Top Usa NEWS FEEDER

Cellphones led to deadly New Year’s Day strike The Russian Defense Ministry has said that the reason that Ukraine was able to achieve the deadly strike was because of the unauthorized use of cellphones by Russian soldiers. Officials received pushback after they laid the blame of the strike on the targeted soldiers themselves. Russia has said that the main reason Ukraine was able to home in on the exact location of the soldiers on New Year’s Day was because the soldiers were using their cellphones despite the cellphone ban. Russian soldiers often use open cellphone lines, where calls are intercepted by Ukraine. These calls often reveal Russian locations and the disarray within the Russian military. Russian lawmakers and military bloggers pushed back against this claim by the Russian Defense Ministry, saying that it is merely an attempt by the military to shift blame from their commanders. Some had criticized Russian commanders for not taking precautions to protect their soldiers. Some basic precautions that were not taken are dispersing newly arrived soldiers to better and safer locations, and housing soldiers away from live munitions. The British Defense Ministry released a statement saying that the unprofessional practices of the Russian military are what is leading to their high casualty rate. “The Russian military has a record of unsafe ammunition storage from well before the current war,” the statement said. The strike had taken place early on New Year’s Day, in the city of Makiivka in the Donetsk region. Ukraine claims to have killed around 400 troops, but Russia had first said that only 63 soldiers were killed, but has since raised that number to 89. This is a rare move by the Russian Defense Ministry to release official numbers of battlefield casualties, as well as admitting that a deputy commander of the regiment was among the casualties of the strike.

Commentary: An Age of Decay America ran out of frontier when we hit the Pacific Ocean. And that changed things. Alaska and Hawaii were too far away to figure in most people’s aspirations, so for decades, it was the West Coast states and especially California that represented dreams and possibilities in the national imagination. The American dream reached its apotheosis in California. After World War II, the state became our collective tomorrow. But today, it looks more like a future that the rest of the country should avoid—a place where a few coastal enclaves have grown fabulously wealthy while everyone else falls further and further behind. After World War II, California led the way on every front. The population was growing quickly as people moved to the state in search of opportunity and young families had children. The economy was vibrant and diverse. Southern California benefited from the presence of defense contractors. San Diego was a Navy town, and demobilized GIs returning from the Pacific Front decided to stay and put down roots. Between 1950 and 1960, the population of the Los Angeles metropolitan areaswelledfrom 4,046,000 to 6,530,000. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was inaugurated in the 1930s by researchers at the California Institute of Technology. One of the founders, Jack Parsons, became a prominent member of an occult sect in the late 1940s based in Pasadena that practiced “Thelemic Magick” in ceremonies called the “Babalon Working.” L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology (1950), was an associate of Parsons and rented rooms in his home. The counterculture, or rather, countercultures, had deep roots in the state. Youth culture was born in California, arising out of a combination of rapid growth, the Baby Boom, the general absence of extended families, plentiful sunshine, the car culture, and the space afforded by newly built suburbs where teenagers could be relatively free from adult supervision. Tom Wolfe memorably described this era in his 1963 essay “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine Flake Streamline, Baby.” The student protest movement began in California too. In 1960, hundreds of protesters, many from the University of California at Berkeley, sought to disrupt a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the San Francisco City Hall. The police turned fire hoses on the crowd and arrested over thirty students. The Baby Boomers may have inherited the protest movement, but they didn’t create it. Its founders were part of the Silent Generation. Clark Kerr, the president of the UC system who earned a reputation for giving student protesters what they wanted, was from the Greatest Generation. Something in California, and in America, had already changed. California was a sea of ferment during the 1960s—a turbulent brew of contrasting trends, as Tom O’Neilldescribed it: The state was the epicenter of the summer of love, but it had also seen the ascent of Reagan and Nixon. It had seen the Watts riots, the birth of the antiwar movement, and the Altamont concert disaster, the Free Speech movement and the Hells Angels. Here, defense contractors, Cold Warriors, and nascent tech companies lived just down the road from hippie communes, love-ins, and surf shops. Hollywood was the entertainment capital of the world, producing a vision of peace and prosperity that it sold to interior America—and to the world as thebeau idealof the American experiment. It was a prosperous life centered around the nuclear family living in a single-family home in the burgeoning suburbs. Doris Day became America’s sweetheart through a series of romantic comedies, but the turbulence in her own life foreshadowed America’s turn from vitality to decay. She was married three times, and her first husband either embezzled or mismanaged her substantial fortune. Her son, Terry Melcher, was closely associated with Charles Manson and the Family, along with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys—avatars of the California lifestyle that epitomized the American dream. The Manson Family spent the summer of 1968 living and partying with Wilson in his Malibu mansion. The Cielo Drive home in the Hollywood Hills where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered in August 1969 had been Melcher’s home and the site of parties that Manson attended. The connections between Doris Day’s son, the Beach Boys, and the Manson Family have a darkly prophetic valence in retrospect. They were young, good-looking, and carefree. But behind the clean-cut image of wholesome American youth was a desperate decadence fueled by titanic drug abuse, sexual outrages that were absurd even by the standards of Hollywood in the 60s, and self-destructiveness clothed in the language of pseudo-spirituality. The California culture of the 1960s now looks like afin-de-siècleblow-off top. The promise, fulfillment, and destruction of the American dream appears distilled in the Golden State, like an epic tragedy played out against a sunny landscape where the frontier ended. Around 1970, America entered into an age of decay, and California was in the vanguard. Up, Up, and Away The expectation of constant progress is deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world, and of America in particular. Some metrics do generally keep rising: gross domestic product mostly goes up, and so does the stock market. According to those barometers, things must be headed mostly in the right direction. Sure there are temporary setbacks—the economy has recessions, the stock market has corrections—but the long-term trajectory is upward. Are those metrics telling us that the country is growing more prosperous? Are they signals, or noise? There is much that GDP and the stock market don’t tell us about, such as public and private debt levels, wage trends, and wealth concentration. In fact, during a half-century in which reported GDP grew consistently and the stock market reached the stratosphere, real wages have crept up very slowly, and living standards have flatlined or even declined for the middle and working classes. Many Americans have a feeling that things aren’t going in the right direction or that the country has lost its societal health and vigor, but aren’t sure how to describe or measure the problem. We need broader metrics of national prosperity and vitality, including measures of noneconomic values like family stability or social trust. There are many different criteria for national vitality. First, is the country guarded against foreign aggression and at peace with itself? Are people secure in their homes, free from government harassment, and safe from violent crime? Is prosperity broadly shared? Can the average person get a good job, buy a house, and support a family without doing anything extraordinary? Are families growing? Are people generally healthy, and is life span increasing or at least not decreasing? Is social trust high? Do people have a sense of unity in a common destiny and purpose? Is there a high capacity for collective action? Are people happy? We can sort quantifiable metrics of vitality into three main categories: social, economic, and political. There is a spiritual element too, which for my purposes falls under the social category. The social factors that can readily be measured include things like age at first marriage (an indicator of optimism about the future), median adult stature (is it rising or declining?), life expectancy, and prevalence of disease. Economic measures include real wage trends, wealth concentration, and social mobility. Political metrics relate to polarization and acts of political violence. Many of these tend to move together over long periods of time. It’s easy to look at an individual metric and miss the forest for the trees, not seeing how it’s one manifestation of a larger problem in a dynamic system. Solutions proposed to deal with one concern may cause unexpected new problems in another part of the system. It’s a society-wide game of whack-a-mole. What’s needed is a more comprehensive understanding of structural trends and what lies behind them. From the founding period in America until about 1830, those factors were generally improving. Life expectancy and median height were increasing, both indicating a society that was mostly at peace and had plentiful food. Real wages roughly tripled during this period as labor supply growth was slow. There was some political violence. But for decades after independence, the country was largely at peace and citizens were secure in their homes. There was an overarching sense of shared purpose in building a new nation. Those indicators of vitality are no longer trending upward. Let’s start with life expectancy. There is a general impression that up until the last century, people died very young. There’s an element of truth to this: we are now less susceptible to death from infectious disease, especially in early childhood, than were our ancestors before the 20th century. Childhood mortality rates were appalling in the past, but burying a young child is now a rare tragedy. This is a very real form of progress, resulting from more reliable food supplies as a result of improvements in agriculture, better sanitation in cities, and medical advances, particularly the antibiotics and certain vaccines introduced in the first half of the 20th century. A period of rapid progress was then followed by a long period of slow, expensive improvement at the margins. When you factor out childhood mortality, life spans have not grown by much in the past century or two. A study in theJournal of the Royal Society of Medicinesays that in mid-Victorian England, life expectancy at age five was 75 for men and 73 for women. In 2016, according to the Social Security Administration, the American male life expectancy at age five was 71.53 (which means living to age 76.53). Once you’ve made it to five years, your life expectancy is not much different from your great-grandfather’s. Moreover, Pliny tells us that Cicero’s wife, Terentia, lived to 103. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of both France and England at different times in the 12th century, died a week shy of her 82nd birthday. Astudyof 298 famous men born before 100 B.C. who were not murdered, killed in battle, or died by suicide found that their average age at death was 71. More striking is that people who live completely outside of modern civilization without Western medicine today have life expectancies roughly comparable to our own. Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard,notesthat “foragers who survive the precarious first few years of infancy are most likely to live to be 68 to 78 years old.” In some ways, they are healthier in old age than the average American, with lower incidences of inflammatory diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis. It should be no surprise that an active life spent outside in the sun, eating wild game and foraged plants, produces good health. Recent research shows that not only are we not living longer, we are less healthy and less mobile during the last decades of our lives than our great-grandfathers were. This points to adeclinein overall health. We have new drugs to treat Type I diabetes, but there is more Type I diabetes than in the past. We have new treatments for cancer, but there is more cancer. Something has gone very wrong. What’s more, between 2014 and 2017, median American life expectancy declined every year. In 2017 it was78.6 years, then it decreased again between 2018 and 2020 to76.87. The figure for 2020 includes COVID deaths, of course, but the trend was already heading downward for several years, mostly from deaths of despair: diseases associated with chronic alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. The reasons for the increase in deaths of despair are complex, but a major contributing factor is economic: people without good prospects over an extended period of time are more prone to self-destructive behavior. This decline is in contrast to the experience of peer countries. In addition to life expectancy, other upward trends have stalled or reversed in the past few decades. Family formation has slowed. The total fertility rate has dropped to well below replacement level. Real wages have stagnated. Debt levels have soared. Social mobility has stalled and income inequality has grown. Material conditions for most people have improved little except in narrow parts of life such as entertainment. Trends, Aggregate, and Individuals The last several decades have been a story of losing ground for much of middle America, away from a handful of wealthy cities on the coasts. The optimistic story that’s been told is that both income and wealth have been rising. That’s true in the aggregate, but when those numbers are broken down the picture is one of a rising gap between a small group of winners and a larger group of losers. Real wages have remained essentially flat over the past 50 years, and the growth in national wealth has been heavily concentrated at the top. The chart below represents theshare of national incomethat went to the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. In 1970 it was 33.3 percent; in 2019 the figure was 45.4 percent. Disparities in wealth have become more closely tied to educational attainment. Between 1989 and 2019, household wealth grew the most for those with the highest level of education. For households with a graduate degree, the increase was 31 percent; with a college degree, it was 17 percent; with a high school degree, about 4 percent. Meanwhile, household wealth declined by a precipitous 60 percent for high school dropouts, including those with a GED. In 1989, households with a college degree had 2.74 times the wealth of those with only a high school diploma; in 2012 it was 3.08 times as much. In 1989, households with a graduate degree had 4.85 times the wealth of the high school group; in 2019, it was 6.12 times as much. The gap between the graduate degree group and the college group increased by 12 percent. The high school group’s wealth grew about 4 percent from 1989 to 2019, the college group’s wealth grew about 17 percent, and the wealth of the graduate degree group increased 31 percent. The gaps between the groups are growing in real dollars. It’s true that people have some control over the level of education they attain, but college has become costlier, and it’s fundamentally unnecessary for many jobs, so the growing wealth disparity by education is a worrying trend. Wealth is relative: if your wealth grew by 4 percent while that of another group increased by 17 percent, then you are poorer. What’s more crucial, however, is purchasing power. If the costs of middle-class staples like healthcare, housing, and college tuition are climbing sharply while wages stagnate, then living standards will decline. More problematic than growing wealth disparity in itself is diminishing economic mobility. A big part of the American story from the beginning has been that children tend to end up better off than their parents were. By most measures, that hasn’t been true for decades. Thechart belowcompares the birth cohorts of 1940 and 1980 in terms of earning more than parents did. The horizontal axis indicates the relative income level of the parents. Among the older generation, over 90 percent earned more than their parents, except for those whose parents were at the very high end of the income scale. Among the younger generation, the percentages were much lower, and also more variable. For those whose parents had a median income, only about 40 percent would do better. In this analysis, low growth and high inequality both suppress mobility. Over time, declining economic mobility becomes an intergenerational problem, as younger people fall behind the preceding generation in wealth accumulation. The graph below illustrates the proportion of the national wealth held by successive generations at the same stage of life, with the horizontal axis indicating the median age for the group. Baby Boomers (birth years 1946–1964) owned a much larger percentage of the national wealth than the two succeeding generations at every point. At a median age of 45, for example, the Boomers owned approximately 40 percent of the national wealth. At the same median age, Generation X (1965–1980) owned about 15 percent. The Boomer generation was 15–18 percent larger than Gen X and it had 2.67 times as much of the national wealth. The Millennial generation (1981–1996) is bigger than Gen X though a little smaller than the Boomers, and it has owned about half of what Gen X did at the same median age. Those are some measurable indicators of the nation’s vitality, and they tell us that something is going wrong. A key reason for stagnant wages, declining mobility, and growing disparities of wealth is that economic growth overall has been sluggish since around 1970. And the main reason for slower growth is that the long-term growth in productivity that created so much wealth for America and the world over the prior two centuries slowed down. Wealth and the New Frontier There are other ways to increase the overall national wealth. One is by acquiring new resources, which has been done in various ways: through territorial conquest, or the incorporation of unsettled frontier lands, or the discovery of valuable resources already in a nation’s territory, such as petroleum reserves in recent history. Getting an advantageous trade agreement can also be a way of increasing resources. Through much of American history, the frontier was a great source of new wealth. The vast supply of mostly free land, along with the other resources it held, was not just an economic boon; it also shaped American culture and politics in ways that were distinct from the long-settled countries of Europe where the frontier had been closed for centuries and all the land was owned space. But there can be a downside to becoming overly dependent on any one resource. Aside from gaining new resources, real economic growth comes from either population growth or productivity growth. Population growth can add to the national wealth, but it can also put strain on supplies of essential resources. What elevates living standards broadly is productivity growth, making more out of available resources. A farmer who tills his fields with a steel plough pulled by a horse can cultivate more land than a farmer doing it by hand. It allows him to produce more food that can be consumed by a bigger family, or the surplus can be sold or traded for other goods. A farmer driving a plough with an engine and reaping with a mechanical combine can produce even more. But productivity growth is driven by innovation. In the example above, there is a progression from farming by hand with a simple tool, to the use of metal tools and animal power, to the use of complicated machinery, each of which greatly increases the amount of food produced per farmer. This illustrates the basic truth that technology is a means of reducing scarcity and generating surpluses of essential goods, so labor and resources can be put toward other purposes, and the whole population will be better off. Total factor productivity (TFP) refers to economic output relative to the size of all primary inputs, namely labor and capital. Over time, a nation’s economic output tends to grow faster than its labor force and capital stock. This might owe to better labor skills or capital management, but it is primarily the result of new technology. In economics, productivity growth is used as a proxy for the application of innovation. If productivity is rising, it is understood to mean that applied science is working to reduce scarcity. The countries that lead in technological innovation naturally reap the benefits first and most broadly, and therefore have the highest living standards. Developing countries eventually get the technology too, and then enjoy the benefits in what is called catch-up growth. For example, China first began its national electrification program in the 1950s, when electricity was nearly ubiquitous in the United States. The project took a few decades to complete, and China saw rapid growth as wide access to electric power increased productivity. The United States still leads the way in innovation—though now with more competition than at any time since World War II. But the development of productivity-enhancing new technologies has been slower over the past few decades than in any comparable span of time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 18th century. The obvious advances in a few specific areas, particularly digital technology, are exceptions that prove the rule. The social technologies of recent years facilitate consumption rather than production.As a result, growth in total factor productivity has been slow for a long time. According to areportfrom Rabobank, “TFP growth deteriorated from an average annual growth of 1.1% over the period 1969–2010 to 0.4% in 2010 to 2018.” InThe Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen suggested that the conventional productivity measures may be misleading. For example, he noted that productivity growth through 2000–2004 averaged 3.8 percent, a very high figure and an outlier relative to most of the last half-century. Surely some of that growth was real owing to the growth of the internet at the time, but it also coincided with robust growth in the financial sector, which ended very badly in 2008. “What we measured as value creation actually may have been value destruction, namely too many homes and too much financial innovation of the wrong kind.” Then, productivity shot up by over 5 percent in 2009–2010, but Cohen found that it was mostly the result of firms firing the least productive people. That may have been good business, but it’s not the same as productivity rising because innovation is reducing scarcity and thus leading to better living standards. Over the long term, when productivity growth slows or stalls, overall economic growth is sluggish. Median real wage growth is slow. For most people, living standards don’t just stagnate but decline. You Owe Me Money As productivity growth has slowed, the economy has become more financialized, which means that resources are increasingly channeled into means of extracting wealth from the productive economy instead of producing goods and services. Peter Thiel said that a simple way to understand financialization is that it represents the increasing influence of companies whose main business or source of value is producing little pieces of paper that essentially say,you owe me money.Wall Street and the companies that make up the financial sector have never been larger or more powerful. Since the early 1970s, financial firms’ share of all corporate earnings has roughly doubled to nearly 25 percent. As a share of real GDP, itgrewfrom 13–15 percent in the early 1970s to nearly 22 percent in 2020. The profits of financial firms have grown faster than their share of the economy over the past half-century. The examples are everywhere. Many companies that were built to produce real-world, nondigital goods and services have become stealth finance companies, too. General Electric, the manufacturing giant founded by Thomas Edison, transformed itself into a black box of finance businesses, dragging itself down as a result. The total market value of major airlines like American, United, and Delta is less than the value of their loyalty programs, in which people get miles by flying and by spending with airline-branded credit cards. In 2020, American Airlines’loyalty programwas valued at $18–$30 billion while the market capitalization of the entire company was $14 billion. This suggests that the actual airline business—flying people from one place to another—is valuable only insofar as it gets people to participate in a loyalty program. The main result of financialization is best explained by the “Cantillon effect,” which means that money creation, over a long period of time, redistributes wealth upward to the already rich. This effect was first described in the 18th century by Richard Cantillon after he observed the results of introducing a paper money system. He noted that the first people to receive the new money saw their incomes rise, while the last to receive it saw a decline in their purchasing power because of consumer price inflation. The first to receive newly created money are banks and other financial institutions. They are called “Cantillon insiders,” a term coined by Nick Szabo, and they get the most benefit. But all owners of assets—including stocks, real estate, even a home—are enriched to some extent by the Cantillon effect. Those who own a lot of assets benefit the most, and financial assets tend to increase in value faster than other types, butallgain value. This is a version of the Matthew Principle, taken from Jesus’ Parable of the Sower: to those who have, more will be given. The more assets you own, the faster your wealth will increase. Meanwhile, the people without assets fall behind as asset prices rise faster than incomes. Inflation hawks have long worried that America’s decades-long policy of running large government deficits combined with easy money from the Fed will lead to runaway inflation that beggars average Americans. This was seen clearly in 2022 after the massive increase in dollars created by the Fed in 2020 and 2021. Even so, they’ve mostly been looking for inflation in the wrong place. It’s true that the prices of many raw materials, such as lumber and corn, have soared recently, followed by much more broad-based inflation in everything from food to rent, but inflation in the form of asset price bubbles has been with us for much longer. Those bubbles pop and prices drop, but the next bubble raises them even higher. Asset price inflation benefits asset owners, but not the people with few or no assets, like young people just starting out and finding themselves unable to afford to buy a home. The Cantillon effect has been one of the main vectors of increased wealth concentration over the last 40 years. One way that the large banks use their insider status is by getting short-term loans from the Federal Reserve and lending the money back to the government by buying longer-term treasuries at a slightly higher interest rate and locking in a profit. Their position in the economy essentially guarantees them profits, and their size and political influence protect them from losses. We’ve seen the pattern of private profits and public losses clearly in the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, and in the financial crisis of 2008. Banks and speculators made a lot of money in the years leading up to the crisis, and when the losses on their bad loans came due, they got bailouts. Moral Hazard The Cantillon economy creates moral hazard in that large companies, especially financial institutions, can privatize profits and socialize losses. Insiders, and shareholders more broadly, can reap massive gains when the bets they make with the company’s capital pay off. When the bets go bad, the company gets bailed out. Alan Krueger, the chief economist at theTreasury Department in the Obama Administration,explainedyears later why banks and not homeowners were rescued from the fallout of the mortgage crisis: “It would have been extremely unfair, and created problems down the road to bail out homeowners who were irresponsible and took on homes they couldn’t afford.” Krueger glossed over the fact that the banks had used predatory and deceptive practices to initiate risky loans, and when they lost hundreds of billions of dollars—or trillions by some estimates—they were bailed out while homeowners were kicked out. That callous indifference alienates and radicalizes the forgotten men and women who have been losing ground. Most people know about the big bailouts in 2008, but the system that joins private profit with socialized losses regularly creates incentives for sloppiness and corruption. The greed sometimes takes ridiculous forms. But once that culture takes over, it poisons everything it touches. Starting in 2002, for example, Wells Fargo began ascamin which it paid employees to open more than 3.5 million unauthorized checking accounts, savings accounts, and credit cards for retail customers. By exaggerating growth in the number of active retail accounts, the bank could give investors a false picture of the health of its retail business. It also charged those customers monthly service fees, which contributed to the bottom line and bolstered the numbers in quarterly earnings reports to Wall Street. Bigger profits led to higher stock prices, enriching senior executives whose compensation packages included large options grants. John Stumpf, the company’s CEO from 2007 to 2016, was forced to resign and disgorge around $40 million in repayments to Wells Fargo and fines to the federal government. Bloomberg estimates that he retained more than $100 million. Wells Fargo paid a $3 billion fine, which amounted to less than two months’ profit, as the bank’s annual profits averaged around $19.7 billion from 2017 to 2019. And this was for a scam that lasted nearly 15 years. What is perhaps most absurd and despicable about this scheme is that Wells Fargo was conducting it during and even after the credit bubble, when the bank received billions of dollars in bailouts from the government. The alliance between the largest corporations and the state leads to corrupt and abusive practices. This is one of the second-order effects of the Cantillon economy. Another effect is that managers respond to short-term financial incentives in a way that undermines the long-term vitality of their own company. An excessive focus on quarterly earnings is sometimes referred to as short-termism. Senior managers, especially at the C-suite level of public companies, are largely compensated with stock options, so they have a strong incentive to see the stock rise. In principle, a rising stock price should reflect a healthy, growing, profitable company. But managers figured out how to game the system: with the Fed keeping long-term rates low, corporations can borrow money at a much lower rate than the expected return in the stock market. Many companies have taken on long-term debt to finance stock repurchases, which helps inflate the stock price. This practice is one reason that corporate debt has soared since 1980. The Cantillon effect distorts resource allocation, incentivizing rent-seeking in the financial industry and rewarding nonfinancial companies for becoming stealth financial firms. Profits are quicker and easier in finance than in other industries. As a result, many smart, ambitious people go to Wall Street instead of trying to invent useful products or seeking a new source of abundant power—endeavors that don’t have as much assurance of a payoff. How different might America be if the incentives were structured to reward the people who put their brain power and energy into those sorts of projects rather than into quantitative trading algorithms and financial derivatives of home mortgages. While the financial industry does well, the manufacturing sector lags. Because of COVID-19, Americans discovered that the United States has very limited capacity to make the personal protective equipment that was in such urgent demand in 2020. We do not manufacture any of the most widely prescribed antibiotics, or drugs for heart disease or diabetes, nor any of the chemical precursors required to make them. A close look at other vital industries reveals the same penury. The rare earth minerals necessary for batteries and electronic screens mostly come from China because we have intentionally shuttered domestic sources or failed to develop them. We’re dependent on Taiwan for the computer chips that go into everything from phones to cars to appliances, and broken supply chains in 2021 led to widespread shortages. The list of necessities we import because we have exported our manufacturing base goes on. Financialization of the economy amplifies the resource curse that has come with dollar supremacy. Richard Cantillon described a similar effect when he observed what happened to Spain and Portugal when they acquired large amounts of silver and gold from the New World. The new wealth raised prices, but it went largely into purchasing imported goods, which ruined the manufactures of the state and led to general impoverishment. In America today, a fiat currency that serves as the world’s reserve is the resource curse that erodes the manufacturing base while the financial sector flourishes. Since the dollar’s value was formally dissociated from gold in 1976, it now rests on American economic prosperity, political stability, and military supremacy. If these advantages diminish relative to competitors, so will the value of the dollar. Dollar supremacy has also encouraged a debt-based economy. Federal debt as a share of GDP has risen from around 38 percent in 1970 to nearly 140 percent in 2020. Corporate debt has had peaks and troughs over those decades, but each new peak is higher than the last. In the 1970s, total nonfinancial corporate debt in the United States ranged between 30 and 35 percent of GDP. It peaked at about 43 percent in 1990, then at 45 percent with the dot-com bubble in 2001, then at slightly higher with the housing bubble in 2008, and now it’s approximately 47 percent. As asset prices have climbed faster than wages, consumer debt has soared from 43.2 percent of GDP in 1970 to over 75 percent in 2020. Student loan debt has soared even faster in recent years: in 2003, it totaled $240 billion—basically a rounding error—but by 2020, the sum had ballooned to six times as large, at $1.68 trillion, which amounts to around 8 percent of GDP. Increases in aggregate debt throughout society are a predictable result of the Cantillon effect in a financialized economy. The Rise of the Two-Income Family The Cantillon effect generates big gains for those closest to the money spigot, and especially those at the top of the financial industry, while the people furthest away fall behind. Average families find it more difficult to buy a home and maintain a middle-class life. In 90 percent of U.S. counties today, the median-priced single-family home is unaffordable on the median wage. One of the ways that families try to make ends meet is with the promiscuous use of credit. It’s one of the reasons that personal and household debt levels have risen across the board. People borrow money to cover the gap between expectations and reality, hoping that economic growth will soon pull them out of debt. But for many, it’s a trap they can never escape. Another way that families have tried to keep up is by adding a second income. In 2018, over 60 percent of families were two-income households, up from about 30 percent in 1970. This change is not a result of a simple desire to do wage work outside the home or of “increased opportunities,” as we are often told. The reason is that it now takes two incomes to support the needs of a middle-class family, whereas 50 years ago, it required only one. As more people entered the labor market, the value of labor declined, setting up a vicious cycle in which a second income came to be more necessary. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 put more downward pressure on the value of labor. When people laud the fact that we have so many more two-income families—generally meaning more women working outside the home—as evidence that there are so many great opportunities, what they’re really doing is retconning something usually done out of economic necessity. Needing twice as much labor to get the same result is the opposite of what happens when productivity growth is robust. It also means that the raising of children is increasingly outsourced. That’s not an improvement. Another response to stagnant wages is to delay family formation and have fewer children. In 1960, the median age of a first marriage was about 20.5 years. In 2010, it was approximately 27, and in 2020 it was an all-time high of over 29.18 At the same time, the total fertility rate of American women was dropping: from 3.65 in 1960 down to 2.1, a little below replacement level, in the early 1970s. Currently, it hovers around 1.8. Some people may look on this approvingly, worried as they are about overpopulation and the impact of humans on the environment. But when people choose to have few or no children, it is usually not a political choice. That doesn’t mean it is simply a “revealed preference,” a lower desire for a family and children, rather than a reflection of personal challenges or how people view their prospects for the future. Surely it’s no coincidence that the shrinking of families has happened at the same time that real wages have stagnated or grown very slowly, while the costs of housing, health care, and higher education have soared. The fact that American living standards have broadly stagnated, and for some segments of the population have declined, should be cause for real concern to the ruling class. Americans expect economic mobility and a chance for prosperity. Without it, many will believe that the government has failed to deliver on its promises. The Chinese Communist Party is regarded as legitimate by the Chinese people because it has presided over a large, broad, multigenerational rise in living standards. If stagnation or decline in the United States is not addressed effectively, it will threaten the legitimacy of the governing institutions. But instead of meeting the challenge head-on, America’s political and business leaders have pursued policies and strategies that exacerbate the problem. Woke policies in academia, government, and big business have created a stultifying environment that is openly hostile to heterodox views. Witness the response to views on COVID that contradicted official opinion. And all this happens against a backdrop of destructive fiscal and monetary policies. Low growth and low mobility tend to increase political instability when the legitimacy of the political order is predicated upon opportunity and egalitarianism. One source of national unity has been the understanding that every individual has an equal right to pursue happiness, that a dignified life is well within reach of the average person, and that the possibility of rising higher is open to all. When too many people feel they cannot rise, and when even the basics of a middle-class life are difficult to secure, disappointment can breed a sense of injustice that leads to social and political conflict. At first, that conflict acts as a drag on what American society can accomplish. Left unchecked, it will consume energy and resources that could otherwise be put into more productive activities. Thwarted personal aspirations are often channeled into politics and zero-sum factional conflict. The rise of identity politics represents a redirection of the frustrations born of broken dreams. But identity politics further divides us into hostile camps. We’ve already seen increased social unrest lately, and more is likely to follow. High levels of social and political conflict are dangerous for a country that hopes to maintain a popular form of government. Not so long ago, we could find unity in civic rituals and were encouraged to be proud of our country. Now our history is denigrated in schools and by other sensemaking institutions, leading to cultural dysphoria, social atomization, and alienation. In exchange, you can choose your pronouns, which doesn’t seem like such a great trade. Just as important as regaining broad-based material prosperity and rising standards of living—perhaps more important—is unifying the nation around a common understanding of who we Americans are and why we’re here.

Idaho Supreme Court Finds No ‘Explicit Right’ to Abortion, Upholds Ban The Idaho Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state abortion law that bans the procedure except in cases of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother, rejecting the claim that the state’s constitution provides a right to abortion. Idaho’s abortionlawwent into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, but has been challenged in the courts multiple times by pro-abortion advocates. The courtruled3-2 to uphold the ban, stating that Idaho’s law that bans abortion under most circumstances does not violate due process or the right to privacy. “The Idaho Constitution does not contain an explicit right to abortion,” Justice Robyn Brody wrote. “To the contrary, the relevant history and traditions of Idaho show abortion was viewed as an immoral act and treated as a crime. Thus, we cannot conclude the framers and adopters of the Inalienable Rights Clause intended to implicitly protect abortion as a fundamental right.” Idaho passed an abortion trigger law in 2020 that prohibited abortions performed for any reason other than rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother, accordingto Idaho Capital Sun. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the state’s trigger law went into effect in August. Under the new law, abortion is a felony offense, leading pro-abortion advocates to challenge the law in court. The Department of Justice sued the state over the law, claiming it violated a law requiring hospitals who receive Medicare funds to perform abortions, and the court initially granted a preliminary injunction until the courts made a final decision,accordingto The New York Times. The decision allows the ban to remain partially in effect but broadens the law to allow abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which provides a wider definition of a medical threat to the mother’s life,accordingto ABC News. That case is still ongoing despite the state Supreme Court’s ruling. “Additionally, as explained below, we conclude that the Total Abortion Ban, 6-Week Ban, and Civil Liability Law each pass the familiar test for determining the constitutionality of most legislation: “rational-basis” review,” Brody explained. “Under that form of review, each of these laws is constitutional because it is rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in protecting prenatal fetal life at all 5 stages of development, and in protecting the health and safety of the mother.” The justices also pointed out that Idaho citizens had other alternatives to make abortion a right under the law through the legislature. “Importantly, nothing about this decision prevents the voters of Idaho from answering the deeply moral and political question of abortion at the polls,” Brody stated. “For example, if the people of Idaho are dissatisfied with these new laws, they can elect new legislators.” Planned Parenthood did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Texas Sues Biden Admin over Policy Loosening Restrictions on Illegal Immigrants Seeking Welfare Benefits Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration over its changes to a policy that will allow illegal immigrants to more easily obtain welfare benefits. President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented changes to the rule Dec. 23 to no longer consider certain nutrition, health and housing benefits when deciding whether a noncitizen can legally stay in the country,accordingto DHS. Paxton isrequestingnot just action in a Texas court, but is also asking that the Supreme Court intervene, heannouncedThursday. The policy has meant that noncitizens who are considered a “public charge” face potential inadmissibility and denial of Green Card status. Before Biden took office, then-President Donald Trump sought to increase restrictions as part of the policy. “The Biden Administration is committed to opening the borders to aliens who lack the ability to take care of themselves. Texans should not have to pay for these costly immigrants, nor should any other American,” Paxton said in a statement Thursday. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues toencountera record number of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. In fiscal year 2022, the agency encountered a record of more than 2.3 million migrants at the southern border. Biden willtravelfor the first time to the area Sunday, when he travels to El Paso, Texas, which is where federal authorities recently encountered more than 2,500 illegal immigrants a day. “I will continue to defend the rule of law and fight to ensure that the massive costs of illegal immigration don’t further burden taxpayers,” Paxton said. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘THE CHOSEN’ Star to Keynote First ‘Post-Roe’ March for Life in Nation’s Capital Jonathan Roumie, who plays the role of “Jesus” in the groundbreaking series THE CHOSEN, will keynote the 50th annual March for Life – the first since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – in Washington, DC, the pro-life organization announced Thursday. In a press release, the March for Life Education and Defense Fund announced actor, director, producer and voice-over artist Roumie, who portrays “Jesus” in the fan-supported free streaming series THE CHOSEN, a drama about the life of Jesus and the calling of his first disciples, will keynote the pro-life organization’s Rose Dinner Gala on January 20. “Jonathan has had the honor of being awarded several titles of Knighthood based on his ecumenical work in ministry and the arts and recently returned from Rome following an invitation to the Vatican for him to participate in a global summit of artists called to promote the faith through their artistic gifts,” March for Life noted. The theme for this year’s event is “Next Steps: Marching Forward into a Post-Roe America,” one that expresses the need for pro-life activists “to continue boldly marching in defense of theunborn – both on the state and federal level – andadvocating for a minimum federal standard to protect innocent life against radical pro-abortion legislation,” the organization said.As the March for Life organization enters the post-Roe era, the route its annual pro-life demonstration takes will shift from its traditional path to the Supreme Court to walking past the place where Roe v. Wade was overturned and then heading on toward the Capitol building. “The route is different, although the ending is similar to what it’s been in years past,” Jeanne Mancini, president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told Paul Bedard at Washington Secrets. “Instead of marching all the way up Constitution Avenue and taking the right on First Street, going past the Supreme Court, what we’re going to do is go in front of the Capitol,” the pro-life leader said. “We’ll go up Constitution and then take a right on Third Street and take a left on Independence Avenue and then still finish at the Supreme Court.” The shift in the march’s path, she said, places “a stronger prominence on the Capitol.” Additional speakers for March for Life 2023, the world’s largest annual human rights demonstration, include: Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who won theDobbsSupreme Court case that overturnedRoe v. Wade Coach Tony Dungy, New York Times bestselling author and Pro-Football Hall of Famer Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse Sister Mary Casey of theSistersof Life Dr. Christina Francis, CEO-Elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists Gina Tomes, program director of the Bethlehem House maternityhome We Are Messengers, the GMA Dove-nominated and K-LOVE Award-winning musical group, will perform at the pre-rally concert. “We are overjoyed to welcomethese inspiring leaders at this year’s 50thMarch for Life, the first in our post-Roenation,” Mancini said in a statement and added: WithRoenow behind us, we are empowered to save countless innocent American lives by continuing to advocate forcommonsenseprotections at the state and federal level,educating Americans on the intrinsic dignity of all human life. This year will be a somber reminder of the millions of lives lost to abortion in the past 50 years, but also a celebration of how far we have come and where we as a movement need to focus our effort as we enter this new era in our quest to protect life. The March for Life Rally is Friday, January 20th beginning at noon Eastern on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

John Bolton Confirms He Will Run for President in 2024 Former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton this week confirmed that he will be mounting a 2024 presidential bid, one meant in part to prevent former President Donald Trump himself from once again claiming the White House. Bolton toldGood Morning Britainthat he was planning on entering the race as a legitimate candidate and not merely a spoiler for Trump.“I wouldn’t run as a vanity candidate,” he told the show. “If I didn’t think I could run seriously, then I wouldn’t get in the race.” The onetime U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has emerged as a fierce and vocal critic of Trump following his 2019 firing by Trump via Twitter. Bolton in 2020 published a memoir of his time in the White House,The Room Where it Happened;the Trump White House at the time sought to block publication of it but ultimately failed.

Commentary: Second Amendment a Blessing, Not a ‘Curse,’ in End-of-Year Examples of Defensive Gun Use The editorial board of a major New Jersey newspaper started the year off with ananti-Second Amendment screed, decrying the right to keep and bear arms as a “curse” perpetuated by a “fanatical” interpretation created by the Supreme Court in 2008. Among other things, editors at the Newark-based Star-Ledger bemoaned that the Second Amendment keeps the nation from enacting “rational” gun control along the lines of Canada—which is a hair’s breadth awayfrom banning all firearm sales—and called for readers to imagine the possibilities if the Supreme Court would just reinterpret the Constitution according to the justices’ personal perceptions of “reasonable” public policy. The editorial, unsurprisingly, gets many things wrong. For example, far from “suddenly siding” with the National Rifle Association in 2008 about the meaning of the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller merely affirmed thelong-established interpretationof the right, universally held by stalwarts of constitutional law such as William Rawle and Joseph Story. But the most egregious aspect of the editorial is its air of disdain for peaceable Americans who want to protect themselves with firearms in such unimaginable public places as“restaurants” and “nursing homes.” Perhaps these editors should spend less time pontificating about other countries and more time investigating the reality of defensive gun use in this one. Almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between500,000 and 3 milliontimes annually, according to the latest report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just last year, a more comprehensive study concluded thatroughly 1.6 million defensive gun usesoccur in the United States every year. For this reason, The Daily Signal each month publishes an article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accountsherefrom 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.) The examples below represent only a fraction of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in December. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactiveDefensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.) Dec. 1, Marinette, Wisconsin:Local police said a man who fatally shot a woman in an apartment complex hallwaywas justified in his actionsbecause it appeared that the woman had stabbed him before he shot her in self-defense. Dec. 5, Warner Robbins, Georgia:When an armed, masked robber jumped over the counter at a fast-food restaurant, demanded money, and pistol-whipped an employee, that employee drew his own gun andfired three shots at the robber, striking him twice. The wounded robber fled but responding police officers found him and took him to a hospital, where he died. The armed employee wasn’t injured, police said. Dec. 7, Knoxville, Tennessee:A man returned home to find a naked intruder ransacking his living room, so he and his wife fled to a neighbor’s house to call 911, police said. The intruder followed the couple, promptingthe neighbor to retrieve his handgunand order the suspect to lay down. Instead of complying, the intruder broke off a car’s windshield wiper and repeatedly swung it aggressively at the neighbor even after he fired a warning shot and retreated into his own yard. The neighbor ultimately shot and wounded the intruder. Dec. 10, Chicago:A concealed carry permit holder turned the tables on three would-be carjackers who shot at him, police said. The intended victimdrew his own gun and returned fire, striking two of the carjackers and sending the third fleeing. The permit holder was unharmed, and police later took the two wounded suspects into custody. It was thesecond time in just one weekthat an armed Chicago resident successfully fended off multiple armed carjackers. Dec. 11, Port St. John, Florida:An armed driver fatally shot a man whoassaulted him in an unprovoked attackwhile he was eating in his car outside a fast-food restaurant. Police said they believe this may have been a case of mistaken identity and that the assailant was looking for another person. Dec. 14, Chandler, Arizona:Anarmed employee quickly endeda potential active shooter situation at an Amazon fulfillment center by fatally shooting a gunman who fired at and wounded another employee in the parking lot. The gunman’s girlfriend worked at the facility, and police said he apparently wanted to confront one of her co-workers, of whom he was jealous. The wounded employee, who was expected to survive, had “felt something was off” and tried to get the gunman to leave, police said. Dec. 18, Tucson, Arizona:The owner of a local barcredited an armed patronwith protecting the lives of other customers and employees by shooting and critically wounding a man who threatened them with a rifle. Police said the man had been removed earlier from the bar for hurling racial slurs and making violent threats. Media outlets initially characterized the shooting as a “bar fight.” Dec. 20, Oklahoma City:An armed resident fatally shot a man who threw several Molotov cocktails through the window of an apartment, in what police believe may have been a targeted act ofdomestic violence. One neighbor reported hearing “at least 10 gunshots” during the incident. Dec. 22, Conway, South Carolina:Witnesses said that when two men—one of whom was armed—jumped over the counter of a Waffle House restaurant and assaulted an employee, theemployee grabbed his own gun, prompting the two men to flee. Police said the men exchanged gunfire with the employee as they fled, but although the restaurant was damaged, it didn’t appear that anyone was injured. Dec. 26, Detroit:Police said a tow truck driver arrived for an agreed-upon meeting to buy a man’s “junk car,” only to be ambushed by the man, who tried to rob him. The tow truck driver, whohad a concealed carry permit, drew his own gun and fatally shot his assailant. Dec. 28, Buffalo, New York:When a severe winter storm nearly immobilized the city’s emergency response capabilities for several days, some criminals took advantage by looting shops, knowing that police officers would be slow to respond. Bystanderstook video of an armed personchasing a would-be looter out of a local beauty salon by firing a gun into the air. The store’s manager speculated that the good Samaritan likely was associated with another neighborhood business. Dec. 30, Dallas:Police said an armed bystander intervened during an attempted carjacking,shooting and wounding one of three assailants. One of the three had pointed a gun at a man as he left a restaurant in a crowded shopping center. A second legally armed man who had been eating inside the restaurant told reporters that when he heard gunfire outside, he drew his own gun and positioned himself to protect other customers if necessary. The American gun owners described above were not “fanatical” or “irrational” for possessing firearms or defending themselves and others with them. Far from it. What’s irrational is the belief that governments—whichkilled 200 million largely unarmed civiliansin the 20th century—should be entrusted with a monopoly on instruments of force, instead of held in perpetual check by a well-armed citizenry. What’s fanatical is Gun Control Inc.’s obsession with disarming peaceable persons and effectively rendering moot their inalienable right to self-defense based on a promise that the government always will be able to protect them from all harms. For the Americans in the incidents outlined above, and for countless others who defend themselves with firearms every year, the right to keep and bear arms is not a curse. When the government failed to protect these Americans, the Second Amendment was their greatest blessing.

U.S. Shells Out Another $3 Billion in Military Aid for Ukraine The U.S. announced a $3.1 billion security assistance package for Ukraine on Friday, including for the first time dozens of heavy infantry vehicles. Of the total, $2.85 billion willcomedirectly from existing U.S. weapons stocks, including 50 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles and 500 anti-missiles, according to a press release. Ukrainian officials expect Russia toconducta second mobilization and renewed offensive in the coming months,accordingto Reuters. Bradleys will become the first armored vehicle to feature in a weapons package for Ukraine, although Biden previouslyapprovedpaying for the Czech Republic to refurbish 45 ex-Soviet tanks to transfer to Ukraine. The Bradley is an infantry fighting vehicle equipped with a small gun, too underpowered to meet the Army classification of a tank, of which the Army hashundredsin storage,accordingto Task and Purpose. Bradleys are “a significant improvement compared to what the U.S. has already provided” and will help Ukraine integrate infantry and tank divisions in maneuvers to push back Russian forces, Bradley Bowman, director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Giving the Bradleys to Ukraine is also a sign that the U.S. defense community trusts Ukraine with this capability,” Luke Coffey, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the DCNF. The package also includes the first radar-guided Sea Sparrow missiles. Ukrainian troops have already discovered modifications that allow their Soviet-era ground launchers to fire the Sea Sparrow, Politicoreported, citing officials familiar with the matter. News of the U.S. imminent aid package on Thursday coincided with announcements from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to transfer Marder fighting vehicles and an additional Patriot air defense system,accordingto a joint U.S.-Germany statement. French President Emmanuel Macron promised to deliver AMX-10 RC armored reconnaissance to Ukraine in a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Wednesday, France24reported, citing an aide to Macron. “It is the first time that Western-designed tanks are supplied to the Ukrainian armed forces,” the aide told France24. Neither country specified the number of fighting vehicles intended for Ukraine’s troops, but Scholz said Germany would send “all Marders that are operational,”accordingto Reuters. German officials pressured Scholz to upgrade support for Ukraine after France’s announcement, but Germany, sensitive to how Russia may interpret the transfer of heavy weaponry, has preferred to coordinate arms deliveries with allied countries, Reuters reported. Ukraine has continued torequestheavier, more powerful tanks. However, the latest plans for arming Ukraine signal anincreasingopenness to providing equipment tailored toward offensive operations, Coffey told the DCNF. “It’s a stark shift from this idea that we’re only providing defensive weapons,” Coffey said. The U.S. and Western partners are on a “trajectory” of being willing tosupplymore equipment that will “enable the Ukrainians to be more effective on the battlefield, as opposed to just surviving on the battlefield or just defending on the battlefield,” Coffey added.

Senate Democrats Criticize New Biden Border Plan On Thursday, four Democratic members of the U.S. Senate slammed Joe Biden’s most recent proposal for handling the immigration crisis, particularly the plans to slightly increase the number of deportations. As reported byThe Hill, ahead of Biden’s planned first trip to the southern border since taking office, the Biden Administration announced revised plans that involve temporarily expanding Title 42 to increase the number of daily deportations by turning away illegal aliens who present themselves at the border. In response, Democrats Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) issued a joint statement condemning the new plan just hours after it was first announced. “While we understand the challenges the nation is facing at the Southern border exacerbated by Republican obstruction to modernizing our immigration system,” the statement falsely declared, “we are deeply disappointed by the Biden Administration’s decision to expand the use of Title 42.” “Continuing to use this failed and inhumane Trump-era policy put in place to address a public health crisis will do nothing to restore the rule of law at the border,” they continued. “Instead, it will increase border crossings over time and further enrich human smuggling networks.” The four senators did offer praise for another aspect of the plan, which allows up to 30,000 illegals to enter the country uninhibited every month, provided they are from the countries of either Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Venezuela; but they continued to criticize other aspects of the plan as well, including the White House’s claim that requiring illegals to apply for asylum from their home country does not equate to a travel ban. “We are also concerned about the Administration’s new transit ban regulation that will disregard our obligations under international law by banning families from seeking asylum at the border,” the statement read, “likely separating families and stranding migrants fleeing persecution and torture in countries unable to protect them.” Title 42 is a health policy that was first implemented by the Trump Administration at the onset of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Citing the possible spread of disease and other public health risks, the Trump Administration used Title 42 to significantly reduce legal and illegal immigration into the country, and expanded its deportation efforts, ultimately succeeding in bringing total immigration rates to near zero by the end of the year. The Biden Administration has sought to end the policy, but the new reversal comes after the Supreme Court temporarily halted efforts to end the policy after a lawsuit was filed by 19 Republican-led states arguing for its preservation.

Federal Border Wall Replacing Arizona Container Wall Goes Up Next Week United States Customs and Border Protection announced Friday that construction on a barrier at the Yuma sector of the southern border would start next week. A press release explained that the federal government would “close gaps” near the Morelos Dam, a primary location for illegal crossings in Arizona. “The safety and security or our workforce, law enforcement partners, and the local community are a top priority,” Acting Chief Patrol Agent Patricia McGurk-Daniel said in the statement. “Yuma Sector is dedicated to working with our state, local, and tribal counterparts to ensure a multi layered approach to secure our nation’s borders and protect our local community,” she continued. Plans for the project had been public since last year and said that it would be finished in the summer. The former Ducey administration placed storage containers at the gaps as a mitigation strategy, which led to a lawsuit and its subsequent removal in recent days. The Center Square reported on the stipulation filed in court that assured that the federal government would go forward with the project as part of an agreement to take the containers down. As of the fiscal year 2023 so far, the Yuma sector has had nearly 50,000 migrant encounters, according to CBPdata.

Washington Lawmaker Introduces Proposal to Pay Prisoners Minimum Wage A Washington legislator who served time behind bars contends it is time for the state to stop saving millions on the backs of inmates who are paid pennies for work in prison jobs. “This is an evolution of slavery,” Rep. Tarra Simmons, D-Bremerton, told reporters. She is proposing that inmates be paid minimum wage when they work in the kitchen or produce furniture or other goods. Simmons, an attorney, is co-founder and director of the Civil Survival Project, a program that advocates for people formerly incarcerated. She has pre-filed House Bill 1024, known as the “Real Labor, Real Wages Act,” for consideration in the 2023 legislative session, which begins Jan. 9. Simmons contends that the 13th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery, excluded inmates and that allowed states to continue “exploiting” people. As a result, the American Civil Liberties Union and other reform groups argue that incarcerated people are coerced into working for very little return under threats of additional punishment, including solitary confinement or suspension of visitation with loved ones. The current pay structure has outside companies complaining about unfair competition because they must pay at least minimum wage, driving up their production costs. Washington Correctional Industries is a revenue-generating branch within the Department of Corrections that operates businesses in the state’s 12 prisons. According to the Washington Department of Corrections, CI generates up to $70 million in sales a year, ranking as the nation’s fourth-largest prison labor program. The nearly 2,000 inmates working on CI projects reportedly earn between 65 cents to $2.70 per hour. “When I was incarcerated, I was paid 42 cents an hour,” said Simmons of her experience. She is believed to be the first person elected to the legislature after being convicted of a felony. She served a 30-month prison sentence for drug and theft charges. During that time, Simmons said that she worked in the kitchen, laundry room and as a custodian. Not only are prisoners inadequately paid, she said, the money they do make often goes toward fines and fees imposed by courts, which leaves them with next to nothing to cover basic needs and save for future release. Exiting prison without financial support leads to recidivism, homelessness and sometimes substance abuse, said Simmons. The DOC sees prison work programs as one way to help people successfully transition back into society after their sentence is served. The state agency points to the findings of a Washington State University study that incarcerated individuals who participate in CI programs are less likely to commit new crimes leading to conviction when they are released. In addition, formerly incarcerated people who worked inside were more likely to have a legal source of income, earn more than $1,000 per month, and earn an average of $1.03 more per hour than their peers who did not participate. Simmons is proposing that half of an inmate’s minimum wage earnings be placed into an account that cannot be accessed until their release. “If people can leave with enough money to have transportation, for housing, clothing, food and potentially some job training, hopefully they will have a better chance at not coming back,” she said.

Poll: Michiganders Approve of Right to Work by 2:1 Ratio Approximately twice as many Michiganders approve of a right-to-work law than oppose it, according to a statewide poll released Thursday by TargetPoint Consulting on behalf of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The TPC poll concluded 58% of 800 Michigan voters surveyed support the state’s legislation; 29% of respondents oppose it. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 3.5%; Michigan has about 8.2 million registered voters. Mackinac bills iteself as “a nonprofit research and educational institute that advances the principles of free markets and limited government” and openly supports the law. TargetPoint, based in Virginia, is a full-service public opinion and market research firm offering custom design work. The law was passed by the state Legislature and signed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder in 2012, taking effect March 31, 2013. Since then, unions in the state have lost approximately 140,000 members. The Democratic trifecta elected by voters in November– the governor’s office, and majorities in both chambers of the Legislature–have signaled a desire to roll back right to work protections. “This is the latest ofmore than a dozen pollsshowing that Michigan voters strongly support the state’s right-to-work law,” Jarrett Skorup, senior director of Marketing and Communications at Mackinac, wrote in an email to The Center Square. “These polls –done by pollsters from across the political spectrum –almost always show that Republicans, Democrats and independents across the state don’t believe anyone should have to join or pay dues or fees to a union in order to hold a job.” Right-to-work laws have been enacted in 28 states, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus ruling rendered union shop arrangements for public employees unconstitutional in 2018. Right-to-work laws render union membership, dues, and fees illegal as a precondition to work in either a union shop or under a bargaining agreement. “Voters will be expecting a lot from the newly elected Democratic majorities, but clearly repealing the popular law is not one of those expectations,” Michael Meyers, president of Target Point Consulting, said in a statement. “Not only is this law popular with nearly 60% of all voters, but it is also popular across all major demographics in the state.” According topoll results, 71% of Michigan Republicans and right-leaning independents favor the right-to-work law, followed closely by 66% of independents. A majority of Democrats and left-leaning independents support the law, with 46% in favor and 40% opposed. The poll also revealed that 46% of citizens who voted for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer favor the law, while 40% oppose. Perhaps even more astonishing is 60% of labor union members responding to the poll said they support right to work, while 34% answered they oppose it. Members of teachers’ associations narrowly oppose right to work by 2 percentage points, 49% to 47%. “When even Democratic voters, including their most important coalition members, African-Americans, union members and young voters, support the right-to-work law, that tells us Michigan voters want this law to remain in place.” Meyers said. “Michigan voters of all stripes and persuasions overwhelmingly disagree with the idea that people should be forced to pay dues or fees to unions.” Detroit poll respondents favor right to work by 57% to 30% opposed. Similar results were polled in Grand Rapids, where 58% of respondents registered their support compared to 26% opposed. In the Flint-Saginaw region, 69% of respondents supported and 18% opposed.

New Louisiana Law Requires Government-Issued ID to Watch Porn A new Louisiana law went into effect this year requiring individuals who access porn websites to verify their age using government-issued identification. Republican state Rep. Laurie Schlegel of Louisiana introduced the bill last February requiring commercial porn websites to verify the age of anyone who accesses its material with a government-issued ID, which Gov. John Bel Edwards signed into law in June. The bill, which went into effect over the weekend, makes companies who violate the law liable to civil claims while ostensibly prohibiting them from collecting users’ data. “Pornography contributes to the hyper sexualization of teens and prepubescent children and may lead to low self-esteem, body image disorders, an increase in problematic sexual activity at younger ages, and increased desire among adolescents to engage in risky sexual behavior,” the bill states. Any company that receives over 33% of its revenue from pornography falls under the constraints of the law, according to the bill. Those who wish to access pornography websites must link their government-issued ID through a third-party verification system and Louisiana’s digital driver’s license platform. Schlegel is a licensed professional counselor and a certified sex addiction therapist who has worked with patients who suffer from pornography, accordingto USA Today. The inspiration for the bill came from singer Billie Eilish, who confessed on the Howard Stern Show that porn had been introduced to her at 11 and affected her relationships and mental health. “I don’t think a lot of parents know what’s on the internet,” Schlegel told USA Today. “It’s just a click away for kids. … I always like to tell people: ‘This is not your daddy’s Playboy.’ What kids are seeing on the internet is extremely, extremely graphic, hardcore pornography.” Schlegel also voiced hopes that her colleagues in the federal government would consider passing similar legislation. Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah introduced the Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN)Actin December.The bill would impose federal age verification requirements for commercial porn websites and enforce fines of up to $25,000 per violation. Schlegel and Edwards did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

FDA Approves New Drug for Early Treatment of Alzheimer’s The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease, with testing reportedly showing considerable success in helping patients with the debilitating condition. The FDAsaid in a press releasethat it had approved the drug Leqembi for Alzheimer’s patients. The drug is “the second of a new category of medications approved for Alzheimer’s disease that target the fundamental pathophysiology of the disease,” the agency said. “This treatment option is the latest therapy to target and affect the underlying disease process of Alzheimer’s, instead of only treating the symptoms of the disease,” Billy Dunn, thedirector of the Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the release. Testing of the drug reportedly showed it having “a statistically significant reduction in brain amyloid plaque,” one of the chief signs of Alzheimer’s progression. The approval was granted toEisai R&D Management Co, the FDA said. More than six million Americans reportedly suffer from Alzheimer’s. The disease was first clearly identified in the early 20th century, though it has likely affected humans for much longer.

Southwest Says Flight Cancelations Triggered by Recent Winter Storm Will Cost $825 Million Southwest Airlines said Friday the tens of thousands of delayed and canceled flights trigged by a recent winter storm will cost the company $725 million to $825 million. The company made the disclosure in a federalregulatory filing. Southwest canceled nearly 17,000 flights during the storm, which has occurred from about Dec. 21 to Dec. 24, and the company has promised to reimburse passengers whose flights were cancelled. This storm and the related problems left thousands of passengers stranded at airports, with many of them having lost their luggage, at least temporarily. The reimbursements will result in the airline losing an estimated $425 millionin revenue. In the filing, Southwest cited increasedoperating expenses as a result ofreimbursements to customers,premium pay and additional compensation for employees and the estimated value of rewards points offered “as a gesture of goodwill” to impacted customers as major contributors to the millions in additional costs. The discount airline has also acknowledged that outdated technology and its business model, which features flights between regional airports, contributed to the cascade of cancellations while competitors recovered more quickly. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said he would investigate the cause of the cancellations and how they could have been prevented.

SCOTUS to Vote on Hearing 2020 Election Case Against Biden, Harris, Pence, Senators, Congressmen The Supreme Court is set to consider hearing a 2020 election case regarding actions taken on Jan. 6, 2021 by former Vice President Mike Pence, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, 291 House members, and 94 senators. The lawsuit, filed by Raland J. Brunson,alleges the defendants violated their oaths of office by refusing to investigate evidence of fraud in the 2020 election before accepting the electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, allowing for Biden and Harris to be “fraudulently” inaugurated. During the joint session of Congress to certify the 2020 election results, “over 100 members of U.S. Congress claimed factual evidence that the said election was rigged,” Brunsonalleges in hispetition for a writ of certiorari. “The refusal of the Respondents to investigate this congressional claim (the enemy) is an act of treason and fraud by Respondents. A successfully rigged election has the same end result as an act of war; to place into power whom the victor wants, which in this case is Biden, who, if not stopped immediately, will continue to destroy the fundamental freedoms of Brunson and all U.S. Citizens and courts of law.” On Friday, the court will decide whether to grant the case a hearing. Four of the nine justices must vote to hear it for the case to move forward. Thelawsuit,Brunson v. Alma S. Adams, et al, was originally filed on June 21, 2021, by Raland J. Brunsonin Utah’s 2nd District Court after his brother, Loy, filed the same lawsuit in federal court in Utah, according to thebrothers’ websiteexplaining their cases. The brothers are representing themselves in the lawsuits. The Raland J. Brunson suit was moved from the state court to the U.S. District Court in Utah. After that court decided against Brunson, he appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Before a decision was made by the federal appeals court, Brunson realized he could bypass the court and go straight to the Supreme Court by invoking the high court’sRule 11. The rule says that a case pending before the appeals court may bypass that court’s decision and go to the Supreme Court if it “is of such imperative public importance as to justify deviation from normal appellate practice and to require immediate determination in this Court.” After the Supreme Court received Brunson’s petition on Sept. 23, the clerk of the court followed up with him twice for more information on the lawsuit and the timeline for when that information would be sent. Brunson’s filing in the federal district court case noted that members of Congress had requested an investigation into the election. His complaintasserts there were “over 1,000 affidavits detailing that the Election was rigged with fraud, and claims that there was massive foreign interference in the Election by helping illegal aliens, and other noncitizens vote in the Election, thereby canceling the votes.” On Jan. 2, 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), along with 10 other senators, requested “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.”A total of147 Republican lawmakersobjected to the certification of the election on Jan. 6. “The efforts made, as stated in the complaint, that avoided an investigation of how Biden won the election, is an act of treason and an act of levying war against the U.S. Constitution which violated Brunson’s unfettered right to vote in an honest and fair election and as such it wrongfully invalidated his vote,” Brunson allegesin his petition for a writ of certiorari. In the district court decision in the case, the judge noted that Brunson asked for “(1) the immediate removal of all Defendants from office; (2) that they never be able to collect any further pay from the United States for their official service in Congress or as President or Vice President; (3) that they never be able to again practice law or again serve as an elected office-holder in this country; (4) that they each be investigated for treason; and (5) that former president Trump be immediately inaugurated as President.” Brunson also sought nearly $3 billion in damages. The federal district court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case based on Brunson’s lack of standing and the sovereign immunity that the defendants have in their capacity as government officials. The appeals court upheld the dismissal.

Commentary: From What, Exactly, Is the FBI Protecting Us? After the tiered releases of the Twitter files, many suspicions have been thoroughly confirmed. Namely, social media monopolies like Facebook and Twitter worked hand-in-glove with the FBI, as well asother government agencies, to suppress accounts and censor stories they jointly deemed misinformation, disinformation, or otherwise harmful to the country during the 2020 election. The most significant malfeasance arises from thecoordinated campaign to suppress theNew York Poststory about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. The laptop exposed in great detail Hunter’s dissolute lifestyle, along with his role as the family “bag man” for various overseas financial interests. Many have pointed out theOrwellian implicationsof the FBI and other intelligence agencies interfering in elections, determining which speech is “safe,” and pressuring private companies to do what the FBI has no authority to do directly while coordinating with theirerstwhile colleagues. But even beyond these obvious problems, the major premise behind all this government activity is highly questionable. How Harmful Is Harmful Speech? The harm being addressed is, essentially, bad speech. For the FBI and our ruling class, Our Democracy™ is apparently so fragile that the intrusion of even a single bad idea from foreign governments or internet trolls will irreparably damage the integrity of the election process, as well as any election results. This is why the FBI, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and their allies in the media made a huge deal about Russianinterference in the 2016 election. They always kept the details vague, conflating what actually happened with widespread fears that Russia somehowhacked voting machines. The whole thing was an alibi for Hillary Clinton’s loss and an implied indictment of Trump’s legitimacy. The establishment’s alarmed tone distracted from the reality that theonlyinterference amounted to ahandful of Facebook ads, ham-handedly designed to fan the flames of ongoing national discord. Some of the Russian-bought ads were pro-Trump and others were pro-Black Lives Matter. But regardless of the content, and even though Russia hid its involvement, why did any of it matter? Can people not listen, agree, or disagree with something they read, whether it’s from a foreign government or some domestic gadfly, or even someone whose identity remains anonymous? Don’tother countries, be they Mexico, China, or lately Ukraine, also spend money to influence our policies? Isn’t the idea that people have a right to hear foreign viewpoints the premise behind “public diplomacy” and institutions likeRadio Free Europe? The Right to Listen Under well-established First Amendment law, Americans have a right not onlyto engagein free speech, but a corollary rightto listento speech, including from foreign sources. At the height of the Cold War, the 1965 case ofLamontv.Postmaster General,struck down a federal statute directing the Postmaster General to seize “communist political propaganda” that “is printed or otherwise prepared in a foreign country,” to notify the addressee of its source, and to deliver it only upon the recipient’s request. These statutory requirements were far more transparent and far more permissive than the various bans, throttling, account deletion, and othersub rosacensorship undertaken by the FBI in collusion with the social media monopolies. Even so, the Supreme Court held that the “limitation on the unfettered exercise of the addressee’s First Amendment rights” to be “at war with the ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open’ debate and discussion contemplated by the First Amendment.” While the Constitution prohibits almost all restrictions on political speech, and case law emphasizes the rights of both speakers and listeners to benefit from a “marketplace of ideas,” lately a new ethos has emerged: one that is fearful, sentimental, and paternalistic. Under the emerging ethos ofsafety, not only are certain forms of speech deemed beyond the pale—so-called hate speech, for example—but advocates approach the entire ecosphere of speech as something that must be curated and controlled. Implicit in this approach, the public must be vulnerable, fragile, tempestuous, and easily seduced by bad foreign speech. Instead of calling it what it is—ideas we disagree with—they ominously label such speech “disinformation.” This is not language consistent with our Anglo-American free speech traditions. TheLamontprecedent is noteworthy because it dealt with a far more insidious species of foreign propaganda from a far more aggressive foreign competitor. Even so, the Court upheld the rights of readers to read Soviet propaganda if they wanted to. By contrast, other than its vague social conservatism, contemporary Russia has no similarly broad ideological message for Europe or the United States. It certainly does not have a message as organized, dangerous, and purposeful as Soviet Communism. Occupied Democracy There is a relevant precedent for the “managed speech” and “safety boards” that the establishment now considers important. In the wake of World War II, the allies imposed significant measures on occupied Japan and Germany to prevent the revival of aggressive nationalism, including bans on the Nazi party in Germany, disestablishment of the Shinto religion in Japan, renunciation of divinity by the Japanese emperor, and a variety offormal and informal taboosthat constrained these nations’ emergent democratic politics. These were each democracies of a sort, but labored under significant substantive limits on subjects that might otherwise obtain majority support. They were something new: “occupied democracies.” Under the circumstances, such restrictions made a lot of sense. After all, together both regimes had started an atrocious and costly war, and their conduct before and during the war was intimately tied to each nation’s political beliefs and practices. Their constitutional systems and democraticbona fidesreally were fragile and really did need certain safeguards. But precedents from military occupation are not a good template for our peacetime domestic affairs. We are not emerging from some dark chapter in our history, in spite of all the attempts to justify a domestic dragnet with talk of “extremists.” Trump’s politics were well within the American mainstream, liberal even, by the standards of 30 or 40 years ago. If he represented a partial vote of no confidence in the system, that is the point of elections and the presumed advantage of democracy. Even though he was elected fair and square, he wasdeprived of the same deference, respect, and mandate as his predecessors. The idea of a fragile democracy that must be “fortified” to achieve particular substantive outcomes is, in fact, the opposite of democracy. Democracy is just a shorthand for popular self-government. Most of the limits imposed by the Constitution are on the state itself, not on the people. When democracy and elections are managed, someone must be doing the managing, and that someone must deem himself or themselves above majority control. For the ruling class, any majority outcome that goes against their bipartisan shibboleths—things like funding Ukraine, a strong NATO, and open borders—is anathema. Rather, voting and elections serve only to provide legitimacy to the system, buttressing the real power centers that aremostly unaffected by voting. While it is rarely said out loud, thwarting the popular will and labeling the result Our Democracy™ is an essential part of their program. But there is a contradiction at the heart of this view. If democracy is so great, what does it say about majority rule that voters are so easily confused, led astray, or fooled by disinformation? If they really are uneducated and atavistic, who cares what such people want? Perhaps this is why the same ruling class considers populism so taboo, even though it’s merely one step removed from the majority rule that makes up the essence of democracy. As in post-war Japan and Germany, the Washington, D.C. clique that sits above the people and purports to limit their exercise of majority rule is really in charge. When Biden, Pelosi, the FBI, and the social media monopolies say Our Democracy™, theemphasis is always onOur.

Harvard Med Research on mRNA Vax Spike Protein Undermines Fact-Checkers, COVID Censorship Fact-checkers and Big Tech lost another round with purported COVID-19 misinformation this week, when an American Heart Association journal published research suggesting the spike protein used in mRNA vaccines can harm some people. The peer-reviewed study inCirculationreviewed 16 adolescents and young adults hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston Children’s with post-vaccination myocarditis from January 2021-February 2022. All had “markedly elevated levels of full-length spike protein” in their blood, “unbounded by antibodies.” The Harvard Medical School researchers affiliated with the hospitals did not find free-floating spike in 45 “healthy, asymptomatic, age-matched vaccinated control subjects,” despite “essentially indistinguishable” antibody profiling and T-cell responses between the two groups. The findings call into doubt the default response of tech platforms and media organizations when dissenting scientists question the safety of the spike protein. LinkedIn abruptly shut downmRNA vaccine pioneer-turned-critic Robert Malone’s premium account in June 2021 when he mentioned the spike in the context of heart inflammation reports among young men. Malone later said aLinkedIn “senior executive” personally apologizedfor the wrongful removal. ReutersandPolitiFacthave each fact-checked Malone for claiming the spike is “cytotoxic” and harms children. “The spike proteins are harmless, do not cause illness and do not last long in the body,” PolitiFact claimed a year ago. “Covid vaccines show your body’s natural defenses how to recognize and kill the virus, then they disappear,” former CDC DirectorTom Frieden claimedin October 2021. “They don’t stay with you.” Last summer,Twitter issued a strike against Kevin McKernan, who managed MIT’s research and development for the Human Genome Project, for claiming the spike protein is a “super-antigen” whose staphylococcal enterotoxin B domain has “potent toxicity.” More than a year ago, Swedish researchers reported in the peer-reviewed journal Viruses thatSARS-CoV-2’s spike protein “significantly inhibitsDNA damage repair,” so it might be “safer and more efficacious” to phase out the full-length spike in COVID vaccine development. The Circulation study has been shared by COVID vaccine skeptics, including British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who told Just the News last fallhe first faced social media censorshipafter turning on mRNA products. Malhotra now calls them “one of the worst pharmaceutical interventions in the history of medicine.” “Whether the circulating spike protein in the setting of mRNA vaccination was pathogenic [caused the disease] is unclear,” theresearchers wrote in the full paper, calling its association with myocarditis “notable” in this cohort of 12-21 year-olds. “There is growing in vitro evidence that spike itself can stimulate cardiac pericytes dysfunction or inflame the endothelium,” they wrote. “Thus, the spike antigen itself, which evades antibody recognition rather than invoking immune hyperactivation, may contribute to myocarditis in these individuals.” Former Brown University epidemiologistAndrew Bostom, who threatened to sue Twitterbefore Elon Musk’s purchase due totwo suspensions in a monthfor sharing COVID vaccine research, highlighted this section. The authors say the study shouldn’t be taken as evidence that COVID vaccination is generally harmful. “These results do not alter the risk-benefit ratio favoring vaccination against COVID-19 to prevent severe clinical outcomes,” according to a box on “clinical implications.” The paper neglects to mention COVID’s estimated infection fatality rate for young people, however. Stanford Med epidemiologist John Ioannidis, whoseearly-pandemic study of COVID infection ratesput a target on his back, and his Meta-Research Innovation Center team published their latest update on IFRs Sunday in theElsevier journal Environmental Research. Based on 31 “systematically identified national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccination era,” the median IFR for ages 0-19 was 0.0003% and for 20-29, 0.002%. That means 3 and 20 fatalities in a million, respectively. “The current analysis suggests a much lower pre-vaccination IFR in non-elderly populations than previously suggested,” the study says.The team’s year-ago update cut IFR in half for young people. The Circulation paper, accepted for publication the day before Thanksgiving, came out a day afterHarvard Med promoted the FDA’s callfor Americans regardless of risk level to get so-called bivalent boosters after completing their primary series or monovalent booster. That would mean a minimum three spike exposures for children as young as six months. The medical school citedmodeling by the Commonwealth Fundthat claims an extra 75,000 lives could be saved over three months if Omicron-Wuhan strain boosting reached the same rate as flu vaccination for the 2021-2022 season. That model was updated after theFDA’s mouse data-based authorizationof bivalents but beforeresearch questioning their claimed superiority. Mass General Brigham, which is Harvard Med’s teaching hospital, downplayed the importance of the Circulation paper’s findings in itspress release on the study. It put the first mention of the spike protein belowidentical consecutive sentencesreading: “Risk of severe COVID-19 continues to outweigh rare risk of post-vaccination myocarditis.” The release’s first paragraph also emphasizes the purported rarity of the adverse event, citing an uncredited statistic without age breakdowns. “If the risk of myocarditis is not stratified by pertinent risk factors, it may be diluted for high-risk and inflated for low-risk groups,” according to a new peer-reviewed paper by University of California San Francisco epidemiologist Vinay Prasad in theEuropean Journal of Clinical Investigation, owned by academic publisher Wiley & Sons. Prasad reviewed how many risk stratifiers — sex, age, dose number and manufacturer — were used in 29 post-vaccination myocarditis and pericarditis studies. A plurality (45%) had one or fewer, while 28% had all four. “The highest incidence of myocarditis ranged from 8.1-39 cases per 100,000 persons (or doses) in studies using four stratifiers,” the paper says. Six studies found at least 15 cases per 100,000 persons or doses for 12-24 year-old males after the second mRNA dose. “Dose 2 is worse than dose 1. Moderna is worse than Pfizer,” Prasad wrote in an accompanying essay for theSensible Medicine newsletterTuesday. “But these differences are lost in analyses that lump together products or combine young men and old women.”

Review: 10 Books Representing Fiction for the Ages At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this ongoing series of literature recommendations. This week’s entries include fictional stories with timeless themes and insight into reality, in addition to being enjoyable tales in their own right. Read the previous listhere. Joseph Conrad.Heart of Darkness. 1899. “From humble beginnings as the son of a dissident in Poland, to a life of adventure on the far corners of the globe, to at last a dignified position as an elder statesman of the English literary community, Conrad’s personal story is as engaging as his writing. … His incredible stories and the characters in them captured the human condition with a degree technical and artistic perfection often imitated but never full captured again.” Norman Mailer.The Naked and the Dead.1948. “Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War,The Naked and the Deadreceived unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since enjoyed a long and well-deserved tenure in the American canon. … Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows a platoon of Marines who are stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei.” Ray Bradbury.Fahrenheit 451.1953. “Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book. … But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.” Frank Herbert.Dune.1965. “Widely considered among the classics in the field of science fiction, theDunesaga, set in the distant future and taking place over millennia, dealt with themes, such as human survival, human evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, and power. … Herbert’s evocative, epic tales are set on the desert planet Arrakis, the focus for a complex political and military struggle with galaxy-wide repercussions.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.The First Circle.1968. “Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy. … On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country’s brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller’s identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin’s repressive state—or refuse.” V.S. Naipaul.The Enigma of Arrival.1987. “The story of a young Indian from the Crown Colony of Trinidad, who arrives in post-imperial England. He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress. Naipaul (…) is known for the wistfully comic early novels of Trinidad, the bleaker novels of a wider world remade by the passage of peoples, and the vigilant chronicles of his life and travels.” Tom Wolfe.The Bonfire of the Vanities.1987. “The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 satirical novel by Tom Wolfe. The story is a drama about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City, and centers on three main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, and British expatriate journalist Peter Fallow. The novel (…) has often been called the quintessential novel of the 1980s.” Wendell Berry.That Distant Land.2005. “That Distant Landincludes twenty-three stories from Wendell Berry’s Port William membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book shines forth as a single sustained work, not simply an anthology. It reveals Wendell Berry as a literary master capable of managing an imaginative integrity over decades of writing with a multitude of characters followed over several generations.” Cormac McCarthy.No Country for Old Men.2005. “McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. … He sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.” Michel Houellebecq.Submission.2015. “In a France quite similar to ours, a man embarks on an academic career. Unmotivated by teaching, he expects a boring but calm life, protected from great historical dramas. However, the forces at play in the country have cracked the political system to the point of causing its collapse. This implosion without jolts, without real revolution, develops like a bad dream. … This book is a striking political and moral fable.”

Federal Judge Upholds West Virginia Law Preventing Boys from Competing in Girls’ Sports A federal judge ruled Thursday in favor of a West Virginia law that requires athletes to compete in sports on the basis of biological sex rather than gender identity. Southern District ofWest VirginiaJudge Joseph Goodwinruledthat the state’sH.B. 3293, commonly known as the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” is “constitutionally permissible” because its definitions of girl and woman on the basis of biological sex are “substantially related to the important government interest of providing equal athletic opportunities for females.” The ruling comes after a lawsuit, filed on behalf of 11-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender girl, argued that H.B. 3293 violated Pepper-Jackson’s rights under Title IX a federal law that prohibits discrimination of the basis of sex, and kept the student from joining the girl’s cross country team. “While some females may be able to outperform some males, it is generally accepted that, on average, males outperform females athletically because of inherent physical differences between the sexes,” Goodwin wrote. “This is not an overbroad generalization, but rather a general principle that realistically reflects the average physical differences between the sexes. Given B.P.J.’s concession that circulating testosterone in males creates a biological difference in athletic performance, I do not see how I could find that the state’s classification based on biological sex is not substantially related to its interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females.” Pepper-Jackson’s lawsuitalleged that the law was “targeted at, and intended only to affect, girls who are transgender.” Goodwin noted that there are “inherent physical differences” between males andfemales, and while Pepper-Jackson was able to take puberty blocking medication to mute those “inherent physical differences,” some transgender females take the medication after puberty is completed which still gives them an advantage, the ruling stated. Lainey Armistead, a former West Virginia State University soccer player, intervened in the lawsuit in 2021 to support the “Save Women’s Sports Act” in an effort to protect “fairness and safety,”accordingto a press release by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who filed the motion on Armistead’s behalf. “Today’s decision is a win for reality,” Christiana Kiefer, senior counsel for ADF, said in a press release. “The truth matters, and it is crucial that our laws and policies recognize that the physical differences between men and women matter, especially in a context like sports. Female athletes deserve to compete on a level playing field. Allowing males to compete in girls’ sports destroys fair competition, safety on the field, and women’s athletic opportunities.”

DHS Chief Mayorkas Insists Border is Closed as Biden Tours El Paso Ahead of President Biden’s first trip to the southern border on Sunday in El Paso, Texas, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas again said the U.S. southern border is closed. His comments came despite thousands of illegal border crossers pouring into the city, filling the airport, sidewalks, homeless shelters. Over the past few days, many were bused out of town and otherwiseclearedout ahead of the president’s visit. On Jan. 5, after the president announced his expanded immigration plan, Mayorkas announced the Department of Homeland Security was preparing for the end of the public health authority Title 42 after its challenges in court end. Mayorkassaid, “Title 42 or not, the border is not open. We will continue to fully enforce our immigration laws in a safe, orderly and humane manner. Individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States will be subject to expulsion under Title 42 or removal under Title 8.” Mayorkasalso said the crisis at the southern border was “because our immigration system is broken, outdated, and in desperate need of reform. The laws we enforce have not been updated for decades. It takes four or more years to conclude the average asylum case, immigration judges have a backlog of more than 1.7 million cases, and we have more than 11 undocumented people in our country, many of whom work in the shadows …” He mentioned that there are 2.5 million Venezuelans living in Columbia and 1.5 million living in Peru. Over 350,000 Haitians are living in Brazil and Chile and the number of Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica has more than doubled over the past year. He made the remarks as the number of apprehensions of illegal entries by Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians have surged in the U.S. in the past few months and aftermore than 5 millionforeign nationals were apprehended or evaded capture from law enforcement. This includesover 3.3 millionin fiscal 2022, of whichnearly 1.8 millionoccurred in Texas alone. The El Paso Sector, which includes two west Texas counties and all of New Mexico, has experienced a surge in the last two months, breaking all-time records. In December, agentsapprehendedover 55,700 people and reported nearly 33,000 gotaways, according to preliminary CBP data obtained by The Center Square. In November, theyapprehendedmore than 53,000 illegal foreign nationals in the sector and reported over 24,000 gotaways. The number of people crossing the board every month are greater than the individual populations of all but four cities and all but five of counties in New Mexico, according to 2022 Census data analyzed by The Center Square. The record numbers increased after Mayorkas reversed several policies, including releasing illegal foreign nationals into the U.S. and limiting ICE enforcement of detention and deportation policies. Nineteen attorneys general filed a brief with the Supreme Court over them; Florida heads to trial Monday in another lawsuit in which the plaintiffs argue the administration is continuing to violate federal law. Multiple members of Congress have called for Mayorkas to be impeached; multiple attorneys general, led by Florida, have called for him to resign. Last November, U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., now Speaker of the House, said “if Secretary Mayorkas does not resign, House Republicans will investigate every order, every action, and every failure will determine whether we can begin impeachment inquiry.” On Sunday morning, when asked to respond, Mayorkas instead told ABC News This Week he was joining the president in El Paso and at the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico City on Monday, where world leaders will discuss “the security of the homeland.” On Saturday, Mayorkas reiterated his “secure border” language in an interview with CNN anchor Poppy Harlow. She asked him, “Border officials have been consistently telling” a CNN correspondent “they feel abandoned by this administration, by the federal government. So why has it taken two years for President Biden to go to the southern border?” Mayorkas replied, “We have been dedicating our efforts to the situation at the border since day one. We are incredibly proud of our frontline personnel who are tirelessly and selflessly dedicated to the mission. The president knows the border very well. … He is going to see the border not for the first time in his public service career this Sunday.” The National Border Patrol Council, the union representing BP agents, has argued the Biden administration, which defunded CBP enforcement mechanisms while sending $45 billion more to Ukraine, said the administration “doesn’t want more money for DHS to enforce laws and deport people. They only want more money to process more people so they can release more people. Don’t be fooled by their propaganda.” The union also said, “No administration in modern history of this country has done more damage, killed the morale of Border Patrol agents and unleashed death, destruction, rapes, murders and mayhem at our border like the Biden administration.” In a statement it issued on Saturday, it said, “As Biden and Harris sit around DC patting themselves on the back and lying about the border, things in the real world continue to deteriorate at record-setting levels. Rampant lawlessness, dead bodies piling up and human suffering are not part of the gated fantasyland they live in.”

Chicago School Audit Finds Nearly 500 Sexual Complaints Filed in 2022 Chicago school officials this week revealed that the school system recorded nearly 500 sexual complaints over the last year, with investigators stressing their inability to respond to a majority of all complaints they receive. The Chicago Board of Education Office of Inspector General saidin its 2022 annual reportthat it received 470 “sexual allegation” complaints over the course of FY2022. The OIG noted that that number of sexual complaints “do[es] not include matters that were referred to other investigative bodies,” such as “student-on-student” sexual complaints. Overall, the 470 sexual allegations comprise just over one-quarter of all complaints fielded by the OIG over the course of the fiscal year. The OIG noted, meanwhile, that it cannot respond to even half of the total complaints it receives. “Of the 1,825 total complaints received, the OIG opened investigations into a total of 725 cases (39.7%),” the report said. “Several factors restrict the number of cases the OIG can open and investigate, including a continuing focus on significant and often complex issues and time consumed by post-investigation activities.”

Commentary: Lowering the Bar on the ‘New McCarthyism’ “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House! The contest wasbrutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (andothers) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look athow “democracy”(if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work. I am of two minds about that. My own take is that McCarthy is an unreliable ally for those on the Right. He was only too happy to shovel billions of your and your children’s money to Ukraine while doing little to secure our southern border. McCarthy is from California, so, naturally, he likes to spend money. He even got behind such improvident and mendacious schemes as raiding Medicare to pay for the U.S. Postal Service. He was happy to fund the January 6 kangaroo court, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and support mandates for the useless – indeed, dangerous – COVID vaccine for the military. In plain terms, hisvoting recordis only intermittently conservative. Kevin McCarthy, in short, is a swamp creature masquerading as a swamp critic. The Swamp loves its own, and so it was no surprise that McCarthy eventually prevailed, just barely. He did so at considerable cost to the power of the speaker’s office but also considerable benefit to people who care about accountability. McCarthy had to make many concessions to his vociferous opponents in order to entice enough of them to his side (or in the case of a couple, to absent themselves from the House so that McCarthy could win with fewer than 218 votes). Henceforth, a single Congressman can move to remove the speaker. A new committee modeled after the “Church Committee” will be empaneled to investigate abuse by the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence services. More generally, three members of the Freedom Caucus are guaranteed seats on the nine member and all important Rules Committee. That’s not a majority, but it is an agenda-influencing percentage. There were other important concessions, though how and indeed whether they will happen is not clear. I am keen on term limits, and so were the holdouts. They got McCarthy to agree to put the matter to a vote, though I don’t know anyone who believes that this popular idea (popular with thosenotholding office, that is) has a ghost of a chance of passing. More promising is the agreement to end the profligate and insulting practice of passing huge “omnibus” spending packages at the last possible moment so that, as Nancy Pelosi said about aprevious assault on fiscal sanity, you “have to pass it to know what is in it.” Henceforth, or so it was agreed, members of Congress will get at least 72 hours to read bills before they are required to vote on them. That is bad for earmarks, good for accountability. The bottom line is that McCarthy’s prerogatives as speaker have been curtailed, which is a good thing. Also, he has made public promises on important matters that it will be difficult to walk away from without cost. At the same time, I get the distinct feeling that not a lot is going to change. Will there be a meaningful investigation of the January 6 protest at the Capitol? (Where was Nancy Pelosi? Why was the offer of deploying the National Guard not accepted? Who, finally, is Ray Epps and was he correct in saying he “orchestrated” the protest and entry into the Capitol?) Will the partisan and grotesquely un-democratic actions of the January 6 committee presided over by anti-Trump fanatics receive the scrutiny they deserve? I doubt it. I expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under the reign of this new McCarthyism. I might, of course, be proved wrong. I hope I will be. Above all, what just happened in Washington reminded me that Democrats as a group understand power and how to use it much better than Republicans do. The 18th-century Whig writer and politician Horace Walpole once remarked that “no country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” That Machiavellian observation may be unedifying. It may also be true. I note that Donald Trump, much to the surprise of some, endorsed McCarthyafter the third voteended in failure. Trump’s support did not seem to move the needle much one way or the other. Perhaps that is a sign of his faltering political support. Perhaps it is a sign of his canniness. We’ll know the answer to that soon.

University of Michigan Pays More than $18 Million to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Staff The University of Michigan (UM) spends more than $18 million annually to support its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff, according to an analysis of public salary records by UM emeritus professor Mark Perry. UM pays a total of $18,120,242 to support more than 142 staff members who work to promote DEI initiatives on campus during the 2022-2023 school year, according todataanalyzed by Perry. The total equals the amount it would take to cover the cost of in-state tuition for 1,075 students, he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In my opinion, most colleges like UM are spending way too much money on DIE efforts, and it’s incredibly wasteful because those efforts are part of advancing the new DIE religion in higher education and directly contradict the core mission of a university – to educate students, teach critical thinking and expose them to intellectual diversity – in favor of pursuing misguided goals of social justice, racial justice, and gender justice,” Perry told the DCNF. “Those misguided and expensive DIE resources could be better spent by reducing tuition instead of feeding new layers of costly administrative bloat that end up getting passed along to students in the form of higher tuition and fees.” UM expanded their DEIstaff members by 53% between the 2018-2019 and the 2022-2023 academic year, according toPerry’sanalysis. Only 82 “diversicrats” were employed during the 2018-2019 academic year and cost the university $10.6 million.The university increased the number of staff to 126 during the2021-2022 academic year which cost $15.6 million. Perry reported that he could not find a UM staff position with the words “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in the job title until the 2004-2005 academic year. Positions which fit the bill have increased since 2015, according to a graph Perry provided to the DCNF. He said that the number of positions has “metastasized like a cancer.” The highest-paid DEI-focused staff member is Tabbye Chavous Sellers, UM’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion who is married to theformerDEI provost Robert Sellers, according to UM’s salary disclosuredata. Sellers makes $380,000. In total, 44 staff members make more than $100,000 in base salary, 95 make more than $100,000 in total compensation and 17 make more than $200,000 in total compensation, Perry reported. “I don’t think any university chief ‘diversicrats’ in the country make $380,000 or $430,795, that is highly unusual. I also don’t think many colleges have 142 highly-paid diversicrats, so UM stands out as maybe the university with the greatest number of diversicrats and with the highest paid diversicrats in the country,” Perry told the DCNF. In December 2021, Perrytweetedthat The Ohio State University employed 132 DEI-focused staff during the 2021-2022 academic year. That number of staff cost $13.4 million, which could cover the cost of in-state tuition for 1,120 students. The University of Michigan and Sellers did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Tennessee U.S. Representative Burchett Strafes Alabama’s Rogers for Outburst During McCarthy Battle: ‘People Shouldn’t Be Drinking, Especially When You’re a Redneck’ Even though U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-55) would win the House Speaker’s race, it may have been overshadowed byan incident moments earlier on the U.S. House of Representatives floor involving U.S. Reps. Mike Rogers (R-AL-03) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL-01). Throughout the week, Gaetz had been the figurehead for the opposition to McCarthy’s bid, which kept McCarthy from reaching the required majority to earn the role. Rogers hademerged as one of McCarthy’s most staunch alliesin the ordeal by taking an aggressive tack against the 20-something holdouts led by Gaetz. At one point, Rogers called for stripping the holdouts of their committee assignments,which drew the ire of U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX-21). For Rogers, Gaetz’s decision to vote “present” instead of for McCarthy in the 14th vote of the Speaker elections was a breaking point late Friday. Video footage showed the long-time Alabama congressman approaching Gaetz but only to be restrained by his colleague U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC-09). Although the incident continues to generate a lot of buzz, one of Rogers’ colleagues was apparently very upset about the incident. U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN-02), who was in the middle of the fray Friday, had some very pointed remarks for Rogers, according to CNN’s Kate Sullivan. “People shouldn’t be drinking, especially when you’re a redneck, on the House floor,” Burchett said, according to Sullivan’s social media. “I would drop him like a bag of dirt. Nobody’s gonna put their hands on me. Nobody’s gonna threaten me.” “It’s just one of those things — you’ve been around fights before, you’ve seen it. Some guy gets in your face and then it’s just an unfortunate moment is all it was. It shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have crossed that line,” Burchett added, according to Sullivan’s account. In the 12 hours following the dust-up, Rogers offered no public comment other than a tweet congratulating McCarthy and a brief statement. “I am excited to see Kevin McCarthy elected Speaker of the House,” Rogers’ statement said. “Now it is time for the House to do the work the American people sent us here to do.” Following the election’s completion, McCarthy downplayed the incident in comments to reporters. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I mean, we ended up with a tie, and [Gaetz] was able to get the others to be able to go present.” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Gaetz ally,called Rogers’ actions“completely out of line.” Although Gaetz has been posting to his social media, he has not addressed the incident directly since the kerfuffle.