Portland’s rioters were at it again Sunday, this time tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and smashing windows. And this:
One person could be heard saying, “F— all you colonizers. Every one of you that’s against Black Lives Matter can f— the f— off.”
This is the same BLM that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden refuses to condemn, or even to gently criticize.
Keep it in mind as you vote.
Valdis Dombrovskis, European Commissioner for Trade, is demanding that we remove our WTO-sanctioned punitive tariffs on EU products, or he’ll start a trade/tariff war with us.
He isn’t even trying to be serious about trade. Leave aside the fact that the current tariffs have been explicitly approved by the WTO, and Dombrovskis’ own duplicity:
Of course, if the US is not withdrawing their tariffs we have no choice but to then introduce our tariffs[.]
Because it’s entirely appropriate for the EU to retaliate against WTO-approved punitive tariffs.
Consider, instead, the larger picture.
Trump has offered the EU, on more than one occasion, a completely tariff-free trade regime. The EU has refused even to discuss the matter.
Dombrovskis has this bit of cynicism, too:
But in any case, we will be engaging…and trying to bring the US administration back within the framework of multilateralism[.]
He—and the EU government for which he works—refuse the multilateralism of that no-tariff trade regime we’ve offered to the EU and each of its multilateral constituent member nations for which the EU governance speaks.
Here’s some science—the Great Barrington Declaration.
James Freeman, in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal column, opened with this:
This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this Great Barrington Declaration more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.
The declaration says this, in part:
Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings, and deteriorating mental health—leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
The declaration closes with its recommendation for how we should deal with the virus [emphasis added].
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. …
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish….
Of course the Great Barrington Declaration and its Focused Protection proposal have been ignored by the media outlets. They’re also being ignored by Progressive-Democrats everywhere from Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer on down.
The Great Barrington Declaration is the wrong science to follow; it’s too politically inconvenient to settled narrative.
Here’s an interesting graph, produced by Oren Cass in American Affairs:
These are current dollars relative to current wages. Thus, the $13k total cost in 1985 was covered by a then-average $440 weekly wage, and the $54k total cost in 2018 was covered by that year’s $1,000 weekly wage.
Here are the underlying cost and wage data:
Notice which two costs ran up the hardest. Here’s a hint: health care exploded by a factor of 8; even college rose only by a factor of roughly 5; the others increased less than 3 times.
H/t Conrad Hackett, who has a colorized version of the graph.
Fifty thousand Franklin County, OH, voters were mailed the wrong ballots last week. It was a scanner sorting error. That’s what the county’s Board of Elections claimed last Friday.
The affected voters in Franklin County received ballots meant for residents elsewhere in the county and so contained incorrect information for local races[.]
That’s an interesting error. The local post office doing final sorting for the local final delivery routes didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes? The mailman doing the actual final delivery didn’t notice the misaddressed envelopes as he put them in recipients’ mail boxes?
Franklin County has a population of some 1,300,000. Taking a naïve guesstimate of a typical family having two adults and two underage children, that works out to some 650,000 voters. 50,000 of them works out to a bit over 7.5% of the county’s voters getting the wrong ballots.
Stipulate, arguendo, that the scanner errors were entirely innocent, of the sort that fits in the stuff happens category.
That’s still an enormous error, an unacceptably high error, for mail-in ballots. Absentee ballots—generated one by each on an as-requested basis and on proof that the requester is both who he says he is and eligible to vote—do not have this sort of error, and absentee balloting does not have any error of this magnitude.
Innocent or nefarious, mail-in balloting is just too unreliable.
Update: Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, population 349,000, is a heavily Republican county in the heavily Republican southwestern part of the State. 58,000 mail-in ballots were…misplaced on the way out the door; the intended recipients never got them. That’s roughly a third of the voting population whose ballots were lost.
[T]he Westmoreland County Election Bureau is placing blame on a contractor hired by the county to mail out ballots this election cycle.
“The first batch of processed and approved applications was submitted to the County’s mail house, Mid-West Direct on October 3rd. It has been brought to our attention today that Mid-West did not sent out the ballots on Tuesday as indicated.”
The first batch. The screwup supposedly has been fixed, and new ballots “are in the mail.” “Processed and approved applications?” Whose applications? Absentee ballots don’t get batched up; those ballots get sent to the requestor as each application gets approved. This is the county’s approval for mail-in.
This is yet another demonstration of the unreliability of just willy-nilly mailing out ballots instead of staying with on-demand and -proof absentee ballot voting.