 3 as now good. And remember that everything said to be good two months ago is now actually bad.

Who should get the Coronavirus vaccine first?

 According to our Leaders - Government experts, politicians, and a variety of experts - the Coronavirus vaccine should be allocated to people so as to save lives.  Based on this goal, they conclude that health professionals should be first on line and old, vulnerable people should be next on line.

 It is surprising (actually, perhaps not) that our Leaders have missed the fact that saving lives costs person years of life and that a more sensible goal than saving lives is to save person years of life.  According to the latter rule, the vaccine should be allocated in order of from highest to lowest expected person years of life added by giving the vaccine to the next person.

Here is a bare bones example that illustrates the tradeoff.  Consider the following two people, neither a health care professional.  Person A is 85 years old and in such poor health that there is a 99% probability of his dying in 30 days of non-Coronavirus causes and a 100% probability of dying if he becomes infected with Coronavirus.  Person B is 50 years old with an expected lifetime of 20 years if he doesn’t become infected with Coronavirus but, due to a health issue, has a 10% probability death by Coronavirus if he becomes infected.  To keep things simple, assume the same probability of infection and its occurring instantly for both.

Roughly, the person years saved by giving the vaccine to Person A is proportional to 30/365=0.082 and the person years saved by giving the vaccine to Person B is proportional to 0.1*20=2.  If it is an either-or situation, giving the vaccine to Person B does far more good than giving it to Person A.

 A more detailed cost-benefit analysis would be even better.  For example, taking into account that saving a health care professional’s life also may save several other lives.  Similarly, I should be near the front of the line for the vaccine even though I am 83 years old – because the great ideas I will come up with will save many thousands of lives (besides, I’m a nice guy).

 It is telling that what we have been told by our leaders, experts, etc. ignores such an important tradeoff,

 It is surprising what poor decisions supposedly smart people often make.  This may reflect a tendency on their part to overestimate how smart they are and how much they know.  One of the best arbitrages, if possible, would be to buy these people at the price they are worth and sell them at the price they think they are worth.

Democrat hypocrisy

 Here is Jonathan Turley on the hypocrisy of Democrats.

JT is on target.

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As Washington prepares for a Biden administration, congressional Democrats are discovering they cannot live without Donald Trump. In controversies ranging from federal investigations to executive orders, they are invoking Trump to justify abandoning the very principles they inveighed against him for four years. There is a sense of immunity from needing to be consistent or coherent. Call it “Trumpunity.”

Trumpunity is the right to adopt the very practices or policies you once denounced, all because you are not Trump. Even the mention of his name magically relieves any duty to follow prior positions.

So, it was no problem when incoming White House deputy chief of staff Jennifer O’Malley Dillon heralded the Biden administration as ushering in a new “sense of unity” while calling Republicans a “bunch of f—ers.” Although Dillon later apologized, figures like Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) publicly supported her vulgar attack as perfectly acceptable given Trump’s past rhetoric. There is now an open license to engage in the very same behavior as he did. AOC (who previously called for a blacklist of those “complicit” with Trump) told Republicans that, after Trump, “you don’t get to sob now” when Democrats engage in vulgar attacks.

This is, of course, little more than a juvenile “he did it first” defense. Washington has long floated on a deep rolling sea of hypocrisy, but now leaders do not even feel the need for pretense — they have Trump.

After complaining for years that Trump acted unilaterally through executive orders, Democrats now call on Joe Biden to do the same with dozens of such orders. Just a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) denounced Trump’s unilateral COVID-19 relief orders as unconstitutional, a circumvention of Congress. Now, he wants Biden to circumvent Congress after his inauguration with such acts as wiping out up to $50,000 in debt per college student — a massive federal subsidy without any vote of Congress.

For years, Democrats and an array of legal experts denounced Trump for dismissing the Russia collusion investigation as a politically motivated hoax. They insisted on the appointment of a special counsel, and described even rhetorical criticism as criminal obstruction or witness tampering. Now, Biden has dismissed federal investigations of his son as just another form of political “foul play.” Various Democratic senators, including Schumer, have called for the Justice Department not to investigate the Hunter Biden allegations, and figures like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called for the termination of the Durham investigation.

With the confirmation of federal investigations into Hunter Biden, the media and Democratic figures dropped their prior claims that such allegations were Russian disinformation — in Schiff’s words, “out of the Kremlin.” Now, the influence-peddling scheme is treated as true but dismissed as no worse than what the Trumps did. In other words, if the Trump kids cashed in on their father, so can Hunter Biden. It does not matter if there were tax or money-laundering crimes, or if Joe Biden lied about his knowledge or role. The same people who demanded investigations of the business dealings of Trump’s children now cite those dealings to denounce any investigation of Biden’s son.

Trump has long had a similarly distortive impact on legal analysis. Both media and legal figures abandoned long-held views on criminal justice to endorse sweeping interpretations of criminal and constitutional provisions to justify charging or impeaching Trump. Flawed theories rejected by the Supreme Court were declared to be perfectly plausible when used against Trump.

Now, with only weeks left in office for Trump, there continues to be a sense of abandon in sweeping constitutional claims relating to him. Consider the issue of a self-pardon: While long viewed as an open question under the Constitution, various legal experts have declared that Trump clearly cannot pardon himself, a view some of us have challenged. One academic, Ken Gormley, went further this week, proposing that not only can Trump not pardon himself but that Biden can “un-pardon” him if he does. Such a view would require one to unlearn the constitutional language which not only does not limit the pardon power but does not create any power to rescind the pardons of prior presidents. Indeed, such a view would run counter to the history and purpose of pardons. Trump, however, seems virtually extraconstitutional — a rationale in and of himself.

Even constitutional terms apparently no longer have discernible meaning if they come in the same sentence as Trump. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told CNN that members of Congress who question the election results “are bordering on sedition and treason.” That would mean more than 70 percent of Republicans and 10 percent of Democrats nationwide are potentially traitors for believing Trump won. Shaneen and her colleagues denounced Trump for calling people traitors and sought to protect officials who denounced his use of the label “enemies of the people” against reporters. Just two years ago, Trump was called a Stalin for using such labels by Democrats. It is same position taken recently before the Supreme Court by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who called a legal challenge to the election “seditious.” Of course, the use of the courts or Congress to raise such objections is the very opposite of sedition, which seeks to overthrow the legal system.

Democrats did not accuse their colleagues of treason or sedition when they sought to block the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes in Congress in 2004. They did not call Hillary Clinton traitorous for advising Biden not to concede any Trump victory on Election Night. They did not describe members of Congress or the media as traitors for repeatedly declaring Trump “illegitimate” over the last four years.

Napoleon once said “treason is a matter of dates.” And the key date in the United States, for now, appears to be Nov. 7 — the day the media declared Joe Biden the presumptive winner. It also would seem to be the day that millions of Americans became presumptive traitors for questioning the election results. This, according to the same Democrats who once legitimately denounced Trump for calling his critics “traitors” and “enemies of the people.”

It seems Trump is simply too useful to really let go. Without him, the critics would be forced to live according to the values they claimed to defend for the last four years. Why be civil, collaborative or constitutional when you can act like Trump? After all, you’ve got Trumpunity.

The Media’s coverup of the Biden scandal

 Here is Jonathan Turley on the Media's coverup of the Biden scandal.

It seems that people everywhere have been taken in by denials of the Bidens' corruption or, at least, the failure for it to be paid its proper due in their favored news sources.  Yet, Fox, Turley, The Epoch Times, and a few others have been covering the story in detail.  Contrary to what you hear from the the vast majority of the mainstream media, it is the latter that have provided the truth.

Here is Turley's comment.

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“Hunter is stuck on the roof.” That is what the transition team for Joe Biden should have said this week, instead of declaring that Hunter Biden is under federal investigation. The surprise was a lot to handle for many who have been insulated from real news about the case for weeks. The Biden team evidently never heard the old joke about the man who calls home during a trip to speak with his brother who was house sitting.

When asked how things are going, the brother blurts out, “Fluffy is dead.” The man is shocked and yells that is not how you tell someone their cat died. Instead, he claims, you build up to it and say the cat is stuck on the roof, and then call back to say she fell. After the brother apologizes, the man asks how their mother is doing, and the brother pauses before replying, “Mom is stuck on the roof.”

The problem is that Americans were assured that Hunter Biden was nowhere near the figurative roof. Before the election, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said the story involving the laptop was a “smear” from Russia. Some 50 former intelligence officials also insisted the laptop story was likely the work of Russian intelligence. Cable hosts and journalists laughed at the laptop story as fake news, and there was a virtual blackout on further coverage, until that loud thump after the election.

Most striking about the media blackout is that, as with the Trump-Russia collusion story, the media was coaxed to buy into a false narrative. Reporters became so invested in the denial that they couldn’t afford to acknowledge growing evidence of possible wrongdoing. If Hunter Biden and his uncle did conduct a global influence peddling scheme, these reporters were at best dupes and at worst enablers of a coverup, so the story could not be true.

The public shock was palpable because so many have been hermetically and journalistically sealed off from any negative reports on the Bidens. The media was openly in the bag for candidate Biden, and he was left unchallenged in ridiculous claims like his often repeated line “no one has suggested my son did anything wrong.”

Now some media outlets are trying to explain how Hunter wound up on the roof when, before the election, they told us he was resting comfortably. The Daily Beast reported the story by referring to “markings on a series of documents that were made public” but “went largely unnoticed.” It was referencing serial numbers that I and others discussed in detail when the story first broke in October. There was much speculation about what those numbers meant, and how the laptop may have been seized by the FBI to look into underlying business transactions, including possible money-laundering. So that aspect was not “largely unnoticed” — just largely ignored by virtually every media outlet.

There is little pushback on Hunter Biden claiming he just heard about an investigation into his taxes this week. This investigation appears to have been ongoing for two years. The laptop was evidently subpoenaed in 2019, and its emails were said to be packed with incriminating accounts of millions in payments or gifts and references to Joe Biden himself. A key business associate of the Bidens, Anthony Bobulinski, confirmed the authenticity of the emails and accused Joe Biden of lying about his involvement before the election. Yet most media reported none of that.

We now know that Joe Biden’s brother, James, is implicated in a separate federal investigation. But the Hunter Biden investigation remains more notable. The Biden transition team issued a statement saying this is solely Hunter’s “tax affairs” — but tax investigations can be a tad more intrusive and far more damaging than a “tax affair” gone wrong. They require scrutiny of underlying transactions and gifts, like those reportedly detailed on Hunter’s laptop.

The laptop reportedly refers to the Biden family discussing a $5 million interest-free unsecured loan from a Chinese state-owned enterprise that allegedly was part of a discussed wire transfer of $10 million. Since these exchanges strike some of us as raw influence-peddling, there may have been an effort to conceal or disguise them; accordingly, there reportedly were gifts like a 2.8 carat diamond for Hunter Biden from the firm’s founder and former chairman.

The laptop also reportedly contains direct references to tax problems. A former business partner sent Hunter Biden an email in 2017 warning him that he did not disclose on his tax returns some $400,000 in income from a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma. Eric Schwerin, then president of Rosemont Seneca Partners, wrote: “In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income.”

Moreover, reports indicate the investigation may not be simply about “tax affairs” but about money laundering and other suspect dealings. The New York Times reported a separate investigation into Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine “has escalated this year” in Pittsburgh. There is a possible investigation risk from the Senate, if Republicans win at least one of two seats in Georgia. A Biden administration would have to deal with those Hunter Biden inquiries while dealing with a special counsel looking into actions taken during the Obama administration to investigate Trump campaign figures in 2016.

At some point, Joe Biden should address his repeated denials of knowing about his son’s business dealings, an assertion even his son has contradicted. He also should answer such questions as whether he met with Hunter’s business partner, Anthony Bobulinski, in spring 2017, at the Beverly Hills Hilton to discuss any Chinese business deals. He can still rely on a media that is heavily invested in denying the seriousness of these investigations, but it will be hard for those news outlets to maintain radio-silence with a growing cacophony of investigations afoot.

Hopefully, now that Biden is elected and Trump defeated, some in the media may be willing to report on these investigations, and at least acknowledge that Hunter and his uncle are back on the roof.

A climate change tutorial – why there is no existential threat

 Here is a link to to a paper by Howard Hayden, Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Connecticut, titled "CO2 and Climate: A Tutorial.

It does not appear that CO2 is an existential threat.

Here are some excepts from the paper.

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At higher CO2 concentrations, adding more CO2 does little to increase the greenhouse effect, for the simple reason that most (not all) of the IR that CO2 can absorb is already absorbed. (The equivalent phenomenon in economics is called diminishing returns.) In fact, the current discussion among climate scientists is about how much greenhouse effect there would be if the increase in CO2 concentration were 400 parts per million (i.e., the concentration would be doubled from 400 to 800). The temperature rise due to a doubling of CO2 concentration (with all that entails) is lovingly called the sensitivity to doubling. A second doubling (from 800 ppmv to 1,600 ppmv) would cause the same temperature rise.

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A doubling of CO2 concentration—adding as much CO2 as we presently have, from our present 400 ppmv to 800 ppmv—would increase the blocking from 150 W/m2 to 153.5 W/m2. The “forcing” would cause the surface temperature to rise—all other things being equal— by 0.65 ºC (1.1 ºF). Well, that needs be corrected to account for the fact that 20% of the enhanced IR will be blocked. We add 25% to the 3.5 W/m2, and get 4.375 W/m2, with a corresponding temperature rise of 0.8 ºC (1.4 ºF). In other words, the warming that would be caused by the next 400 ppmv would be about one-tenth as much as caused by the first 400 ppmv.

A provacative piece on racism

 Here is a link to a provocative article on racism by Heather Mac Donald.

HMD is on to something.

Here are some excerpts.

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The United States is being torn apart by an idea: that racism defines America. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020 catapulted this claim into national prominence; riots and the desecration of national symbols followed. Now, activists and their media allies are marshaling a more sweeping set of facts to prove the dominance of white supremacy: the absence of a proportional representation of blacks in a range of organizations. That insufficient diversity results from racial bias, claim the activists, and every few days, the press serves up another exposé of this industry or that company’s too-white workforce to drive home the point.

In one short stretch during the summer of 2020, the Wall Street Journal ran stories headlined “Wall Street Knows It’s Too White” and “A Decade-Long Stall for Black Enrollment in M.B.A. Programs.” The Los Angeles Times asked: “Why are Black and Latino people still kept out of the tech industry?” In another article, the Times documented its own “painful reckoning over race.” The New York Times pumped out news features and op-eds alleging racism in food journalism, Hollywood, publishing, and sports management, among other professions. The Chronicle of Higher Education painstakingly reported on protests against alleged racial bias in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, citing, for example, charges that black scientists are constantly “attacked by institutional and systemic racism.” All the articles invoked employment ratios as proof of racism.

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The remedy proposed for this alleged systemic bias is an even greater emphasis on race as a job qualification. Increasing the role of skin color in employment decisions, however, will compromise the caliber of American institutions, if bias does not, in fact, explain workforce disparities. Moreover, the insistence on America’s racism undermines the legitimacy of our polity. It is worth examining in some detail, therefore, the charge of systemic bias and the counterevidence against it—especially since that counterevidence is excluded from public discourse.

Since the George Floyd riots, the following ratios have tumbled out of news pages to buttress the racism charge: 3.7 percent of Google’s employees and contractors are black, compared with about 13 percent black representation in the country at large; at Salesforce, 2.9 percent of employees are black; at Facebook, 3.8 percent; and at Microsoft, 4.5 percent. Black investors make up less than 1 percent of venture capitalists and less than 1 percent of the startup founders whom those venture capitalists underwrite. Some venture-capital firms—among them Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Benchmark, and Greylock—have no black partners at all.

Eight percent of MBA students are black, according to the main business school accreditor. Harvard Business School students are 5 percent black. In 2019, about 4.1 percent of chief executives were black, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Two percent of venture-capital partners in Los Angeles are black or Hispanic. Blacks and Hispanics are 3.7 percent of industry-certified financial planners. Seventy-seven percent of new board members at Fortune 100 companies are white. The newsroom at the Los Angeles Times is 61 percent white, though the white population in Los Angeles County is 26 percent white. Black journalists at the Los Angeles Times are 5.2 percent of staff, though the county is 8 percent black.

At WNYC, the nation’s largest public radio station, 15 of the 157 staff members responsible for content are black; only one of these 15 has direct reports. WNYC’s newsroom leadership is “overwhelmingly white,” according to the New York Times, and most reporters are white.

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But the expectation of proportional representation in every profession is groundless, thanks to the academic skills gap. The unequal distribution of skills, not bias, explains the lack of racial proportionality in employment.

The median black eighth-grader does not possess even basic math skills. “Basic” skills, as defined by the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, means partial mastery of grade-related knowledge. Fifty-three percent of black eighth-graders scored “below basic” on math in 2017. Only 11 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in math, and 2 percent were advanced. By contrast, 20 percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in 2017, 31 percent were proficient, and 13 percent were advanced. Only 12 percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 32 percent were proficient, and 32 percent were advanced.

The picture was not much better in reading. Forty percent of black eighth-graders were below basic in reading in 2017, 17 percent were proficient readers, and 1 percent were advanced readers. Sixteen percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in reading, 39 percent of white eighth-graders were proficient readers, and 6 percent were advanced readers. Thirteen percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 45 percent were proficient, and 12 percent were advanced readers.

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Black students never catch up to their white and Asian peers. There aren’t many white-collar professions where possessing partial mastery of basic reading and math will qualify one for employment. The SAT measures a more selective group of students than the NAEP, but even within that smaller pool of college-intending high school students, the gaps remain wide. On the math SAT, the average score of blacks in 2015 was 428 (on an 800-point scale); for whites, it was 534, and for Asians it was 598—a difference of nearly a standard deviation between blacks and whites, and well over a standard deviation between blacks and Asians. The tails of the distribution were even more imbalanced, according to the Brookings Institution. Blacks made up 2 percent of all test takers with a math SAT between 750 and 800. Sixty percent of those high scorers were Asian, and 33 percent were white. Blacks were 35 percent of all test takers with scores between 300 and 350. Whites were 21 percent of such low scorers, and Asians 6 percent.

In 2005, the Journal of Blacks in Education estimated that there were only 244 black students in the U.S. with a math SAT above 750. Brookings used an estimation procedure that maximized the number of high-scoring black students and came up with, at most, 1,000 blacks nationwide with scores of 750 and above. Whether the number is 250 or 1,000, it means that the STEM fields, medical research, and the ever-more mathematical world of finance cannot all have a 13 percent black participation rate, at least if meritocratic standards remain in place.

The SAT gap is replicated in graduate-level standardized tests. Between 2014 and 2017, the average score on the quantitative section of the Graduate Record Exams (GRE) was 150.05 out of 170. The Asian average was 154.1; the white average, 151; and the black average, 144. MIT’s entering engineering class in fall 2017 had an average GRE quantitative score of 167; students in the University of California, Berkeley, civil and environmental engineering program averaged 160, as did graduate students in USC’s engineering program. Even if the curve for blacks on the quantitative GRE is normally distributed in a bell curve, unlike for the math SATs, there will still be fewer blacks with higher-end scores than whites and Asians, given that the average black quantitative score is so much lower.

John Cochrane on US debt

 Here is John Cochrane on the US debt.

It doesn't look good.

JC wants to borrow long as a way of delaying a potential disaster.  The question is whether the debt markets allow it.

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Does debt matter? As the Biden administration and its economic cheerleaders prepare ambitious spending plans, a radical new idea is spreading: Maybe debt doesn’t matter. Maybe the U.S. can keep borrowing even after the COVID-19 recession is over, to fund “investments” in renewable energy, electric cars, trains and subways, unionized public schools, housing, health care, child care, “community development” schemes, universal incomes, bailouts of student debt, state and local governments, pensions, and many, many more checks to voters.

The argument is straightforward. Bond investors are willing to lend money to the U.S. at extremely low interest rates. Suppose Washington borrows and spends, say, $10 trillion, raising the debt-to-GDP ratio from the current 100 percent to 150 percent. Suppose Washington just leaves the debt there, borrowing new money to pay interest on the old money. At 1 percent interest rates, the debt then grows by 1 percent per year. But if GDP grows at 2 percent, then the ratio of debt to GDP slowly falls 1 percent per year, and in a few decades it’s back to where it was before the debt binge started.

What could go wrong? This scenario requires that interest rates stay low, for decades to come, and remain low even as the U.S. ramps up borrowing. The scenario requires that growth continues to outpace interest rates. Most of all, this scenario requires that big deficits stop. For at best, this is an argument for a one-time borrowing binge or small perpetual deficits, on the order of 1 percent of GDP, or only $200 billion today.

Yet an end to big borrowing is not in the cards. The federal government borrowed nearly $1 trillion in 2019, before the pandemic hit. It borrowed nearly $4 trillion through the third quarter of 2020, with more to come. If we add additional and sustained multi-trillion-dollar borrowing, and $5 trillion or more in each crisis, the debt-to-GDP ratio will balloon even with zero interest rates. And then in about ten years, the unfunded Social Security, Medicare, and pension promises kick in to really blow up the deficit. The possibility of growing out of a one-time increase in debt simply is irrelevant to the U.S. fiscal position.

Everyone recognizes that the debt-to-GDP ratio cannot grow forever, and that such a fiscal path must end badly.

How? Imagine that a decade or so from now we have another crisis. We surely will have one sooner or later. It might be another, worse, pandemic. Or a war involving China, Russia, or the Middle East. It might be another, larger, financial crisis. And with the crisis, the economy tanks.

The U.S. then needs to borrow another $5 trillion or $10 trillion, quickly, to bail out financial markets once again, to pay people’s and businesses’ bills for a while, to support people in dire need, as well as to fight the war or pandemic. But Washington borrows short term, and each year borrows new money to pay off old bonds. So we also need to borrow another $10 trillion or so each year to roll over debts. As bond investors look forward to think about how they will be repaid, they see a country that at best will return to running only $2 trillion or $3 trillion deficits, still faces unreformed Social Security and unfulfilled health-care promises, and whose debt to-GDP-ratio, far from being stable as the rosy scenario posits, is on an explosive upward trajectory.

Imagine also that the U.S. follows its present trends of partisan government dysfunction. Perhaps the president is being impeached, again, or an election is being contested. There are protests and riots in the streets. Sober bipartisan tax and spending reforms look unlikely.

At some point, bond investors see the end coming, as they did for Greece. If they lend at all, they demand sharply higher interest rates. But if rates rise only to 5 percent, our current $20 trillion debt means an additional $1 trillion deficit. Larger debt makes it worse. Higher interest costs rates feed a deficit which feeds higher rates in a classic “doom loop.” The Fed is powerless to hold rates down, even if it is willing to buy $10 trillion bonds, since people demand the same high rates to hold the Fed’s money. And the Fed cannot end the crisis by raising rates, which only raises interest costs further.

The end must come in sharp and sudden inflation or default. And that is a catastrophe. When Washington can no longer borrow, our normal crisis-mitigation policies disappear — the flood of debt relief, bailout, and stimulus that everyone expects — together with our capacity for military or public-health spending to meet the roots of the crisis.

Yes, the U.S. prints its own money and Greece does not. But that fact only means that a crisis may end in sharp inflation rather than chaotic default. And it is not obvious that the U.S. government will choose inflation over default. Will Congress really prioritize paying interest to, as it will see them, Wall Street fat cats, foreign central bankers, and “the rich” who hold U.S. debt, over the needs of struggling Americans? Will our elected officials really wipe out millions of voters’ savings in a sharp inflation rather than devise a complex haircut for government debt? Don’t bet on it. But if bond investors smell a haircut coming, they will flee all the faster.

No, interest rates do not currently signal such problems. But they never do. Greek interest rates were low right up until they weren’t. Interest rates did not signal the inflation of the 1970s, or the disinflation of the 1980s. Nobody expects a crisis, or it would have already happened.

Yes, worriers like me have warned of such a crisis for a long time, and it hasn’t happened yet. Well, California rests on a fault and hasn’t suffered a devastating earthquake in 100 years. That does not prove earthquakes can no longer happen, or that those who warn of earthquakes are chicken littles.

Is not the dollar a “reserve currency,” which foreigners are delighted to hold? Yes, but as with all currencies, foreigners will only hold dollar debt in finite quantity and only so long as they perceive U.S. debt to be super-safe. The opportunity does not scale, and trust once in doubt vanishes quickly.

Yes, Washington incurred a bit over 100 percent debt to GDP during World War II, debt which it successfully paid off. But the circumstances of that success were sharply different. By 1945, the war and its spending were over. For the next 20 years, the U.S. government posted steady small primary surpluses, not additional huge deficits. Until the 1970s, the country experienced unprecedented supply-side growth in a far less regulated economy with small and solvent social programs.

We have none of these preconditions today. What’s more, we are starting a spending binge with the same debt relative to GDP with which we ended WW II. And the United States after WW II was one of only two or three episodes in all history in which such large debts were mostly paid off without large inflation or default.

A smaller reckoning may come sooner. Three quarters of this year’s deficits were financed by Fed money creation, not by selling Treasury securities, following market trouble in March when foreigners sold a lot of Treasuries rather than buy them as usual in times of trouble. Basically, the Fed printed money (created reserves) and handed it out, and people are sitting on that money in the form of vastly increased bank deposits. When the economy recovers, people may want to invest in better opportunities than trillions of dollars of bank deposits. The Fed will have to sell its holdings of Treasury securities to mop up the money. We will see if the once-insatiable desire for super low-rate Treasury securities is really still there. If not, the Fed will have to raise rates much faster than their current promises.

What can be done? First, spend wisely, as if debt actually has to be paid off. It does. Even if the interest rate remains below the growth rate, that channel for reducing the debt-to-GDP ratios takes decades. When a fiscal reckoning comes, it will require a swifter reduction in debt. That will mean either sharply higher, European-style middle-class taxes or lower spending. Since taxes ruin economic growth — most of Europe has incomes 40 percent lower than the U.S. — most of the adjustment will have to come from spending. The sooner we do it, the less painful it will be.

Second, borrow long. Our government is like a dysfunctional, endlessly bickering, indebted couple, buying a too-big house in the boom of 2006. Should they take the 0.5 percent adjustable rate mortgage, or the 1.5 percent 30-year fixed rate mortgage? The former looks cheaper. But if interest rates rise, they lose the house. Our house. They should lock in the rate!

It is perhaps beyond hope that politicians will ignore such low rates and foreswear borrowing and blowing an immense amount of money. But if the U.S. borrows long term, then it is completely insulated from a debt crisis, in which rising rates feed higher deficits which feed higher rates. Avoiding a debt crisis for a generation really is worth an extra percent of interest cost.

Cutting spending, reforming taxes and entitlements, and saying no to voters who want bailouts and to a progressive army that wants immense spending programs is the tough job of politicians, one which they will likely fail to do. But the incoming Treasury secretary pick, the talented and sensible Janet Yellen, can choose all on her own whether the country borrows short or long, and thereby avoid a debt crisis for a generation.

If I get to whisper two words in her ear, they will be these: Borrow long.

Ten reasons why the Green Agenda is just plain wrong

 Here is Matt Ridley with some common sense on the Green Agenda.

MR is on target.

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While climate change is a real issue and must be tackled, the prime minister's 10-commandment plan is not the way to go about it

My article for The Telegraph:

Our fearless leader has descended from the mountain with a 10-commandment plan for a green industrial revolution. At a cost of £12 billion, he will have all Britons driving electric cars powered by North Sea wind turbines and giving up their gas boilers to heat their homes with ground-source heat pumps. He will invent zero-emission planes and ships. This vast enterprise will create 250,000 jobs. I am a loyal supporter of the prime minister, but this Ed Miliband policy makes no sense any way you look at it. Here are 10 reasons why.

First, if it’s jobs we are after then spending £48,000 per job is a lot. Cheaper, as Lord Lawson put it, to create the same employment erecting a statue of Boris in every town. Anyway, it’s backwards: it’s not jobs in the generating of energy that count but jobs that use it. Providing cheap, reliable energy enables the private sector to create jobs for free as far as the taxpayer is concerned.

Second, he misreads how innovation works, a topic on which I’ve just written a book. Innovation will create marvellous, unexpected things in the next 10 years. But if you could summon up innovations to order in any sector you want, such as electric planes and cheap ways of making hydrogen, just by spending money, then the promises of my childhood would have come true: routine space travel, personal jetpacks and flying cars. Instead, we flew in 747s for more than 50 years.

Third, he is hugely underestimating the cost. The wind industry claims that its cost is coming down. But the accounts of wind energy companies show that both capital and operating expenditures of offshore wind farms continue to rise, as Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University and John Aldersey-Williams of Aberdeen Busines School have found. Wind firms sign contracts to deliver cheap electricity, but the penalties for walking away from those contracts, demanding higher prices from a desperate grid in the future, are minimal and their investors know it. Britain already has among the highest electricity prices for business in Europe because of the £10 billion a year that electricity-bill payers spend on subsidising the rich capitalists who own wind farms; raising them further will kill a lot more than 250,000 jobs.

Fourth, these policies will not significantly reduce the nation’s emissions, let alone the world’s. It takes a lot more emissions to make an electric car than a petrol one because of the battery. This is usually made in China. If the battery lasts for 100,000 miles – which is optimistic – and the electricity with which it is recharged is made partly with gas, then there is only a small saving in emissions over the lifetime of the car, according to Gautam Kalghatgi of Oxford University.

Fifth, the plan will make the electricity supply less reliable. Already this autumn there have been power-cut near misses and there was a bad blackout in 2019. Costly diesel generators came to our rescue, but keeping the grid stable is getting harder, and in both Australia and California, blackouts have become more common because of reliance on renewables. Smart meters that drain your electric car’s battery to help keep other people’s lights on may help. But if you think that will be popular, Boris, good luck, and wait till the lights go out or the cost of heating your home goes through the roof.

Sixth, Mr Johnson is depending on impractical technologies. Ground-source heat pumps can work, though they deliver low-grade heat and can’t cope on a freezing night. Air source heat pumps have not proved so far to be nearly as efficient as promised. They need electricity, make a noise and take up outside space that is not there in a terrace of houses. Forcing us to use compact fluorescent light bulbs, when LEDs were coming, proved a costly mistake.

Seventh, hydrogen is not an energy source; it first has to be made, using energy, then stored and transported. Making it from natural gas is expensive and generates emissions, but making it with electricity is vastly more expensive. Its minuscule molecules can slip through almost any kind of hole, so the natural gas pipe network is not suitable. Leaks will happen at hydrogen fuelling stations, as one did in Norway in June last year, resulting in a massive explosion.

Eighth, this industrial revolution is anything but green. To generate all our electricity from wind in the North Sea, taking into account the increased demand for electricity for heat pumps, electric cars and hydrogen manufacture, would require a wall of turbines 20 miles wide stretching from Thanet to John O’Groats, says Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The effect on migratory birds would be terrible.

Ninth, nobody is following Britain’s example. China has announced that its use of fossil fuels will not even peak till 2030. China has more coal-fired power now under development than the entire coal power capacity of the United States. It will use coal to make the turbines and cars and batteries we use, laughing all the way to the bank. The world still generates 93% of its energy from CO2-emitting combustion (coal, oil, gas and wood) and just 1.4% from wind and solar.

Tenth, while climate change is a real issue and must be tackled, Extinction Rebellion is simply wrong about the urgency. If it’s extinction they worry about, let’s tackle invasive alien species, responsible for most extinctions. By contrast, there is no confirmed extinction of a species due to climate change. Nor has global warming resulted in more or fiercer storms or droughts. The extremists’ claims otherwise simply ignore the scientific evidence. Emissions have so far increased crop yields and made all ecosystems greener.

Yes, we need to address the issue, but we would be better off funding research to bring down the cost of carbon capture, nuclear power and fusion. Nuclear is the one form of carbon-free energy that can generate reliable power from a tiny footprint of land. The reason nuclear electricity costs so much today is because we have made innovation in nuclear design all but impossible by devising a byzantine regulatory process of immense cost. Let’s reform that. Small, modular molten-salt reactors are an innovation within reach, unlike electric planes.

My fear is that we will carry out Boris’s promised 10-point plan, cripple our economy, ruin our seascapes and landscapes, and then half way through the 2030s along will come cheap, small, safe fusion reactors. The offshore wind industry, by then so stuffed with subsidies they can afford to lobby politicians and journalists even more than they do to today, will suck their teeth and say: “no, no, no – ignore the fusion crowd. We’re on the brink of solving the reliability issue, and don’t worry, the cost will come down eventually. Promise!”

Boris, this is not the way to the promised land, especially when the government is borrowing £300 billion because of covid. High-cost electricity will prevent the United Kingdom making a success of Brexit. It will bankrupt us in the short run, make us less competitive in the long run and not cut emissions much anyway.