True dat!

Found on Gab:

And that's why we're having so many problems getting out of "this" together - because with very few exceptions, those managing "this" aren't part of what the rest of us are experiencing.  I reckon most of them need replacing, at once if not sooner.




Peter

Has the FBI institutionalized malfeasance of office?

I'm glad that the Attorney General has withdrawn the charges against General Flynn:  but I'm sickened that they were ever brought at all.  The entire affair demonstrates that a major US government agency deliberately disregarded both the law and the facts in going after an individual for partisan political purposes.

Something has got to be done about this.  It's simply intolerable to think that those responsible can continue their lives and careers, getting away with their crimes - because they were crimes.  Be in no doubt about that.  If we allow them to pass now, then future administrations and bureaucrats and officials will take that as a sign that they, too, can get away with it.  Examples need to be made.  Heads need to roll - and very senior heads, at that - not only through dismissals, but through criminal prosecution, too.

Tucker Carlson put it very well.  Please take the time to watch the video below, if you haven't seen it already.  He hits all the right notes, IMHO.

Senior officials were willing to destroy the life and livelihood of an innocent man, in order to get at his boss.  Politics triumphed over the rule of law - at least in the past.  That may have been prevented, finally, in General Flynn's case . . . but there's nothing except the rule of law to prevent it happening again.  That's a very scary thought.  Therefore, that rule of law needs to be applied to the perpetrators.  It's as simple as that.

Peter

Practical, effective ways to combat the COVID-19 virus

In mid-March, I cited Tomas Pueyo's article "Coronavirus:  Why You Must Act Now".  It was a clarion call to politicians and business leaders to take immediate action to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and listed various measures that would help in that process.

I was interested to learn that a number of experts in their field have since joined with Mr. Pueyo to study the matter further.  They've published four more articles, which I recommend to your attention, and will be publishing more (you can sign up for notifications here).  The articles analyze what's happened around the world, what's worked, and what hasn't.  Those so far published include:

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance

What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time

Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance

Part 1: A Dancing Masterclass, or What We

Can Learn from Countries Around the World

Coronavirus: The Basic Dance Steps

Everybody Can Follow

Part 2 of Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance

Coronavirus: How to Do Testing

and Contact Tracing

Part 3 of Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance

They've also produced a more formal, scientific article titled "Evidence-based, cost-effective interventions to suppress the COVID-19 pandemic: a rapid systematic review".  Click on that link to go to its summary page, then click "Preview PDF" to read the text.

I find these articles interesting in that they're analyzing events "on the ground" and recommending ways to make dealing with the pandemic easier for all of us.  They're not politically motivated, and don't seem to have any particular special-interest agenda to push.  They appear to aim to provide as much useful, practical information as possible.  For example, from their latest article:

Many countries are enduring the Hammer today: a heavy set of social distancing measures that have stopped the economy. Millions have lost their jobs, their income, their savings, their businesses, their freedom. The economic cost is brutal. Countries are desperate to know what they need to do to open up the economy again.

Thankfully, a set of four measures can dramatically reduce the epidemic. They are dirt cheap compared to closing the economy. If many countries are enduring the Hammer today, these measures are the scalpel, carefully extracting the infected rather than hitting everybody at once.

These four measures need each other. They don’t work without one another:

• With testing, we find out who is infected
• With isolations, we prevent them from infecting others
• With contact tracing, we figure out the people with whom they’ve been in contact
• With quarantines, we prevent these contacts from infecting others

Testing and contact tracing are the intelligence, while isolations and quarantines are the action.

There's much more at the link.

The thing is, of course, that these measures aren't "one-size-fits-all" like the total shutdown of the economy currently being experienced.  They require good judgment, careful administration and constant monitoring of the health care workers in the field doing the work.  That's anathema to bureaucrats, who'd rather use a single mold and force everyone into it, because it's easier to administer that way.  (The bureaucrats will also have to get out of the way of those who can produce solutions - such as, for example, cheap, accurate easy-to-use tests for COVID-19 - rather than micromanage every aspect of the problem.)  Politicians also won't like it, because it demands that they use their heads rather than react with a knee-jerk.  (For an example of the latter, note the number of states whose governors have extended the lock-down, some into July, rather than proactively seek to restart their economies while protecting citizens so far not affected by the virus.)

Kudos to Mr. Pueyo and his team for producing these articles.  It's good to have all the information pulled together and synthesized, to provide a detailed overview of successes, failures, and potential next steps.  I look forward to seeing what they have in mind in future.  Thanks to them and those like them, the rest of us are better informed, and have options to consider - and to recommend to our elected leaders.

Peter

Behind the scenes of the meat shortage

The Washington Examiner takes a hard look at some of the factors causing the current meat shortage in the USA.  As usual, they can be summed up in a single phrase:  the government got involved.

Dig a little deeper, and the situation gets even more dire. We could soon see farmers unable to keep their farms afloat, livestock killed in mass with no means to be sold, and hungry families.

For those unfamiliar with agriculture policy, this scenario seems unimaginable. But according to those who’ve spent their years toiling in the amber waves of grain, the problem was merely exasperated by the pandemic, not the result of it.

. . .

There is no actual shortage in livestock ... Rather, the breakdown is coming on the plant side of the equation where cramped quarters are hazardous. Why can’t farmers sell directly to consumers and circumvent this problem? You guessed it — government regulations.

In 1967, the federal government blocked states from making their own decisions on how meat was processed and promptly handed the power to the Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

What followed was essentially a takeover of control of the industry. Farmers had to travel long distances and sell their livestock to a small number of USDA slaughterhouses instead of to local butchers, small processors, or directly to consumers. This relationship began to severely impact their profit margins as the government was able to force farmers to sell their product for pennies on the dollar. When you limit the number of places the producers can sell, you control the prices.

Even before the current crisis, this was a powder keg of cronyism waiting to blow. The economic model forced on farmers by the government simply doesn’t work. They’re buried in debt as they must finance expensive equipment to do their jobs, yet also must pay all of the costs of raising the animals upfront. And they increasingly see their returns diminish at the end of the equation.

Farmers are boxed in. While “Big Ag” gets bailed out from the ramifications of trade wars and other bad economic policies, small farmers, who make up the bulk of production, are struggling to survive.

To add insult to injury, as our farmers bend over backward to create under the heavy burden of strenuous regulations on our own soil, the USDA continues to import beef from Brazil’s cheaper, unregulated marketplace instead. You wouldn’t know that, though, because in 2013, Congress abolished the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) law that would have tipped consumers off.

There's more at the link.

The article doesn't mention some of the positives of USDA involvement and the centralization of slaughterhouses.  Among others, they include the best use of the limited number of inspectors.  There aren't enough of them to assign several to every remote slaughterhouse;  but if those facilities are centralized into larger, regional units, the inspectors can cope with the workload.  Also, there's the problem of ensuring uniform standards among many scattered processing plants.  This is illustrated every day by outbreaks of food poisoning in countries that don't pay enough attention to standardized processing, food hygiene, etc.  (We've all heard phrases such as "Montezuma's Revenge", "gyppo gut", "the Zulu two-step", "Delhi belly", and so on.  They all have the same origin - or should I say "point of departure"?  On second thought, perhaps not . . . )

That said, there's also a very strong case to re-examine the current system and see whether it can't be improved, for the benefit of the nation as a whole.  I, for one, would like to know whether I'm buying beef "made in America" or produced elsewhere.  I'd also like to see an expansion of farm "buying clubs" where farmers are allowed to sell their meat direct to consumers.  Miss D. and I have bought half a cow before (its name was "Sir Loin", we were told), and it lasted us well over a year - it was very good meat, too, straight from the farmer to the consumer.  Why not allow that on a wider basis?  Local game processors, ubiquitous in the hunting regions of the country, could just as easily process cows or pigs as they can deer or wild hogs.

Peter

US foreign policy: run by "The Blob"?

A very interesting (and sometimes amusing) article takes a critical look at US foreign policy:  how it's made, how it's run, and its consequences over the past half-century or so.  It doesn't pull its punches.

The major policy think tanks in Washington are rife with three sources of funding: government, private defense companies, and very wealthy neoliberal and neoconservative foundations (think Carnegie on the left, Scaife on the right). The National Security and “Grand Strategy” programs at elite schools are no different. They all have one thing in common: the status quo. As a result, the output is hardly dynamic, it’s little more than dogmatic, conventional thinking about world problems that keep bureaucrats in jobs and always meddling, the military amped up with more hammers and nails to hit, and politicians (and attending administrative class) favorable to either or both of these goals in Washington, preferably in power.

This is a closed club that offers only gradations of diversity just like Democrats and Republicans during the war: No one argued about “liberating” Iraq, only about the tactics. That was why it was so easy for Hillary Clinton’s Nat Sec team in-waiting to create the Center for a New American Security in 2008 and transition to an Obama think tank shop in 2009. Plug and play one for the other, counterinsurgency under Bush? Meh. Under Obama? Let’s do this! They all had a plan for staying in Afghanistan, and they made sure we were, until this day.

This doesn’t even include the orbit of research centers like RAND and the Center for Naval Analysis, which actually get government funding to churn out reports and white papers, teach officer classes, lead war gaming, and put on conferences. Do you really think they call for less funding, killing programs, eliminating lily pads, or egads, pulling out of entrenched strategic relationships that might not make sense anymore? Never. The same players get the contracts and produce just what the government wants to hear, so they can get more money. If they don’t get contracts they don’t survive. It’s how the swamp works.

As for it being a cabal? This ecosystem—the Blob—is a revolving door of sameness, a multigenerational in-crowd of status-driven groupthink inhabiting a deep state that is both physical and of the mind. It’s a lifestyle, and a class. To get anywhere in it, you not only have to have the right pedigree, but the right way of thinking. Ask anyone who has attempted to break in with the “wrong credentials,” or marched off the reservation in the early years of Iraq only to be flung to the professional margins. Conference panels, sanctioned academic journals, all run by the same crowd. Check the Council on Foreign Relations yearbook, you’ll catch the drift. You can be a neocon, you can be a “humanitarian” interventionist, but a skeptic of American exceptionalism and its role in leading the post-WWII international system? Ghosted.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

This is the "deep state" writ large, IMHO.  It doesn't matter who's in power:  the foreign policy "establishment" has (in the past) continued to run things its way, and basically forced the administration to conform (not that much forcing was needed).  President Trump overturned that.  From the beginning, he ran down the importance of the State Department with its entrenched cabal, and got rid of a lot of the deadwood there by appointing Secretaries of State who would wield the axe with vigor.  He continues to run the USA's foreign policy on the basis of "America First", and insists that professional diplomats toe the line on that.  Many of them still resist, more or less covertly, but so far he's managed to keep control.

However, let a more compliant President take office, and all bets are off.  The Blob will grow again, because you can't decapitate a Blob - it has no head, only an endless appetite.  Feed it, and it'll grow back to what it was.  Let's hope that doesn't happen.

Peter

The current lockdown might help to reshape American education

As the lockdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic continues, it's highlighting fissures in the monolithic education establishment, and giving parents and students fresh reason to question whether or not they're getting the best value for their education dollars.

First, the American Spectator points out that "We're All Homeschoolers Now".  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Kids go to school for six-plus hours a day, but a lot of that time is wasted. In most cases, you could run through the lessons in about two hours. Parents are seeing that now.

The pandemic quarantine is showing us that schooling is basically state- or parent-sponsored babysitting with some ABCs, 123s, dodgeball, and the prom thrown in.

This highly credentialed child care costs taxpayers a lot of money ... now that we’re out the money and have to take care of the kids, reassessment is going to happen.

. . .

The sector of education that is in real trouble is higher education. Costs have gone nothing but up as schools have used the money from student loans to do things like build more buildings, hire an assistant to the assistant to the assistant of the president — basically anything but put that money back into the classrooms.

. . .

Colleges and universities are keeping the money flowing in right now with online courses. Students who would never have considered distance learning have gotten a taste of it. Many will decide they prefer that to the in-person experience.

Schools will try to hold per-credit prices up, but it won’t work. Economies of scale for in-demand online learning are significantly lower than classroom learning, and there are enough credentialed competitors in that space that this will finally bend the higher-ed cost curve down.

There's more at the link.

(As I've said in these pages before, every one of my four university qualifications was earned through part-time and/or correspondence education.  I could never afford to go to university full-time.  I don't think my education suffered through doing it that way, and I saved a bundle!)

Heather Mac Donald agrees that US higher education is basically a Ponzi scheme.

Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.

Higher education today resembles a massive Ponzi scheme. Colleges desperately recruit ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating. Before their inevitable withdrawal, those students’ tuition dollars fuel the growth of the bureaucracy, which creates the need to get an even larger pool of likely dropouts through the door to fund the latest round of administrative expansion ... Tuition at private four-year colleges grew 250 percent from 1982 to 2012, while the median family income rose about 18 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to ABC Insights. Since the 2008 recession, tuition at four-year public colleges rose 35 percent.

. . .

The primary concerns of college leaders are developing new sources of revenue and competing for students, according to a 2019 Chronicle of Higher Education poll. Even before the coronavirus sent a spasm of fear throughout the enrollment bureaucracy, colleges were nervously eyeing their sinking enrollment yields ... And now, the coronavirus threatens tuition dollars, government support, and alumni giving.

. . .

Already-enrolled students have been sent packing and told to hook up their laptops for distance learning. Almost no college is considering a tuition rebate, which implies that online learning should be valued at the same rate as an on-campus class. Students and their parents may start to ask why they should pay astronomical fees for a campus experience if they can get the same instruction over the web.

. . .

For years, as tuitions climbed to ever-more obscene levels, observers predicted that the higher-ed bubble was surely about to burst. That never happened. Now, however, the long-overdue correction may be near.

Again, more at the link.

Even technically-oriented education can benefit from the online learning environment, as a recent study confirms.

A new study led by Cornell University researchers shows that STEM students learn just as much in online classrooms as they do in traditional in-person classes. Online courses might be less satisfying than in-person classes, but many more students can access them and they are much cheaper to facilitate.

Last, but by no means least, home schooling and education means that left-wing and progressive indoctrination of students is being exposed for what it is - and, for the first time, many parents are doing something about it.

Needless to say, now with my kids home and me overseeing their daily e-learning, this is a great opportunity to take a deeper look at the left-wing theories on race and gender, not to mention climate change, that public schools are pushing on my children.

. . .

Over the last several years, my children’s schools have pushed for “equity,” which usually starts with a survey or audit about “school climate.” Of course, the ideologues hired to do the surveys always find that certain groups feel oppressed, and thus interventions are necessary to create what they deem as safe learning environments where everyone feels welcome. But only certain dimensions of identity politics, particularly race, gender, and sexuality, are measured.

. . .

Equity at its core is based in left-wing critical race theory that assumes institutional racism and oppression pervade every corner of society and necessitate the redistribution of resources based on “oppressed” status. It is sold as a warm, fuzzy idea of helping kids succeed, but it serves as a gateway for training teachers on how racist they are, reducing academic standards, exchanging traditional curriculum with more “culturally relevant” material, and fomenting resentment between groups rather than promoting the safe school climate these equity plans say they so desire.

. . .

Schools are likely to continue e-learning efforts in the upcoming weeks as we continue through the pandemic. Parents, use this time when your children are home to find out what they are learning. It will be interesting to see how many parents discover that kids do not have to be in a classroom to learn, and that they have options, especially if the curriculum in their schools is pushing fringe race and gender theories on their kids.

More at the link.

That last article illustrates why so many "special snowflakes" are encountered at our colleges and universities, demanding "safe spaces" and protesting vehemently at being exposed to any other point of view but those in which they've been indoctrinated.  After twelve years of that sort of schooling, why should they be any different?  And, since parents have willingly abandoned much of the responsibility of raising their children to such school systems, they have no right to complain.

The question is, how can we snap our children out of such indoctrinated nonsense?  I honestly don't know whether that's possible in the short term.  At least, if the current shutdown shows parents what's going on and motivates them to do something about it, that can only help the younger generation - even if some of their older siblings are effectively write-offs until they learn better in the School of Hard Knocks.

Peter