Shared posts

22 May 14:59

Political Economy Media Malpractice

by Dan Mitchell

A big problem for Joe Biden, as I’ve repeatedly noted, is that families are on an economic treadmill.

Simply stated, inflation has been climbing as fast (or sometimes faster) than wages.

That’s not a recipe to make a politician popular.

Now there’s some new data that is further bad news for Biden. Not only are wages and salaries flat after adjusting for inflation, but so it net worth.

I’m motivated to share this data because Ezra Klein has a column in the New York Times that examines seven reasons why Biden is in political trouble.

Much of the analysis is very reasonable (Is Biden too old? Is there an anti-incumbent mood? etc).

But the economy was also on the list, and Klein compares Biden and Reagan in an attempt to argue that Biden is doing a better job than people think

In the Times-Siena poll, 21 percent of voters say the economy will drive their vote, while 7 percent say inflation is their top issue. …Biden’s numbers aren’t following the pattern we’ve seen with other recent presidents. …Biden’s recovery is stronger than what…Reagan…saw. In 1984, inflation was higher than it is now, unemployment was higher than it is now and the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage was above 13 percent — almost double what it is now. …Yet Biden is polling worse than Reagan…at this point in their re-election bids.

I already wrote a column (last November) showing that Reagan produced better results, but that’s not the part of Klein’s column that deserves the most criticism.

The silliest part of his analysis is that he simply looks at a moment in time and ignores context. Here are the two things to understand.

  1. Inflation and interest rates were very high when Reagan took office and he made the tough policy choices that put those variables on a downward trajectory.
  2. Inflation and interest rates were very low when Biden took office and he pursued policies that put those variables on an upward trajectory.

I imagine Klein fully understands that this context is important. But because he leans to the left, he is following the usual media strategy of trying to make Biden look good.

P.S. Regarding jobs, Biden took office while the economy was still dealing with government-mandated shutdowns, so his job numbers seem to look good, but not when compared to the pre-pandemic trend.

P.P.S. Biden and his supporters could point out that bad monetary policy began under Trump, but they don’t have much credibility since they supported the bad monetary policy and allowed it to continue after he became president.

21 May 22:29

HIGHER EDUCATION: ‘Semester From Hell’: How Ant...

by Stephen Green

HIGHER EDUCATION: ‘Semester From Hell’: How Anti-Semitic Harassment Derailed An Israeli Student’s Soccer Dreams.

His new life 6,000 miles away in Southfield, Michigan turned dark his sophomore year when he moved in with his teammate, Zavier Chimienti. Nedivi says Chimienti harassed him for four months beginning in September 2023, with anti-Jewish slurs, Nazi salutes, and full-on physical abuse.

But months after he reported the alleged abuse to both police and school officials, Nedivi is no longer on the soccer team. The school kicked both students off the team as it conducted its investigation, and, though court records show the police charged Chimienti, the investigation concluded that there was no discrimination.

An outside law firm, however, has concluded that the university mishandled its investigation. With a second external review of the evidence underway, records obtained by The Daily Wire appear to corroborate Nedivi’s allegations, including a teammate’s official witness statement to police, as well as text messages and pictures that document the claims.

Read the whole thing.

21 May 16:57

FINALLY — CALIFORNIA GETS SERIOUS ABOUT CRIME: San Diego is finally cracking down … on beachside

by Ed Driscoll
Jts5665

"Somebody, somewhere is enjoying themselves, potentially even improving their health and it has to stop!" Very progressive.

FINALLY — CALIFORNIA GETS SERIOUS ABOUT CRIME: San Diego is finally cracking down … on beachside yoga.

No, they’re not cracking down on illegals storming the beaches. They’re not cracking down on drug dealers. They’re not even cracking down on homeless encampments.

It’s the yoga that’s gotta go, according to a new city ordinance in San Diego.

https://twitter.com/TheKevinDalton/status/1792681534694281370

To be fair, it’s probably for the best: Americans who practice yoga ‘contribute to white supremacy,’ claims Michigan State University professor.

21 May 15:28

Microsoft Windows will soon begin "remembering and understanding everything you do" via constant screenshots

by Not the Bee
Jts5665

I may have to put the effort in to learn linux.

I didn't need a reason to stay away from Windows, but it was sure nice enough of Microsoft to give me one:

21 May 13:54

HadCRUT Has Now Fully Removed 0.15°C From The 1940s Warmth ‘Blip’ As Proposed In 2009 E-mails

by Kenneth Richard

The amplitude of the recorded warmth in the 1940s was always a problem for purveyors of the human-caused global warming narrative. So the 1940s temperatures have been artificially cooled to make this less of a problem.

In 2009, overseers of the HadCRUT global temperature data discussed “correcting” the “1940s warming blip” in e-mails that they later tried to hide from Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) investigators.

“So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.”

“I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately.”

“It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with ‘why the blip?’.”

Image Source: Climate Gate E-mails (FOIA)

And, just as they had said they would do, 0.15°C of warmth has gradually been removed from the 1940s HadCRUT global temperature data over the last 15 years. They have “corrected” the data to align with their narrative.

Image Source: climate4you.com

What’s also noticeable here in this HadCRUT-changes-temperature-data chart provided by climate4you is just how much warmth has been added to 21st century temperatures since 2008.

The HadCRUT3 global temperature trend was recorded as 0.03°C per decade during the global warming hiatus years of 2000-2014 (Scafetta, 2022).

This was increased to 0.08°C per decade by version 4, as the overseers of the HadCRUT data conveniently added 0.1°C to 0.2°C to the more recent anomalies.

Today, in HadCRUT5, the 2000-2014 temperature trend has been adjusted up to 0.14°C per decade when using the computer model-infilling method.

So, within the last decade, a 15-year temperature trend has been changed from a pause to a strong warming. After all, when the observations don’t fit the narrative, it is time to change the observations.

Image Source: Scafetta, 2022
21 May 12:44

#JOURNALISM: https://twitter.com/NealMcCluskey/status/1792009183862153629

by Glenn Reynolds
Jts5665

Epic levels of ignorance. The wealthy are wealthy because their money never stops working for them.

#JOURNALISM:

20 May 22:24

WHY AM I REMINDED OF “FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON”? Just the News filed a short take that honestly makes me

by Charles Glasser

WHY AM I REMINDED OF “FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON”? Just the News filed a short take that honestly makes me wonder if Fetterman has been red-pilled, or at the very least, somehow came out smarter after his stroke than he was before it happened:

“In the past, I’ve described the U.S. House as The Jerry Springer Show,” Fetterman posted on X. “Today, I’m apologizing to The Jerry Springer Show.”

I did not have “Fetterman getting into a beef with AOC” on my bingo card.

 

20 May 12:30

THE TARGETED ADS THAT DIDN’T BARK IN THE NIGHT:  An attorney says she saw her library reading habit

by Sarah Hoyt
20 May 03:23

NEO: The Ghouls of Gaza. The article also adds this detail about Shani Louk – and perhaps it is t

by Ed Driscoll

NEO: The Ghouls of Gaza.

The article also adds this detail about Shani Louk – and perhaps it is true of the other bodies as well:

Louk’s father, Nissim Louk, said his daughter’s body had been discovered in a cool, deep tunnel and was still in excellent condition when it was brought home.

Hamas knew these people were dead but they allowed the families to believe they were still alive, the better to torment the relatives and encourage them to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions. It was also understand that a Rafah operation by the IDF would probably lead to the finding of some hostages, dead or alive. But the whole world, including Biden and company, seems to have wanted to protect Rafah.

Read the whole thing.

17 May 19:21

Study: Risk of suicide increases 12x after “gender-affirming” surgery ... is anyone surprised?

by Not the Bee

A new study hot off the press has confirmed what most of us already knew: people who get "gender-affirming" surgery have more than 12 times higher instances of suicide attempts than those who don't get the surgeries.

17 May 15:58

WELL, BYE: ‘Hundreds’ of Columbia faculty to go on strike if police not removed from campus.

by Glenn Reynolds
17 May 14:44

THIS NAKBA DAY MESSAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY TRUTH: Also worth noting. Before the Palestinian cause b

by David Bernstein

THIS NAKBA DAY MESSAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY TRUTH: Also worth noting. Before the Palestinian cause became a thing, in the Arab world the “Nakba” or catastrophe wasn’t the displacement of Arabs from Palestine, but the failure of five Arab armies plus Palestinian Arab militias to wipe out the nascent state of Israel and kill or expel its Jewish residents.

16 May 15:06

RED ALERT:  Stewart Baker writes at the Volokh Conspiracy:  “Congress is Preparing to Restore Quot

by Gail Heriot

RED ALERT:  Stewart Baker writes at the Volokh Conspiracy:  “Congress is Preparing to Restore Quotas in College Admissions … and Everywhere Else–as a Very Quiet Part of the Bipartisan ‘Privacy’ Bill.”  I haven’t had a chance to review the bill yet.  But the conservative civil rights lawyers who have had that opportunity all agree that this “bipartisan” bill will, if passed, be a disaster.  I assume the GOP staffers involved simply didn’t understand the ramifications of the “disparate impact” provisions in the bill.  But I’ll know more once I’ve read the bill myself.  In the meantime:  Dear Congress:  Please don’t pass this bill.

(Yes, I noticed Glenn posted this last evening, but it’s important enough to post again.)

 

 

16 May 13:45

Biden asserts executive privilege to block release of dementia audio tapes from John Hur.

by Kane
Jts5665

lol

14 May 23:01

ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR THE LITTLE GUYS: ATF Likely to Dodge Accountability Bullet in Arkansas Shooti

by Glenn Reynolds
Jts5665

SOP. Attack Terrify Firebomb kills someone and gets off scott free.

14 May 19:53

Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis

by Madeleine Rowley
 Nonprofits Are Making Billions Off the Border Crisis
A group of migrants try to cross a barbed wire fence to reach the U.S., as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on March 20, 2024. (Photo by Herika Martinez via AFP)

While the border crisis has become a major liability for President Biden, threatening his reelection chances, it’s become a huge boon to a group of nonprofits getting rich off government contracts.

Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.

And with the recent massive influx of unaccompanied children—a record 130,000 in 2022, the last year for which there are official stats—the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs.

“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”

The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million.

Some of the services NGOs provide are eyebrow-raising. For example, Endeavors uses taxpayer funds to offer migrant children “pet therapy,” “horticulture therapy,” and music therapy. In 2021 alone, Endeavors paid Christy Merrell, a music therapist, $533,000. An internal Endeavors PowerPoint obtained by America First Legal, an outfit founded by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, showed that the nonprofit conducted 1,656 “people-plant interactions” and 287 pet therapy sessions between April 2021 and March 2023. 

Endeavors’ 2022 federal disclosure form also shows that it paid $5 million to a company to provide fill-in doctors and nurses, $4.6 million for “consulting services,” $1.4 million to attend conferences, and $700,000 on lobbyists. In 2021, the NGO shelled out $8 million to hotel management company Esperanto Developments to house migrants in their hotels. Endeavors, which gets 99.6 percent of its revenue from the government according to federal disclosure forms, declined to comment to The Free Press.

The Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, funds the nonprofits through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, and its budget has swelled over the years—from $1.8 billion in 2018 to $6.3 billion in 2023. The ORR is expected to spend at least $7.3 billion this year—almost all of which will be funneled to NGOs and other contractors.

When asked about the funding increase during a January media event, Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the chief executive of Global Refuge said, “We’ve grown because the need has grown.” The nonprofit did not make Vignarajah available for an interview.

But while it’s true the number of migrants has exploded in recent years, critics say these enormous federal grants far exceed the current need. The facilities themselves are generally owned by private companies and are leased to the NGOs, which house the unaccompanied minors and attempt to unite them with family members or, if that’s not possible, people who will take care of them—their so-called sponsors. The ORR does not publicly list the specific number of shelters it funds in its efforts to house migrants, a business The New York Times once described as “lucrative” and “secretive.” 

While some NGOs have long had operations at the border, “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that researches the effect of government immigration policies and describes its bias as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.”

Consider Global Refuge, based in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2018, according to its federal disclosure form, the Baltimore-based nonprofit had $50 million in revenue. By 2022, its revenue totaled $207 million—$180 million of which came from the government. That year, $82 million was spent on housing unaccompanied children. Global Refuge also granted $45 million to an organization that facilitates adoptions as well as resettling migrant children. 

Now Global Refuge employs over 550 people nationwide, and CEO Vignarajah said in January that the nonprofit plans to expand to at least 700 staffers by the end of 2024.

Vignarajah, a former policy director for Michelle Obama when she was first lady, took the top job at Global Refuge in February 2019 after she lost her bid to be elected governor of Maryland. She has since become one of the most prominent advocates for migrants crossing the southern border, appearing frequently on MSNBC and other media as an immigration advocate. Her incoming salary was $244,000, but just three years later, her compensation more than doubled to $520,000. 

In 2019, Global Refuge housed 2,591 unaccompanied children while spending $30 million. Three years later, the NGO reported that it housed 1,443 unaccompanied children at a cost of $82.5 million—almost half the number of migrants for more than double the money.

In a statement to The Free Press, Global Refuge spokesperson Timothy Young said that while in care, “Unaccompanied children attend six hours of daily education and participate in recreational activities, both at the education site and within the community.” 

The man with the $1 million salary is Dr. Anselmo Villarreal, who became CEO of Southwest Key Programs, headquartered in Austin, Texas, in 2021. (Villarreal took a drop in pay compared to his predecessor, Southwest Key founder Juan Sanchez, who paid himself an eye-popping $3.5 million in 2018.) 

Despite a number of scandals in the recent past, including misuse of federal funds and several instances of employees sexually abusing some of the children in its care, Southwest Key continues to operate—and rake in big government checks. In 2020, the year of Covid-19, its government grant was $391 million; by 2022, its contract was nearly $790 million.

Southwest Key’s federal disclosure forms show that in 2022, six executives in addition to Villarreal made more than $400,000, including its chief strategist ($800,000), its head of operations ($700,000) and its top HR executive ($535,000). Its total payroll in 2022 was $465 million.

Endeavors, Inc., based in San Antonio, Texas, is run by Chip Fulghum. Formerly the chief financial officer of the Department of Homeland Security, he signed on as Endeavors’ chief operating officer in 2019 and was promoted to CEO this year.

In 2022, Fulghum was paid almost $600,000, while the compensation for Endeavors’ then-CEO, Jon Allman, was $700,000. Endeavors’ payroll went from $20 million in 2018 to a whopping $150 million in 2022, with seven other executives earning more than $300,000.

Perhaps the most shocking figure was the size of Endeavors’s 2022 contract with the government: a staggering $1.3 billion, by far the largest sum ever granted to an NGO working at the border. (In 2023, Endeavors’ government funds shrank to $324 million because the shelter was closed for six months. Endeavors says this was because the beds were not needed, the border crisis notwithstanding.)

Despite these astronomical sums, the Unaccompanied Children Program is fraught with problems and suffers from a general lack of oversight. Because so many unaccompanied youths are crossing the border, sources who worked at a temporary Emergency Intake Site in 2021 said the ORR pressured case managers to move children out within two weeks in order to prepare for the next wave of unaccompanied children. 

In 2022, Florida governor Ron DeSantis empaneled a grand jury to conduct an investigation, which showed how the ORR continually loosened its safety protocols so children could be connected to sponsors more quickly—and with less due diligence. The same report revealed that because there’s often no documentation to prove a migrant’s age at the time Border Patrol processes them, 105 adults were discovered posing as unaccompanied children in 2021. One of them, a 24-year-old Honduran male who said he was 17, was charged with murdering his sponsor in Jacksonville, Florida.

“We used to have DNA testing to make sure we had these family units,” Chris Clem, a recently retired Border Patrol officer, told The Free Press. But since the border crisis, the ORR has abandoned DNA testing, according to congressional testimony by the General Accountability Office. In 2021, ORR revised its rules so that public records checks for other adults living in a prospective sponsor’s home were no longer mandatory.

Tara Rodas, a government employee who was temporarily detailed to work at the California Pomona Fairplex Emergency Intake shelter in 2021, told The Free Press she also uncovered evidence of fraud within the sponsorship system. “Most of the sponsors have no legal presence in the U.S. I don’t know if I saw one U.S. ID,” said Rodas. “There were no criminal investigators at the site, and there was no access to see if sponsors had committed crimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico.”

Last October, the ORR published a series of proposed changes to its regulations in the Federal Register that will effectively codify the more relaxed standards. The new regulations, which will go into effect in July, will allow background checks and verifying the validity of a sponsor’s identity—but wouldn’t require them.

“It is mind-boggling that ORR has not seen fit to adjust the policies for (unaccompanied children) placements, except to make them more lenient,” Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies told The Free Press. “They could do a much better job, but they only want to streamline the process and make the releases even easier.” The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to emailed questions from The Free Press.

Deborah White, another federal employee temporarily detailed to the Pomona Fairplex facility in 2021, told The Free Press: “Ultimately, the responsibility is on the government. But the oversight is obviously not adequate—from the contracting to the care of the children to the vetting of the sponsors. All of it is inadequate. The government blames the contractor and the contractor blames the government, and no one is held accountable.”

Maddie Rowley is an investigative reporter. Follow her on X @Maddie_Rowley. And read Peter Savodnik’s piece, “A Report from the Southern Border: ‘We Want Biden to Win.’”

Reports like this one require time and resources. To support more of our independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:

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14 May 14:23

"Planet of the Apes" actors say they are "Team Ape" because humans are bad for the environment and start wars: "I dislike humans a lot"

by Not the Bee
Jts5665

Exterminationism.

Hollywoke isn't sending their best and brightest, are they?

14 May 14:23

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: DEI Hits the VA: Biden’s Veterans Affai

by Glenn Reynolds

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: DEI Hits the VA: Biden’s Veterans Affairs Department Offers Race-Based Training Programs That Exclude White Vets. “‘Equity’ means realizing ‘treating everybody the same might not be enough,’ VA official Shawn Liu says.”

14 May 12:31

HOW IT’S GOING: https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1790049169501041026

by Glenn Reynolds

HOW IT’S GOING:

13 May 20:13

COME SEE THE EUGENICS INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Climate Professor Thinks We Should ‘Cull’ the Human P

by Stephen Green
Jts5665

Exterminationism.

13 May 13:40

I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN GOOGLE BRAGGED ABOUT ITS MOTTO: DON’T BE EVIL:  Google blasted for AI th

by Sarah Hoyt

I’M SO OLD I REMEMBER WHEN GOOGLE BRAGGED ABOUT ITS MOTTO: DON’T BE EVIL:  Google blasted for AI that refuses to say how many Jews were killed by the Nazis.

10 May 18:09

“AMERICAN FECKLESSNESS:” THE BIDEN TRADEMARK. https://twitter.com/AlbertoMiguelF5/status/1788602

by Glenn Reynolds

“AMERICAN FECKLESSNESS:” THE BIDEN TRADEMARK.

09 May 22:18

The Emotional Support Animal Racket

by Scott Alexander

If you’re from a country that doesn’t have emotional support animals, here’s how it works.

Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.

Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.

Legally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.

Here’s a typical case: you’ve been seeing a patient with depression for three years. You prescribe them medication, maybe they get a little better, maybe they go up and down randomly in the way of all depression patients. Then they say “My roommate is leaving, so I need to move to a new apartment. But almost nowhere allows dogs, and the only place that does allow them charges more than I can afford. Please write me an emotional support animal letter or else I’ll lose my beloved Fido, the light of my life.”

So you say, okay, I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if you’re really depressed. They say “You’ve been treating me for depression for three years, you’ve prescribed me six different antidepressants, come on.” You say okay, fine, I’ll skip that part, but I’ve got to do an evaluation to see if your animal really helps you. They say “I feel so much better whenever I’m with Fido, he really brightens up my day.” You ask the same question several times, in the manner of all psychiatrists, and your patient always gives the same answer. Then you say “I’ve got to evaluate whether your animal is safe,” and he says “Oh yeah, Fido is such a good boy, he would never hurt a fly.” Now what?

You could keep evaluating harder. You could make them bring Fido into your office (good luck!) and observe him. The observation would look like your patient petting a dog for a half-hour appointment, for which you charge them $200. You could get “collateral history” from friends and family: “Is Fido really a good boy? Does your cousin seem happier when Fido is around?” At some point this becomes insane and humiliating. Good luck figuring out which point that is.

Or you could do the ultra-responsible thing and deny the letter. You could say “As your psychiatrist, I inherently have a conflict of interest; I know you, I like you, I can’t be objective in this determination.” Now your patient will hate you forever. Every other doctor gives their patients emotional support animal letters. The only other psychiatrist in town charges $500 per appointment and demands at least ten appointments before they will write an ESA letter, they’ll never be able to make it work, they’ll lose Fido. They’ll lose Fido and it will be your fault and they’ll hate you forever and they will never take any of the medication you recommend ever again even if they’re suicidally depressed and you’re the last psychiatrist in the world.

Or you could wash your hands of it. You could say “I’m going to be ultra-responsible and demand you see a third party. But just between you and me, that third party could be Pettable - Get Your ESA Letter In 24 Hours. Or maybe CertaPet - Get Your ESA Letter In 3 Easy Steps. Or even ExpressPetCertify - Same Day ESA Approval, Guaranteed Landlord Acceptance. Or how about ESADoctors - Get Your Legitimate ESA Letter? Or any of their one thousand competitors. You don’t have to feel conflict-of-interest-y. Your patient will only be out $100 or so, and only slightly pissed at you. And you get the warm glow of knowing this will definitely work, because these services have never, ever turned anyone down.

Or you could stop dithering and just write the damn emotional support animal letter. It doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences. If you Google “emotional support animal letter”, it autocompletes to “…template”. There are hundreds of them!

This option has basically no downsides and is the one that most psychiatrists end up taking.

And it’s harmless enough with Fido - he really is a good boy. But I’ve had patients with ADHD ask me to certify their snake. Sorry, I refuse to believe a snake can help you with ADHD, unless it’s one of those talking snakes from Harry Potter and it whispers “Concccccentrate . . . conccccccentrate” in your ears every time you start slacking off. Still, some patients argue very eloquently: “Taking care of the snake helps me keep to a routine, and makes me feel more confident, and she’s my only friend in the world, and I feel like I’d be stressed and lost without her.” It’s a little weird. But do you really want your patient to lose their beloved Nagini just because you refused to write a letter that has no legal requirements and no downsides?

Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. Probably the emotional support animal loophole makes things better rather than worse.

But the process runs into the same failure mode as Adderall prescriptions: it combines an insistence on gatekeepers with a total lack of interest over whether they actually gatekeep. The end result is a gatekeeping cargo cult, where you have to go through the (expensive, exhausting) motions of asking someone’s permission, without the process really filtering out good from bad applicants. And the end result of that is a disguised class system, where anyone rich and savvy enough to engage with the gatekeeping process gets extra rights, but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules.

I have no solution to this, I just feel like I incur a little spiritual damage every time I approve somebody’s ADHD snake or autism iguana or anorexia pangolin or whatever.

09 May 22:15

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Day Before Biden Admin Announced It Would

by Ed Driscoll
Jts5665

Interesting.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Day Before Biden Admin Announced It Would Withhold Weapons From Israel, It Issued Sanctions Waiver To Allow Arms Sales to Qatar and Lebanon.

Less than a day before the Biden administration announced its intent to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel, it issued a sanctions waiver to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to a host of Arab nations that boycott the Jewish state, including Hamas ally Qatar and Iran-controlled Lebanon, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

On Tuesday—just a day before President Joe Biden threatened to withhold key weapons deliveries from Israel if the country moves forward with an incursion in the Gaza Strip’s Rafah neighborhood—the State Department informed Congress that it intends to bypass laws that bar the United States from selling weapons to nations that boycott Israel, according to a copy of the notification obtained by the Free Beacon.

The Biden administration, which has waived these sanctions in the past, said in the notification that it intends to extend the waiver through April 30, 2025, allowing weapons to be sent to a host of nations that work closely with the Hamas terror group and other Iran-backed terror proxies.

It’s just amazing how much Good Ol’ Moderate Joe’s foreign policy decisions sound exactly like the sort of thing Obama would have done!

09 May 21:45

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY: ‘The era of cheap food is over,’ says Waitrose chief.

by Ed Driscoll
Jts5665

The goal is fewer humans.

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY: ‘The era of cheap food is over,’ says Waitrose chief.

Bailey will unveil the “Farming for Nature” scheme at Leckford, the Waitrose farm in Hampshire where they have been farming regeneratively since 2020. The supermarket wants to source “as much as possible” of its UK meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables from farms that use regenerative practices, such as reducing pesticide use and ploughing and turning over field margins to pollinators. The aim is that by 2035, all of its UK supply chain for these items will be from regenerative farms. It is aware it will be a huge learning curve for Waitrose farmers and can’t predict how many will sign up, but Bailey is determined that the supermarket should lead the way.

“I think there was a point at which we realised we had to do something,” he says. It sounds very noble, but some would say supermarkets have a major part to play in getting where we are now, having engaged in a systematic price war that has pushed farmers into intensification. Does Bailey, who worked for Sainsbury’s for 18 years – starting in the fresh food department and working his way to become its grocery buying director, before he joined Waitrose in 2020 – feel guilty?

He laughs awkwardly. “I feel responsible,” he says. “I’m part of a generation of people who are in the right place at the right time to make a change. And I feel that burden.”

“I think we’re seeing the end of the era of cheap food, because of the impact of that cheap food – not just on people’s health but the external impact, the environmental impact, the societal impact of that cheap food. We need to witness the end of cheap food and a reversal of the value of the food people are eating.”

The ghost of FDR smiles; as Amity Shlaes wrote, in the 1930s, “Roosevelt led the country in passing the Agricultural Administration Act, which taxed middlemen in order to give a greater share of revenue to farmers. The Act also restricted production and sent subsidies to those on the farm. Six million young pigs were killed early to drive up pork prices; farmers were instructed to plow crops under.”

08 May 19:20

Brazen election interference in Illinois. Democrats retroactively change law.

by Kane
08 May 18:33

Report: Federal agencies have resumed talks with Big Tech about censorship ahead of 2024 Election because duh

by Not the Bee

Well, here we go again.

08 May 18:32

#RESIST: Prison Guard Resigns After ‘Immoral, Dangerous’ Trans Policies. “At the peak of his car

by Stephen Green

#RESIST: Prison Guard Resigns After ‘Immoral, Dangerous’ Trans Policies. “At the peak of his career as a correctional lieutenant inside the California Prison system, Hector Bravo Ferrel couldn’t take anymore. Things became dangerous and unethical, he said, after the state passed SB 132, a law that required prison guards to transfer convicts from the men’s prison to the women’s prisons. The law also allowed male inmates who identify as women to demand they be searched—in the nude—by female prison staff. Ferrel walked away from his stable, lucrative career to blow the whistle on “backwards” policies inside the correctional world that he says put female prison staff and inmates at risk.”

08 May 02:45

House passes Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act in bipartisan vote

by Misty Severi
Jts5665

How about doing something about the bureaucracy's power to arbitrarily legislate instead of just treating one of the symptoms?

"No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda," Lesko said.
08 May 00:43

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: https://twitter.com/theMRC/status/1787898440988361015

by Glenn Reynolds

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: