Jts5665

1. Progress Ireland.

2. Some new results on tatonnement?

3. The new Paul McCartney album is his best since the 2004 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.  Here is a song by song analysis.  For an 83-year-old, it is an astonishing and I think unparalleled achievement.

4. “Our findings suggest that the aggregate value of data is about 1.5% of GDP.”

5. Turkmenistan notes.

6. Seminar teaching rich kids how to manage their wealth (WSJ).

The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In the US, someone with wealth is free to give it away more or less as they see fit (spousal claims excepted, which partly reflect marital co-ownership). In much of Europe, however, there is forced heirship–a large fraction of wealth must be handed down to children which makes it harder to direct large portions of wealth to charities, foundations, or non-family causes compared to the US. (Louisiana, with its French-Spanish civil law roots, is the one state with forced heirship and even it mostly gutted it in 1995.)

Here is an excellent post by John Arnold who, if he were European, would be required to give 75% of his wealth to his three children instead of spending it on philanthropy as he and his spouse are now doing.

America’s cultural ideal has been the self-made entrepreneur while Europe’s was rooted in aristocracy, with status inherited rather than earned. Europe’s inheritance laws show this divide.

Many European countries have “forced heirship” laws that require people to leave 50-75% of their estates to their children. Want to leave the majority of your wealth to charity? not allowed. Your kids are estranged from you, struggling with addiction, or irresponsible? still required to give them the money. Want your kids to avoid a life of entitlement? tough.

Incredibly, these laws look back at transfers made during your lifetime. If you have 3 children in France, you’re required to bequeath them a minimum of 75% of your estate. Because French law calculates this based on your assets at death plus all lifetime gifts, giving away more than 25% of your wealth while alive means your heirs can legally sue to force charities or foundations to return the funds. This has limited the development of the nonprofit sector on the continent.

The cultural gap between an entrepreneurial society and one shaped by dynastic wealth is enormous. If you make it yourself, you tend to want your kids to do the same. If you inherit it, the primary goal is protecting the estate for the next gen.

Countries like Spain, France, and Italy legally entrench family dynasties, while America has historically sought to limit them through estate taxes. The result is not only a weaker culture of philanthropy and civil society in Europe, but also less economic dynamism.

It’s interesting that in Capital Piketty discusses required equal division to children as an egalitarian legacy of the revolution but, as far as I recall, never reflects on the fact that forced heirship prevents a French entrepreneur from giving his fortune away to charity. A case for laissez-faire, no?

The post Europe Demands Family Dynasties appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

In 2015 I wrote Baltimore Arrests are Down and Crime is Way Up and, as I predicted, Baltimore tipped into an high crime equilibrium. After the Freddie Gray riots, arrests declined and crime shot up but crime stayed high even after arrests rebounded. In my view, the surge fed on itself: higher crime strained police resources, and that strain—in and of itself—reduced the probability of punishment, sustaining the high-crime equilibrium, as in my crime wave paper.

Yet, beginning around 2022 crime in Baltimore—most especially murders—began to fall.

In April, Baltimore had four homicides, the lowest total for any single month since at least 1970. So far this year, there were 38, compared with 51 in the same period last year. At the current rate, Baltimore would end 2026 with fewer than 100 homicides. There were 323 just four years ago.

How did we get from a city in which the question was how high can crime rise, to one where the question is how low can it go? The answer might be linked to the nationwide decline in murder, spurred by a restoration of policing as the excesses of the George Floyd years recede. But that raises the question of what cities across the country are doing right.

So what caused the decline? We can’t be entirely sure as national trends confound but Charles Fain Lehman has a good piece in the FP arguing plausibly that the answer boils down to carrots, sticks and the non-random nature of murder. Begin with the latter. A significant subset of murders are highly predictable. A gang member gets gunned down today. Next week, you can expect retaliation. Moreover, you know who is going to do the murder even more than you know who is going to be murdered. Namely, a close associate—a fellow gang or family member—will be the one to do the killing. Sometimes pre-Cog is not so hard.

So with this in mind, Baltimore, under a new mayor and tough on crime prosecutor, began to intervene in the murder cycle before it happened, i.e. a focused deterrence program based on Boston’s Operation Ceasefire.

The approach involves a detailed investigation of every shooting that happens in the city. Every week, the Baltimore Police Department and its partners review the week’s incidents….For every shooting, GVRS prescribes reaching out to known associates of the victim.

…At one recent coordination meeting, about 20 people gathered around the table of the conference room at Baltimore’s Doxa Ministries Church Without Walls. Under the direction of Reginald Williams from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, they talked through two new “referrals” associated with the victim of a recent shooting. One had a long criminal history and was on house arrest. Another, barely an adult, was himself a victim a few years earlier.

Both men will have their doors knocked on by several of the meeting’s attendees. They will be offered services—job training, tattoo removal, relocation, whatever they need to get out of the “life.” But they will also get a clear message, delivered verbally and in the form of a letter from Mayor Scott: Baltimore is watching them—and will come after them.

Carrots, sticks, and a little Pre-Cog. Together they appear to be working.

The post Why are Murders Down in Baltimore? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A police hate crime adviser says she was left “gobsmacked” after West Yorkshire Police focused on protecting mosques, not Jews, after last October’s Manchester synagogue attack – then sacked her for speaking up.

The post Police Sacked Hate Crime Adviser Who Warned Force Favoured Muslims Over Jews appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

This is terrifying. Read the whole post.

For now, this is a threat. And it's just part of Mamdani's new housing plan.

Article Written and Published by Libelists?
by Jessica Rose at Brownstone Institute

Here’s the article in question. It was written and published on Dec. 5, 2025, 6:00 AM EST by Brandy Zadrozny in MS NOW and is entitled: “RFK Jr.’s CDC panel: No more hepatitis B vaccine for some newborns. The CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, stocked with anti-vaccine activists and loyalists to RFK Jr., voted on Friday to stop recommending a birth dose of vaccine.”

I am posting my X remarks and defense of some of the false and defamatory comments made therein.

The first statement in this article is false, and what follows are many defamatory remarks including multiple references to “anti-vaccine activists” and descriptions of the ACIP meeting and members as “chaotic and ultimately unproductive” and “illegitimate”.

Read on... I would consider suing for libel here.

Without data?

Close up of “without data”…

147 children under 10 (including infants) got dosed and were monitored for 5 whole days. This is the Recombivax HepB clinical trial.

There’s been very little change in infant morbidity since the onslaught of at-birth HepB regimen. The age ranges with biggest declines indicate other sources as the reason for HepB acute cases decline.

Such as these…

Why does the US have HepB as a birth dose when other countries do not while these other countries do not suffer from hordes of endemic HepB in babies?

Looks like all the cases of HepB after 2003 were from chronic infections.

And that these chronic infections were in older adults.

Pebsworth simply offered the reasons for acute HepB becoming a more prominent issue in the US over the past decades. She was not misinforming or stigmatizing. At all.

“Pebsworth attributed risk from hepatitis B to gay men, drug users and immigrants — a claim that both misinforms and stigmatizes disease.”

HepB is an STD and is not transmitted through respiratory droplets, coughing, sneezing, or airborne routes, so blood or semen transmission is impossible in HBsAg- mothers. She states that a rapid rise of acute HepB were due to 1. increases in transmission blood-borne infections (STD transmission rates including HepB) [1960s - blood infusions + 1980s - STD problems + IV drug use], and 2. immigration from high endemicity areas with established chronic HepB carriers which preceded the 1991 universal infant vaccination strategy.

More data…

During the ACIP meeting, Dr. Meissner kept insisting that data showing harms to infants in HepB context does not exist. It does. I didn’t get this data to the ACIP table or to Dr. Meissner’s eyes, but it does in fact, exist.

Close up…

When comparing the estimated number of perinatal HepB deaths from HBsAg+ mothers in the US (2,268) to the estimated number of infant deaths reported to the VAERS pharmacovigilance database using an under reporting factor of only 5, the number of deaths is far greater in the latter estimation. This is based on AAP data, peer-reviewed literature and VAERS data.

Not only are there many deaths reported to VAERS for infants 1 year of age and under, temporal clustering indicates a causative effect.

The number of deaths in days in infants is clustered at 6 days old. This is the age at vaccination.

Temporal clustering represented as the number of days post vaccination in infants two years old and less clearly shows that most reports of death were made on day 1.

*Volitionally…

Republished from the author's Substack

Article Written and Published by Libelists?
by Jessica Rose at Brownstone Institute - Economics, Policy, Public Health, Education, Society

Judging by the headlines, Ted Turner, who died earlier this month at age 87, will be remembered as an adventurer and visionary: creator of CNN, and with it the 24-hour news cycle, the inventor of the satellite-supported national TV superstation, a distinguished sailor, a loyal conservationist, and a reputed playboy. He adored women so much that he produced five children with them, incidentally breaking faith with one of his core values: population control.  

When Turner was born on the eve of the Second World War, just over two billion people inhabited the earth. That number increased three-fold by 2000. For Turner, who had internalized the cataclysmic “overpopulation” fears of the Cold War, such growth in living, breathing souls was not a success, but a looming catastrophe. His goal was to first “stabilize the population,” then ideally reduce it to around two billion.  

Toward his vision of a world with fewer children, Turner was a generous donor to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Planned Parenthood, and the Guttmacher Institute. In 2004, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America presented him with the Margaret Sanger Award, which recognizes “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement.” 

Turner wasn’t the only billionaire philanthropist pouring money into population control. In 2009, he met privately in New York City with Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, George Soros, Warren Buffett, and others to discuss how they could use their wealth to curb overpopulation and fight climate change. They were known as the “Good Club,” The Guardian reported, and they wanted to “save the world.” 

Despite their anxieties about other people’s fecundity, the neo-Malthusian billionaires in attendance had, like Turner, been quite fruitful in their own reproductive behavior: Rockefeller had six children; Soros had five; and Gates and Buffett each had three. While sources described Gates as the “most impressive” speaker, Turner was the most outspoken and attempted to “dominate” the meeting.

His outspoken rhetoric certainly wasn’t limited to elite secret gatherings. At a climate luncheon in 2010, he urged world leaders to adopt China’s one-child policy, insisting that, “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.” 

While lauded as an optimist, Turner believed humans were headed for a nightmare future unless they took drastic action against alleged overpopulation and climate change. He predicted a doomsday scenario of civilizational collapse, with famine, death, cannibalism, and very few survivors living in a “failed state like Somalia or Sudan.” The earth’s temperature is rising, he claimed, because “too many people are using too much stuff.”  

Meanwhile, as an adventurer, he afforded himself a lavish and abundant lifestyle, flying his Bombardier Challenger 300 private jet a distance of nearly 80,000 miles in 2022 alone. His aircraft that year surpassed the combined emissions of 34 average Americans.

Turner’s hypocritical and apocalyptic mindset reflected the zero-sum ideology of twentieth-century neo-Malthusians such as Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, co-author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, which boldly asserted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to overpopulation. Turner admired Ehrlich and derived his two-billion world population ideal from Ehrlich’s estimation of earth’s “carrying capacity.”   

This outlook received bipartisan support in Washington throughout the 1960s and 1970s among “Rockefeller Republicans” like Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger as well as environmentalist Democrats like Jimmy Carter. Neo-Malthusian ideas were institutionalized within the State Department and USAID, operating under the misguided assumption that rapid population growth inhibited economic development and constituted a threat to US national security and economic interests. Food aid was even conditioned on developing countries’ willingness to implement population control policies.  

The neo-Malthusian consensus wasn’t shattered until the Reagan administration declared rapid population growth a “neutral phenomenon” rather than a barrier to development at the UN’s 1984 World Population Conference in Mexico City. Economist Julian Simon, who argued that “the ultimate resource is people,” was instrumental in shaping the Reagan administration’s renewed approach to population policy.  

In 1990, Simon triumphed over Paul Ehrlich in a ten-year wager on the prices of five metals. Ehrlich, betting that population pressures would diminish resources and spike commodity prices, lost to Simon’s more optimistic view that human knowledge, innovation, and resource substitution would produce greater abundance and lower prices over time.  

Simon is no less correct today than he was in 1980 when his wager against Ehrlich began. The “time prices” of basic commodities — denoting the amount of time someone must work to earn enough money to purchase a given item — have continued to shrink, owing much to population growth and the expansion of the rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom.  

Contrary to the assumptions of Turner and the neo-Malthusians, population growth hasn’t exacerbated famine, poverty, and disease. Nor has it necessarily hastened global warming. As economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso documented in their 2025 book After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People, no theoretical or historical relationship exists between population size and particulate air pollution. Whether the human population stabilizes or declines, global warming is forecast to proceed. “Billions of lives lived would make a small difference to this big problem,” they said.  

Addressing and overcoming challenges like climate change requires sustained technological progress, which is enabled by more free minds, not fewer. Turner wanted to limit both human numbers and human freedom, but his Malthusian views embodied a discredited consensus that applied a yeast-in-a-petri-dish model to the study of human population.  

This dismal perspective, which assumes people will breed themselves into oblivion, doesn’t take into account the better angels of our nature: our rationality, ingenuity, and adaptability unparalleled by any other species. But it reveals a lot about how Malthusians think about their fellow humans — not as sovereign individuals possessing inherent rights and dignity, but rather as an infestation requiring systemic control. As Julian Simon pointed out, this worldview isn’t predicated on scientific facts but on “value judgments about the worth of human life.”  

Simon’s intellectual archnemesis, Paul Ehrlich, preceded Turner in death by less than two months. These two Malthusian giants departed our resourceful earth at a time when roughly two-thirds of people live in countries with sub-replacement fertility rates, meaning the average woman is having fewer than 2.1 children. The depopulation they so fervently sought — and funded — has at last become a reality. 

But it comes at a price. Countries are not only facing spiraling debt and deficits spurred by population aging and worker shortages, but also a dearth of love, care, and support for the elderly. In countries like Japan, those who fulfilled Turner’s wish and had only one child — or perhaps none — are increasingly dying alone and undiscovered for days, weeks, or even months. It’s a sad and overlooked outcome of depopulation, but luckily for Turner, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, he had five children, along with billions of dollars, to support him in his final years of decline and dependency.

When a state starts floating an exit tax, it is telling you something more important than any campaign slogan: the people running the place know their model is not working. 

They may not say it that way. They will call it fairness, responsibility, or making the wealthy “pay what they owe.” But the meaning is the same. 

If families, entrepreneurs, and investors are leaving, the state can either ask why its policies are pushing them out, or it can try to tax them for escaping. An exit tax chooses punishment over reform. 

I understand why these proposals resonate with some people. If you are watching wealthy residents relocate while governments still face bills for schools, roads, pensions, and other commitments, it is easy to feel like the people with the most mobility are ducking the tab. 

That frustration is real. It deserves a serious answer. But an exit tax is not a serious answer. It is a confession that lawmakers would rather cling to a failing fiscal model than fix the spending, regulation, and tax policies that made people want to leave in the first place. 

That is why the current trend is so revealing. In California, proposals have centered on taxing billionaire net worth, including wealth that often exists on paper rather than in cash. In New York, the push has extended to a new surcharge on high-value second homes in New York City.

In Washington, lawmakers have already enacted a “millionaires’ tax.” These policies differ in form, but not in spirit. They all send the same message: if government has made your state too expensive, too hostile, or too unpredictable, it may still try to claim part of your future anyway. 

The economics are worse than the politics. Supporters talk as if wealth is a pile of idle cash sitting in a vault, just waiting to be skimmed. It is not. Wealth is usually tied up in businesses, shares, property, and future earnings. 

Taxing net worth or unrealized gains means taxing value that often has not been sold, realized, or converted into cash. That can force asset sales, dilute business ownership, weaken investment, and change behavior long before the tax collector ever gets a check.

 A Hoover Institution analysis of California’s proposal found that once likely migration responses are considered, the measure could leave the state with a negative net present value of about $25 billion. That is the real lesson: politicians score the tax statically, but the economy does not sit still. 

And that is before you get to the broader evidence. The OECD has noted that recurring net wealth taxes have become much less common across advanced economies because they tend to raise less revenue than promised while creating large compliance costs, avoidance incentives, and economic distortions. Countries tried them. Many backed away. 

A recent NBER study on Scandinavian wealth taxation found that higher top wealth-tax rates reduced the number of wealthy taxpayers and that many of those taxpayers were business owners whose departure reduced investment, employment, and value-added. 

That is the part too often ignored in political talking points. When a state drives out a founder, investor, or employer, it is not just losing one tax return. It is losing future jobs, future capital formation, and future opportunity for everybody else too. 

Defenders of exit taxes still fall back on one argument that sounds morally satisfying: these taxpayers benefited from state infrastructure, legal protections, and markets while they lived there, so the state deserves one final cut

But that argument quietly rewrites the relationship between citizen and government. It turns moving into a taxable offense. It says the state retains a lingering claim on your success because you once lived under its jurisdiction. That is a dangerous principle in a federal system built on mobility and competition.

 Even in the international arena, exit taxes are controversial, complex, and tied to specific movements of assets or functions across borders. Importing that logic into state tax policy is not modernization. It is escalation. 

The problem is not just that these taxes are bad economics. It is that they usually do not stay narrow. Politicians sell them as a tool aimed only at billionaires or luxury homeowners — policy aimed at an applause line. But when the revenue falls short, the scope expands. 

One-time wealth taxes become annual property surcharges. “Billionaire” thresholds are expanded to target millionaires and eventually the middle class. “Temporary” taxes become permanent fiscal architecture. New York’s pied-à-terre proposal is a good example of how quickly the logic expands once the principle is accepted. 

Frédéric Bastiat warned us to look not just at what is seen, but at what is unseen. We see the tax revenues. That’s a small, visible victory compared to the investment that never happens, the entrepreneur who builds elsewhere, jobs that never arrive — the unseen costs compound. 

Exit taxes are built on ignoring all of that. 

Claiming an exit tax frames mobility as theft, when it is often a rational response to bad governance. They do not restore prosperity. They steal the opportunity to prosper by doubling down on the very policies that made growth harder in the first place. 

If lawmakers want to deter departures, the answer is not a fiscal trap door. It is better policy: lower taxes, lighter regulation, spending restraint, and a serious effort to make their states places where productive people want to stay.

Real economic renewal is more difficult than yet more taxation, but it is also the only approach that works. Exit taxes will not save failing states. They only confirm why people wanted to leave. 

Earlier this month, in Part V of my series on the U.S. vs. Europe (previous versions available here, here, here, and here), I shared a chart showing the OECD calculations of “Actual Individual Consumption.”

The AIC numbers are designed to give people an apples-to-apples comparison of living standards.

I’m re-sharing the chart today, and I’ve highlighted the United States and France.

The average for OECD nations is 100. France is slightly better than average with an AIC score of 104.

But the US is way head, with an AIC score of 149.

In other words, the average person in the United States enjoys a much higher level of consumption than the average person in France.

What happens, though, if we compare the average person in Mississippi (America’s poorest state) to the average person in France.

I’m motivated to examine this question because there was an interesting exchange of views between Paul Krugman (Europe is doing well) and Pieter Garicano and Luis Garicano (Europe is not doing so well).

Megan McArdle of the Washington Post wrote about this debate. Here are some excerpts from her column.

I can certainly imagine myself in a Parisian cafe, enjoying some steak frites and a glass of wine while taking in the glorious streetscape. What’s harder to imagine is soaking in all that ambiance and thinking, “Yeah, this place is definitely poorer than Mississippi.” … that’s what gross domestic product statistics suggest. In 2024, France had a per capita GDP of $46,103. Mississippi’s was $55,876. As recently as 10 years ago, French GDP was ahead ($37,024 versus $36,184), but since then U.S. GDP and productivity have grown significantly faster than Western Europe’s. …If you want to understand the more serious version of the Europe/America debate, you should read a recent essay economist Paul Krugman wrote while traveling in Europe, saying he sees little evidence of relative decline. You should also read the response that my old economics professor, Luis Garicano, wrote with Pieter Garicano, urging us to believe the statistics over our lying eyes. …The answer Krugman offers is that it’s a mirage. Europe has chosen forms of consumption that don’t show up in GDP (such as taking more vacation than Americans). …The Garicanos offer compelling responses, including noting that highly productive export industries can pay a hefty premium to attract the best workers.

Megan then cites the OECD’s AIC data.

…for those who doubt that Americans are earning more after accounting for things such as Europe’s low-cost universal health care, that there’s a reasonably good measure…known as “actual individual consumption.” This measure includes what governments and nonprofits spend on providing things such as education and health care. Researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at AIC in 2023, adjusted for local price differences and pegged America’s AIC at 150 percent of the OECD average. France is right around the median. …French homes average slightly under 1,076 square feet, while the average U.S. home is around 1,800 square feet and has energy-intensive amenities that most European homes lack, such as air conditioning and tumble dryers.

This is all interesting, at least for people who enjoy comparative economics.

But what about Megan’s speculation about whether France is poorer than Mississippi.

For my contribution to the debate, I’m going to generate an answer.

My methodology is simple

First, according to the Commerce Department, per-capita personal income in Mississippi is $54,531, significantly lower than the US average of $76,375. To be more exact, Mississippi is about 71.4 percent of the US average.

Second, the US is at 149 for the OECD’s AIC measure. So if we make the presumably reasonable assumption that the Mississippi AIC score is 71.4 percent of 149, we get a score that is a bit higher than 106.

Since France is at 104, this means Mississippi wins. Heck, not only does Mississippi beat France, it’s also ahead of nations such as Sweden, Ireland, and Denmark.

By the way, this does not mean I’m saying it’s better to live in Mississippi than in France. If you like old cathedrals, medieval villages, and a couple of thousand years of history, France beats every state, not just Mississippi.

What I will say, however, is that bad policy is hindering French prosperity. France could be and should be much richer. Sadly, it made the mistake of enacting the income tax in 1914 and then it dramatically expanded its welfare state beginning in the 1960s.

The U.S. also made the mistake of bad fiscal policy in the 1900s, but fortunately not as far and as fast in the wrong direction as France.

P.S. One final point is that Europe seems prosperous to American tourists because we generally visit their historic cities, which is where rich Europeans tend to live. Poor Europeans, meanwhile, usually live in the suburbs where tourists almost never visit. This is very different from the United States, where poor people often live in cities and upper-income Americans are more likely to congregate in the suburbs and exurbs.

P.P.S. Mississippi has approved legislation to repeal its state income tax. Assuming that ultimately happens, it will enjoy an even bigger advantage over France.

Scientific discovery is driven by the iterative process of observation, hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis. Despite recent advancements in applying artificial intelligence to biology, no system has yet automated all these stages [1, 2, 3]. Here, we introduce Robin, the first multi-agent system capable of fully automating both hypothesis generation and data analysis for experimental biology. By integrating literature search agents with data analysis agents, Robin can generate hypotheses, propose experiments, interpret experimental results, and generate updated hypotheses, achieving a semi-autonomous approach to scientific discovery. By applying this system, we were able to identify promising therapeutic candidates for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), the major cause of blindness in the developed world [4, 5]. Robin proposed enhancing retinal pigment epithelium phagocytosis as a therapeutic strategy, and identified and confirmed in vitro efficacy for ripasudil and KL001. Ripasudil is a clinically-used Rho kinase (ROCK) inhibitor that has never previously been proposed for treating dAMD. To elucidate the mechanism of ripasudil-induced upregulation of phagocytosis, Robin then proposed and analyzed a follow-up RNA-seq experiment, which revealed upregulation of ABCA1, a lipid efflux pump and possible novel target. All hypotheses, experimental directions, data analyses, and data figures in the main text of this report were produced by Robin. As the first AI system to autonomously discover and validate novel therapeutic candidates within an iterative lab-in-the-loop framework, Robin establishes a new paradigm for AI-driven scientific discovery.

Here is the full article from Nature.  And here are two other new Nature pieces on related topics.

The post Robin (it’s happening) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Tajikistan’s remittances are worth nearly half the country’s GDP—

In Tajikistan, remittances — the money sent or brought back by migrants — amounted to 48% of GDP in 2024. The chart places this figure in context by comparing it with other countries with data for the same year. Nicaragua and Honduras receive remittances worth around a quarter of their GDP — high by global standards, but still far below Tajikistan’s level. Remittances here include two types of flows: money migrants abroad send home to their families, and money cross-border workers bring home from short-term jobs abroad.

Both of these flows play a role in Tajikistan, where most remittances come from labor migrants in Russia. In addition to the roughly 400,000 Tajiks settled there, hundreds of thousands more cross the border for seasonal and short-term work.

According to a report from the International Organization for Migration, about 1.2 million Tajiks were in Russia in mid-2024, which is more than a tenth of Tajikistan’s total population.

The World Bank’s latest Tajikistan Economic Update says that much of the country’s recent rapid economic growth (above 8% since 2021) was supported by these remittance inflows.

That is from Our World in Data, with a picture at the link.

The post Tajikistan fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Last year, I wrote a column rebutting Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D., Va.) attack on a nominee for expressing his belief in natural rights that derive from God, not the government. (He later backtracked after a public outcry). Now, MSNOW host Katy Tur seems to be echoing the same concern over Speaker Mike Johnson expressing his faith in natural rights at the “Rededicate 250” rally on the mall in Washington, DC.

Those voices have seeked to distort the self-evident truth that we know so well, that our founders boldly proclaimed in the Declaration: That our rights do not derive from the government. They come from you, our creator and heavenly father.

The line clearly caused Tur some alarm. The host raised it with the show’s panelists:

What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?

It is an astonishing question given that express reliance on God as the source for the rights declared in that document.

In my new book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I detail how the Declaration of Independence (and our nation as a whole) was founded on a deep belief in natural laws coming from our Creator, not government. Ours was the world’s first major Enlightenment revolution based on those very natural rights.

That view is captured in the Declaration, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The view stated by Kaine did exist at the founding — and it was rejected. Alexander Hamilton wrote that “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

The irony is that the acknowledgment of natural rights does not “put God over the Declaration of Independence.” It is the very premise of that Declaration.

As I discuss in the book, the right of the colonists to rebel was a major question debated before the Revolution. Loyalists would often cite Romans 13, in which Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey civil authorities and be loyal subjects. It would be Reverend Jonathan Mayhew to put this argument to bed, using his pulpit at Boston’s Old West Church to explore the moral foundations for both fealty and rebellion for citizens:

“His published sermon “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the Higher Powers” was given on January 30, 1750, and proved to be one of the most significant publications leading up to the Revolution. Paine’s Common Sense would not be published for twenty-five years, and it was Mayhew who would lay out the moral right, if not obligation, to rebel when natural rights are denied. Mayhew gave the lecture on the one hundredth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, who was experiencing a revival in the minds of many as a martyr.

Mayhew would have none of it and laid out the “general nature and end of magistracy” for a people denied the rights given to them by the Creator. He directly took on the oft-cited biblical authority for those demanding blind loyalty to the King: Romans 13. In the chapter, Paul the Apostle reminds Christians that they must obey the civil authorities and be loyal subjects. The use of this passage, he argued, was a blasphemy in suggesting that a tyrant violating the very natural laws set by God could be treated as “God’s Minister.” To the contrary, there is a moral obligation to oppose such tyrants in defense of God-given rights.”

The Revolution was fought over natural rights that belonged to colonists as human beings, bestowed by God and defended by the American Revolution. The Constitution created a system that guaranteed the protection of those rights contained in the Declaration of Independence.

Speaker Johnson was speaking directly to the foundation of this Republic in reaffirming his faith in natural rights. Of course, the rejection of natural rights in academia and politics is consistent with the view that our rights evolve with a “living Constitution.” What the government giveth, the government may taketh away.

The debate reflected in Tur’s comments could not be more timely or elemental on our 250th anniversary. We must again decide not just who we were then but who we are now as Americans. There are many who want to decouple our system from natural rights as they “reimagine” American democracy and “trash” the American Constitution. It is the same Siren’s Call heard at the founding. That is precisely why Franklin was right that this remains our Republic “if [we] can keep it.”

The Brits actually convicted some bad guys??

Below is my column in The Hill on the statement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that true billionaires do not exist because “you just can’t earn” a billion dollars. Figures such as Jeff Bezos are merely capitalist unicorns according to this new socialism mythology. The problem is that she, and other socialists and Democrats, are fast making this fable come true.

Here is the column:

Another sign that the “Green” Revolution is sinking Germany

The Energiewende (transition to green energy) is often hailed as the future of urban logistics, but a recent development in Bielefeld, Germany, serves as a sobering cautionary tale. The city has been forced to mothball its entire fleet of seven hydrogen-powered garbage trucks.

Idled garbage trucks. Illustration image only, generated by Grok AI. 

Poor logistics

Blackout News reports that for years, Bielefeld’s hydrogen trucks relied on a refueling station in Rheda-Wiedenbrück. Even then, the logistics were strained; drivers had to make an 80-kilometer round trip just to fuel up. Given that these trucks have a daily range of about 300 kilometers, nearly a third of their energy was being spent just getting to the pump.

When the station in Rheda-Wiedenbrück closed, the situation turned from difficult to impossible. The next available station was in Münster—roughly 180 kilometers away for a round trip. At that distance, the trucks would consume most of their fuel just traveling to and from the station, leaving virtually no range left to actually collect trash.

Massive financial investment

The scale of idling the buses is significant. Each of the hydrogen-powered  trucks cost approximately €1 million—four times the price of a conventional diesel garbage truck (roughly €250,000).

To bridge the cost gap, the German federal government provided massive subsidies, covering 90% of the additional costs. In total, nearly €5 million in taxpayer money was pumped into this fleet. Today, those high-tech vehicles are now idle, doing nothing, representing a massive waste of subsidized resources.

Bureaucratic absurdity

The most frustrating part of the story is that Bielefeld actually has a hydrogen refueling station within the city. One might think the solution is simple: just refuel the trucks at the local station! However, due to the strict terms of the government subsidies used to build that station, its use is contractually restricted to hydrogen buses only. Despite both the buses and the garbage trucks belonging to the municipal fleet, formal funding rules prevent the trucks from using the local pump.

Trend of hydrogen snafus

Bielefeld isn’t an isolated case. Similar issues have been reported in Duisburg and Lübeck, where hydrogen-powered municipal vehicles have been sidelined due to fuel shortages or infrastructure gaps. It highlights a recurring theme in the “Energiewende” (energy transition): technology is often deployed far ahead of the practical infrastructure needed to support it.

Summary

The case of Bielefeld’s idle garbage truck fleet is an excample of bureacracy’s rank inability to operate a society, serving as a reminder that “green” technology is is a costly folly.

Original report in German at Blackout News here.

Donate - choose an amount
5101520501002505001000

In December 2025, Australia became the first country to ban youth under 16 years old from holding accounts on major social media platforms, a policy now under consideration in more than a dozen countries and in numerous states. Because social media use is inherently social, the effectiveness of a ban that is easy to circumvent may depend on whether compliance reaches a tipping point: a share of compliant peers high enough to make it optimal for individuals to comply themselves. We surveyed 835 Australian teenagers four months after the ban took effect and find that only about one in four 14–15-year-olds comply. The social environment around use has barely moved: most banned teens believe that their peers are still using banned platforms and cite social reasons for continuing use. Sustaining high compliance requires two ingredients: the share of compliers must be high enough and those who comply must find it preferable to continue complying. The current ban achieves neither. Teenagers report that they require roughly two-thirds of peers to stop using social media to stop themselves, far above the share currently complying. They also perceive compliers as less popular than non-compliers, so the more influential teens disproportionately stay on the platforms. Together, these patterns suggest that compliance is more likely to diminish than to rise. Sustaining higher compliance will likely require pairing the ban with instruments that act on social norms and individual incentives directly.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Leonardo Bursztyn, Angela L. Duckworth, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Aaron Leonard, Filip Milojević, Christopher Roth & Cass R. Sunstein.

A few days ago I was talking with a very smart fifteen year old in Australia (really).  He was of the opinion that it was quite ineffective, though he noted he could no longer access LinkedIn.  I would note there are more stringent measures, requiring more governmental monitoring and control of the internet, that perhaps could have a greater effect.

The post The social media ban in Australia, how is it going? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas underpin everything we do here at The Free Press. These values are the lifeblood of democracy—and essential to the pursuit of truth.

Last September, that principle came under violent assault when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at Utah Valley University. As we wrote then, Kirk “was at that college campus in Utah—the very institution meant to be a bastion of freedom of conscience and speech—because he wanted to promote debate. This is the very act that gave birth to this nation, and the only thing that will ensure its survival.”

In the months since, questions about how to protect free expression have only intensified. They surfaced again recently, when Utah Valley University announced that best-selling author Sharon McMahon would deliver its commencement address, provoking swift backlash. Legislators and online commentators denounced McMahon for posts she made after Kirk’s death—posts that condemned his murder while also criticizing some of his views. Last month, the university canceled her speech, citing “increased safety concerns.”

It’s an episode that captures the tensions in the free speech debate today. That’s why we invited Sharon to share her story. —The Editors

Last December, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at Utah Valley University’s commencement ceremony, scheduled for Wednesday, April 29.

It’s the same campus where Charlie Kirk was murdered last year, in a horrifying act of political violence. It’s also a school I’ve spoken at twice before.

I was looking forward to speaking to graduates. I am a former government teacher and author who has spent years writing and speaking about history, citizenship, democracy, and the obligations of ordinary people in difficult times. My commencement speech was not going to be about partisan politics, to which I do not subscribe. It was going to be about hope, and the long American tradition of ordinary people doing consequential things.

But within weeks of the official public announcement in March of my speaking event, a pressure campaign, led by state and federal Utah legislators and Turning Point USA, caused my invitation to be rescinded.

Read more

(a) At least Rachel Madcow is somewhat consistent in a perverse way: her whole ideology consists of “the needs of the Party are ever-evolving”:

(b) But then there is the strange (?) case of Megan Kelly. Originally at Fox News, she quit the channel for NBC after alleged s3xual harassment by its founder Roger Ailes, then went solo in 2020.

Despite a 2016 spat with Trump, she wholeheartedly endorsed him in 2024 and was rah-rah-MAGA for a while. She was then also supportive of Israel, sincerely or not.

Then apparently she decided to throw in her lot with the Sucker Qatarlsons and Candace of the Sedevacantist Mind, turns hard against Trump and Israel.

Now, suddenly, she reversed course again.

Well, well… did the money from Qatar and/or the SPLC suddenly dry up?

Aside from the “me-again” thing, she strikes me definitely as being “a journalist of negotiable virtue”

ADDENDUM: and behold what became of the state where Mrs. Arbel and I first met:

“Masgramondou” has a long essay on Substack about the SPLC scam:

https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/the-splc-is-going-down

And always a breath of fresh air to listen to Haviv Rettig Gur and (usually) his guests:

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, one of the few economists in the world equally at home solving stochastic dynamic optimization problems as with  sociological theory and history, has an excellent series of twitter posts on capitalism and modernity.

JFV:  I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory.

What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria.

I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978.

Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely.

Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies.

But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies.

I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism.

At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.

Here’s the second post:

Many readers yesterday asked for more concrete examples of what I have in mind regarding the distinctions between features inherent to modernity and those inherent to “capitalism.”

Imagine we have a functioning socialist commonwealth. For simplicity, I will call it the SC.

Imagine also that this SC aims to provide state-of-the-art medical care to its citizens. This is not about superfluous consumption. It is about the desire to provide good preventive care, adequate treatment, palliative care, and so on.

Soon, you realize that you need the scientific-technological complex that develops advanced mRNA vaccines and, even more importantly, the industrial capacity to produce tens of millions of doses at short notice when a new virus arrives or an old one mutates. These are sophisticated processes that involve coordinating millions of individuals with diverse knowledge, skills, and personalities.

But it does not stop there. You will need to produce thousands of MRIs, scanners, FLASH radiotherapy machines, and all the bewildering array of equipment you find in a top hospital.

And I insist: wanting to be treated with the latest oncological equipment if you get cancer is not frivolity. It is a deep human desire that a good society (any society, really) should attempt to provide.

How are you going to accomplish all this? An SC does not want to use private property, so it relies on some form of public property. But public ownership is not the main issue. The real issue is that the SC would need to organize large bureaucratic organizations. Without them, it cannot develop and deploy vaccines, MRIs, scanners, and the rest. The need to scale is the key mechanism at play, not who owns the property.

And, because of their scale, these large bureaucratic organizations will suffer the type of problems that critics of “capitalism” attribute to “capitalism.” The organization will be impersonal and alienating, and inefficient due to career concerns, asymmetric information, conformity effects, and internal politics.

Moreover, because resource constraints hold in every human endeavor, some claims for medical treatment will be denied. The SC will not have enough resources to satisfy every medical demand (and medical demands are, for all practical purposes, unlimited), every demand for education, every demand for the environment, and every demand for this or that worthwhile cause. Sorry, yes, scarcity will always be with us, with or without AI.

Patients whose requests for medical treatment are denied will be particularly annoyed because the SC is built on the idea that such events cannot happen. At least in a “capitalist” society there is someone to blame (the “capitalist”).

Those who deny the need for large bureaucratic organizations are living in a fantasy world. I am pretty sure the day they are told they have prostate cancer, they will run to their closest large bureaucratic organization for treatment.

Those who deny the problems of large bureaucratic organizations, and how deeply irresoluble those problems are, have not seen how not-for-profits work. I have never seen more acrimonious fights than within not-for-profit organizations, where some shared sense of the common good unites members. The fights are fierce precisely because profits play no role.

I have been reading about these issues for nearly 40 years, and I have seen plenty of proposals to address the problems of large bureaucratic organizations. A favorite among many is “participation” or “more democracy” within the organization. No, sorry, more “participation” or “more democracy” only makes things worse. Yugoslavia taught us that you cannot run a large bureaucratic organization based on democratic participation (well, you only need to know some basic economics; Arrow’s impossibility theorem, anyone?).

Large bureaucratic organizations are essential to modern life, and they are full of problems, with or without “capitalism.”

This is what Weber understood and what Marx, who had an incredibly naïve view of the future, never grasped. Weber saw that bureaucracy is not a feature of “capitalism” but the institutional form modern society uses to coordinate large-scale tasks under rational, impersonal rules. Hospitals, ministries, armies, universities, and, yes, corporations all converge on the same form because it works at scale. The iron cage is not capitalist. It is modernity.

The third excellent post on whether capitalism created modernity which criticizes Quine and the analytic-synthetic distinction (!) is here.

The post Capitalism and Modernity appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

HUD: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to real estate professionals clarifying they are not violating the Fair Housing Act when they share information with prospective homebuyers about neighborhood crime rates and school quality data.

“Buying a home is one on the most significant decisions a family will ever make,” said Secretary Scott Turner. “Americans should not be left in the dark about vital facts like neighborhood safety or school quality. HUD is making clear that real estate professionals can openly and lawfully provide this information in an equal and consistent manner to American families.”

The background is that The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin (and via later amendments) familial status, and disability. Discrimination included “steering” buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on protected characteristics. The Biden administration ramped this up with a directive and Executive Order that essentially said the Fair Housing Act must be interpreted not just to prohibit discrimination but to redress and undo past discrimination:

This is not only a mandate to refrain from discrimination but a mandate to take actions that undo historic patterns of segregation and other types of discrimination and that afford access to long-denied opportunities.

…the [HUD] Secretary shall take any necessary steps,…to implement the Fair Housing Act’s requirements that HUD administer its programs in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing and HUD’s overall duty to administer the Act (42 U.S.C. 3608(a)) including by preventing practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect.

The “discriminatory effect” language reinforced that so-called disparate impact, not just intentional discrimination counted as discriminatory—and it contributed to a legal and reputational environment in which platforms and agents had strong incentives to avoid anything that could be characterized as steering. As a result, by the end of the year, Realtor.com had removed its crime map from all search results, as did Trulia, Redfin announced it would not add crime data to its platform and since Zillow already didn’t include such data, by early 2022 all the major portals had dropped crime information. Similarly, the National Association of Realtors published material instructing agents not to directly answer client questions about neighborhood safety. One article in “The Safety Series” was titled “‘Is This a Safe Neighborhood?’ Don’t Answer That” and by “Safety Series” they meant safety for the realtor not the client.

So without explicitly making such information illegal, the government created a legal and reputational climate that chilled its provision. Portals removed crime maps and realtors became reluctant to answer ordinary buyer questions about neighborhood safety and school quality. That is a degradation of service, not a civil-rights victory. The pretext was that crime information might not be accurate but the real fear was that it would accurately suggest neighborhoods with high percentages of black residents had more crime. Withholding information about crime and schools, however, does not change the facts; it just shifts the informational advantage toward buyers who are wealthy, well-connected, or sophisticated enough to find the data themselves. Moreover, it should go without saying that black homebuyers also want information about neighborhood crime rates–don’t these buyers count? Suppressing truthful information is rarely a good way to improve outcomes. As with Ban the Box, blocking direct access to relevant information encourages worse proxy-based decision-making.

Trump’s HUD is correct: fair housing law should prohibit discrimination, not prevent realtors from telling the truth.

The post HUD Says Realtors Can Now Speak the Truth appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Neither retractions, expressions of concern, nor other editorial notices seem to keep authors from continuing to cite problematic papers, according to a look at what happened to more than 170 articles by one author.

“After the public notification of integrity concerns about an article, it would be expected that other authors would no longer cite the article because it is unreliable,” write the authors of a new preprint. But that’s not what they found in a limited comparative study. Whether the study is generalizable has yet to be seen, says one other expert.

Four sleuths – the University of Aberdeen’s Hugo Studd and Alison Avenell and the University of Auckland’s Andrew Grey and Mark J. Bolland – charted citation data for 172 papers on clinical trials from Zatollah Asemi, a nutrition researcher at Kashan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, whose work has come under scrutiny. 

Of these, 23 had been retracted, 38 had expressions of concern, 41 had some other type of editorial notice, and 70 had not been subject to any flag. The preprint authors sought to test how the type of editorial response affected citations, given “differences in their visibility or perceived seriousness.”

Bibliometric researchers sometimes refer to retracted or marked papers that continue to circulate as “zombie papers.” Data suggest the vast majority of retracted papers continue to be cited as if they had not been retracted. Even when citations of retracted papers do dwindle, it’s been unclear whether that’s due to the paper’s age rather than its editorial status. 

The authors of the new preprint have been involved with the Asemi case — and this specific dataset — for years. In 2019, they flagged the 172 papers to the journals that published them with allegations of unethical conduct, results that didn’t match the study design, data irregularities and myriad other integrity issues. For those papers on which editors have taken action, notices have been published an average of five years after publication. As Grey told us back in 2021 in regards to journals’ response times on Asemi’s papers: “Yep, pretty slow.”

The randomized controlled trials reported in the articles examined had collectively been cited more than 10,000 times in more than 6,000 articles. For both the flagged articles and those with no notices, “citations increased steadily, peaking 45-65 months post-publication,” with similar declines thereafter. The researchers found “little evidence that publication of an editorial response, whether it was retraction, publication of an EoC or issuing of an editorial notice, had any meaningful effect on the rate of citation.”

In a jointly signed response to our questions, the four authors told us they were unsurprised by their results, given the years of delay between publication time and notice. They were also unsurprised that the black-marked papers continued to be referenced in new work. “By then, these [trial] publications were probably imbedded within the literature and databases, resulting in continued citation regardless of editorial action,” they wrote.

The authors told us they believe the results of the paper are generalizable, even though it covered one author’s body of work. That’s because the trials spanned 65 journals and were published by 25 publishers.

Jodi Schneider, director of the Information Quality Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is not as convinced it’s generalizable. But, she added, “Their continued analysis of this case study is quite valuable for the research community — with sobering results.”

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

(a) Preach it, sister!

(b) Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (himself originally an Egyptian secular Muslim) argues that the “Democratic” Party has embraced the most toxic form of tiers-mondisme (Third-Worldism) hook, line, and sinker.

https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and

The British Labour Party’s long arc on the Israel question is a second case, less catastrophic in its consequences but no less instructive in its mechanism.

Labor’s postwar leadership maintained, through the 1950s and 1960s, a broadly sympathetic position toward the State of Israel, rooted partly in the socialist character of the early years of Zionism and partly in the moral weight of the Holocaust.

The erosion of that position began in the 1970s, accelerated through the 1980s, and achieved its terminal expression under Corbyn. It was a long series of small concessions, each of which was understood, at the time it was made, as a reasonable accommodation to a legitimate concern. The anticolonial left within the party insisted that Israel was the one case in which the party’s commitment to decolonization was being betrayed by a sentimental attachment to a settler state. The leadership, which did not wish to fight on this ground and which had other priorities, understood that the anticolonial and migrant constituency was growing and the pro-Israel constituency was shrinking, and made the accommodation. It did not defend the position. It allowed the position to erode, gradually, through a series of shifts and tactical retreats, each of which was too small to constitute a crisis and all of which, taken together, constituted a transformation.

By the time Corbyn assumed the leadership, the transformation was complete, and what the moderates discovered was not that they had lost on Israel while holding everything else. They discovered that they had lost the ability to hold anything. The moderates who had conceded Israel in order to fight on other grounds found that there was no other ground. The ground itself had shifted beneath them.

The French left and Algeria is the third case, and in certain respects it is the most clarifying, because it is the case in which the concession was most obviously correct on the merits and most obviously destructive in its consequences.

The French Left’s turn against the Algerian War was, by any reasonable moral standard, the right position. The war was a catastrophe, the ruthless methods were unconscionable, and the defense of French Algeria was indefensible. But the anticolonial framework that was mobilized to oppose the war did not retire itself when the war ended. It did not say: we were right about Algeria, and now let us return to the normal business of French political life, applying our judgment case by case to the questions before us. It said: we were right about Algeria and now the Third Worldist logic applies everywhere and always, and the task before us is not to demobilize but to extend. The French left that emerged from the Algerian War was not a left that had won one argument and was prepared to be moderate on the others. It was a left that had discovered a permanent indictment of all of Western civilization, and that could be applied to every question the West would ever face regarding its relationship to the rest of the world, and it applied it, and has never stopped applying it.

The moderate Democratic leadership, which believes itself to be practicing realism, is not making a new mistake by imagining that a sacrificial logic can be controlled. In many ways, it is one of the oldest mistakes in politics.

Mrs. Arbel is in many ways an unreconstructed liberal (unlike this writer, who gradually “crossed the aisle” after 9/11 and the Second Stupidfada). She was a card-carrying Democrat all her adult like (although she had voted for both of Reagan’s terms), until recently, when she with tears in her eyes had her registration changed to Republican. She’s far from the only disaffected Democrat in the MAGA coalition that I know: except that the ones in “New Class” professions generally can’t afford “coming out” in the US and confide in me in whispers.

Look, I’m no keener on a one-party GOP state than I am on a one-party “Democrat” state or any other form of one-party state — all of those eventually get hollowed out by corruption.

I would love for the Democratic Party to return to its roots and “keep the other side honest”— but at present, they are being skinsuited by Islamo-Marxists, with the acquiescence of the merely über-corrupt.

ADDENDUM: Insty has a provocative thesis: the US has been “colonized from within” by the bureaucracy- NGO complex

https://open.substack.com/pub/instapundit/p/our-self-colonized-nation?r=bj80t&utm_medium=ios

As I wrote last month, the key defining definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production.

In other words, a country is socialist when government is the full or part owner of companies.

This policy is a failure when implemented by out-of-the-closet socialists like Mayor Mamdani in New York City.

But it’s also a failure when implemented by politicians like Donald Trump.

Sadly, it seems like Trump is doubling down on socialist failure. Here are some excerpts from a report in the Wall Street Journal by Alison Sider, Brian Schwartz, and Andrew Scurria. 

The Trump administration is nearing a rescue deal for Spirit Airlines, which is struggling to survive during a run-up in jet fuel prices. Under the agreement being discussed, the U.S. government would loan the embattled discount carrier as much as $500 million, receiving in return warrants to take a potential significant stake in Spirit, people familiar with the matter said. …The Transportation Department and Commerce Department are involved in the discussions, which aren’t yet final, and the terms of any agreement could still change. …rescuing Spirit would be a rare intervention to prop up a single carrier. …Trump said Tuesday he was troubled by the idea that Spirit, which employs about 14,000 people, could go out of business. “Maybe the federal government should help that one out,” he said on CNBC.

Here’s a frustrating part of this story.

Government intervention is a big reason that Spirit is in financial trouble.

JetBlue Airways in 2022 agreed to acquire Spirit in a $3.8 billion deal, but the Justice Department challenged it, arguing that the combination would hamper competition and lead to higher fares. A federal judge agreed and blocked the deal. “Spirit is a small airline. But there are those who love it. To those dedicated customers of Spirit, this one’s for you,” U.S. District Judge William Young, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, wrote in his 2024 decision.

In other words, Spirit would not be in trouble today if the government had not interfered with foolish antitrust law a few years ago.

Seems like Judge Young, who wrote, “this one’s for you,” should not have skipped economic classes in college.

Another case of Mitchell’s Law.

This tweet from Scott Lincicome is spot on.

I’ll close by warning that Trump’s socialism is setting a terrible precedent.

As noted in my Fifth Theorem of Government, it’s important to contemplate what happens when the “other side” is in charge of Washington.

I’m terrified by what a future President AOC might do now that Trump has opened a very bad door.

P.S. The U.S. only ranks #27 in the Hayek Socialism Index, which is not good, but I fear America’s score will be even lower in the next edition.

P.P.S. I don’t like bailouts, but I’d rather have Trump simply give cash to Spirit rather than give cash AND take an ownership position.

This column ran on Fox.com

Once-in-a-century play here, folks. Never seen anything like it before and probably never will again (baseball, amirite?).

Below is my column in the California Post and New York Post on the disbarment of John Eastman. I criticized the January 6th speeches while they were being given and disagreed with the legal theories presented to stop the certification. However, this action leaves troubling questions of consistency and clarity in the standards used to judge lawyers presenting novel or controversial legal arguments. It also is likely to have a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech by lawyers.

Here is the column:

Last week, the California Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of John Eastman. It is a decision that will prevent Eastman from practicing law – the most serious punishment the California State Bar can deliver.

Eastman is the former dean of the law school at Chapman University in California. He represented President Donald Trump in some of his election challenges in 2020.

In 2020, I publicly disagreed with Eastman’s legal theory that Congress could block the certification of President Joe Biden.

However, Eastman’s disbarment should be a concern for everyone who values the rule of law and free speech.

After the election, various legal advisers told Trump that there wasn’t enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election –– as some of us in the media also said.

But Eastman and other lawyers believed there were still arguable grounds to challenge the certification.

In the past, Democrats in Congress had moved to block the certification of Republican presidents, and Eastman believed that their playbook was legal, or at least defensible.

Election disputes are often difficult to resolve in court because time is quite limited.

As the date for the 2020 certification approached, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and others made sensational claims about voting machines and other conspiracies that they later admitted were not supported by evidence.

The courts uniformly rejected these challenges.

Eastman is being punished for a different reason: He helped to develop Trump’s legal argument for blocking the election certification.

He admitted that there were few cases to cite as precedent, and acknowledged that he and the Trump legal team were advancing novel theories.

But that is not unusual in controversial cases.

Public interest attorneys often advance novel legal arguments, challenging existing precedent and the status quo. Even longstanding precedents, like Roe v. Wade, have been overturned after years of litigation.California State Bar officials failed to address the implications that disbarring Eastman would have on other cases in which new legal theories are tested.

The animus of the California State Bar was also evident in the original charges against Eastman. He was ultimately found guilty on 10 of 11 charges of egregious and deceitful conduct.

The lower court’s decision placed great emphasis on Eastman’s public remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally. The court dismissed his claims that his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Democratic Party election lawyers have been punished by courts and accused of meritless or unsupported claims. However, bar associations in “blue” states have not moved to disbar them, and I would not support such an effort.

Take Democrat attorney Marc Elias. He was a critical player in the infamous Steele dossier on “Russia collusion,” and helped push the false Alfa Bank conspiracy.

In Maryland, Elias’s team filed in support of an abusive gerrymandering of the election districts that a court found not only violated Maryland law, but also the state constitution’s equal protection, free speech and free elections clauses. The court found that the map “subverts the will of those governed.”

In 2024, the chief judge of the Western District of Wisconsin not only rejected but ridiculed the Elias Law Group for one of its challenges. Judge James Peterson (an Obama appointee) said that the argument “simply does not make any sense.”

Elias has been sanctioned in court. However, neither he nor his associates were, of course, disbarred over prior challenges.

The California Bar and the California Supreme Court insist that they are merely imposing minimal standards of conduct in disbarring Eastman.

However, the record in this matter shows more distemper than deliberation on critical points.

The California State Bar has created new problems, rather than clarifying standards.

Even as someone who disagreed with John Eastman, I am not sure what the standard is for zealous advocacy by attorneys.

While Eastman was giving bad advice, he was not committing a crime or, in my view, committing an offense that deserved disbarment.

There cannot be a different standard for different candidates, or different clients.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

Everyone knows the Luddites smashed looms. What is less appreciated is that the loom was the first serious programmable device — the direct ancestor of the computer. Thus, the Luddites weren’t just the first to resist automation. They were in some ways the first to attack AI.

The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control which threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to computer programming. Babbage borrowed the idea directly for the Analytical Engine in the 1830s.

The Luddites lost–they were violently suppressed by the UK military–but more generally they lost because programmable looms brought patterned clothes to the masses.

Prior to its invention, the creation of complex patterns required skilled and labour-intensive manual labour, often involving large teams of weavers. With the Jacquard loom, a single operator could control the machine and produce intricate designs with relative ease.

This innovation greatly increased the speed and efficiency of textile production. It also opened up new possibilities for creativity and design, as the loom enabled the production of intricate patterns that were previously unattainable. The Jacquard loom contributed to the democratization of textile manufacturing, making intricate fabrics accessible to a wider audience

By the time Jacquard died in 1834, thousands of his looms were operating in Manchester, an epi-center of the Luddites riots. Moreover, just over 100 years later, Manchester birthed the Manchester Baby and the Manchester Mark 1, the first electronic stored-program computer. And who was hired to program the latter? None other than Alan Turing.

Ada Lovelace had foretold it all beautifully: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Addendum: I thank Claude for assistance on this post.

The post The Luddites Were the First to Attack AI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.