Dangerous Mistake

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The Trump administration is completing its move to change the classification of marijuana from a Schedule I drug…alongside LSD and heroin…to Schedule III, making it obtainable with a prescription.

This is a mistake on two fronts. The first is that marijuana is a highly dangerous drug, having been bred explicitly to strengthen its effects. Those effects include brain damage on developing brains, and human brains are always developing; although the pace of development slows markedly in a human’s middle twenties. The damage done, too, isn’t like a smoker’s damage to his lungs, which can be mostly repaired if the smoker stops smoking. Despite the plasticity of our brains, damage done chemically by the materials in marijuana is permanent.

That leaves aside the slowed reflexes and impaired judgment of a marijuana user while he’s using. Driving or operating machinery while under the influence of marijuana is just as dangerous to the user and to others as is driving or operating machinery while drinking alcohol.

The other front is that this is the wrong place to make money. The profits from universally legal cultivation and sale of marijuana qua marijuana is just chump change compared with the profits available from commercializing marijuana for medicinal use. There is a plethora of anecdotal evidence that marijuana helps with pain management, PTSD, depression, and the like. That warrants serious research to determine the specific chemicals and chemical combinations in marijuana that have these and potentially other medicinal benefits.

With that successful research, and I submit that with concerted effort by a variety of pharmaceutical companies, success is within five years, the cultivation of marijuana for medicinal purposes and the extraction of those chemicals and chemical combinations can be done under license (which we already know how to do in the narcotic medicine venue). Those actual medicines then can be sold under prescription or over the counter, depending on the specific combination. (I’m eliding here the fact that herbal medicine—which is what marijuana would be, even by prescription—suffers badly from inconsistent dose control.)

Mistake

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President Donald Trump (R) is pushing Congress to include in its next budget enactment a 50% increase in the US quota contribution to the IMF, a dollar increase of some $55 billion.

The mistake is in this:

the cost to US control over IMF resources, which Treasury conceals with its claim in the budget that the “equiproportional” quota increase “would be fully offset by a reduction in” the use of debt, “all of which will keep the IMF’s overall lending capacity constant.” What Treasury doesn’t disclose is the hit to US power when the IMF gets more of its resources from equity than debt.

That hit comes from voting on IMF lending which depends on the fund’s use of debt via New Arrangements to Borrow which it does in order to raise lendable monies. This is loosely akin to a bank’s need for extending savings accounts to customers in order to raise funds to lend to other customers.  It takes approval by 85% of IMF voting shares for the IMF to borrow, and the US has had, heretofore, 16% of the voting shares, giving us veto power over IMF’s borrowing.

So long as the IMF has to borrow to lend, the US can exercise a large measure of control over IMF lending. But the US quota increase would shift the IMF’s ability to lend to those quota funds, and with that shift, the US would lose its current voting veto power, IMF could lend without serios oversight.

One upshot of all this, if it is passed, is an increase in the People’s Republic of China’s ability to borrow from the IMF and thereby to prop up its own internal excessive borrowing. And helping out an enemy nation like that is a very serious mistake.

What are they Going to Do about It?

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The Wall Street Journal opened its house editorial with this:

The gerrymander race to the bottom escalated on Tuesday as Democrats in Virginia won a narrow victory to redraw their state map to add as many as four Democratic House seats. This is bad news for GOP control of the House in November, but Republicans can also blame President Trump for starting this rolling rock that has now come down on their heads.

Say that’s true—and it likely is. It’s also true, though, that Texas was pressured by the courts to redraw its Congressional district maps because, those courts had decided, the then-just-drawn map was overly racially gerrymandered. However, the State’s Republican-led legislature didn’t need to redraw its map the way it did, if the goal was only to correct a court-claimed racial mistake.

At bottom, though, the question is, So what? This is where the Republicans are, regardless of how they got here.

What are they going to do about it? Wasting time, energy, and resources pointing fingers is time, energy, and resources they should be putting into unifying their party and dealing constructively with the situation—national as well as local—as it is. That begins with individual candidates getting out among their constituents, Left, Right, and Center, and talking directly to them about the candidates’ concrete policies and how those are better than the Progressive-Democrats’ and how each Republican candidate’s policies will directly benefit each set of constituents.

Is This Believable?

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Yale has completed a report based on self-criticism that evaluates the school’s adherence to academic seriousness.

After a useful summary of the problems, the report offers 20 recommendations that run from the obvious (“lead by example”) to the challenging (“grade like we mean it”). On grading, the report recommends a new mean policy of 3.0 from the current norm of nearly all A grades. Older readers will think a standard of 2.0 ought to be the real mean, but 3.0 is progress.
…
Most encouraging is a full-throated endorsement of free inquiry and “enhancing open and critical debate on campus.” It urges each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its “intellectual and methodological commitments” as well as the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.”

No, this isn’t believable without corroboration. Phishing efforts have grown markedly in their skill and imitation of the real enterprises they’re imitating and from which they’re redirecting their victims’ responses to their own nefarious sites. This Yale report seems nothing more than a similarly skillfully done misdirection effort. As the WSJ noted toward the end of the piece,

the reforms will have to be implemented by the same people who had no problem with university failings until they began to cost dollars and public support.

Three corroborations must occur before Yale can be taken seriously. In the near term, those same people who had no problem with university failings must be replaced in toto by others actually committed to reforming, with those same people being removed from all connection, however remote, to the school. In the intermediate term and longer, those reforms must be put in place, adhered to, and strictly and draconianly enforced. In the longer term, the self-evaluation must be repeated after one year to evaluate success and failure and to determine further reforms that are necessary along with corrective action regarding those failures.

Progressive-Democrats Destroy Again

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This time they’re Illinois’ Progressive-Democrat governor, the inestimable JB Pritzker, and the State’s Party-dominated legislature. (The Wall Street Journal misattributed the fiasco to Pritzker, but even within Party, Governors need the complicity of Party’s legislative syndicate.) Following is from the Chicago Tribune, from which the WSJ quoted.

The owner of two-thirds of a massive natural-gas-fired power plant in Will County is moving their part of the facility to Texas.
Literally.
As in, putting huge turbines on flatbed trucks and driving them south to friendlier climes.
We’ve learned that two-thirds of the capacity at the 1,350-megawatt Elwood Energy facility—the largest natural-gas-fired peaker power plant in Commonwealth Edison’s territory and one of the biggest in the nation—now is being shut down thanks to Illinois’ landmark clean-energy law [Climate & Equitable Jobs Act] enacted in 2021. The sudden removal of that whopping 900 megawatts of capacity could well drive up local electric bills that already have been rising.

And this:

The remaining three units at Elwood will continue to operate at the site and now will be permitted to do so under the law until 2045. Why? Because the previous owner, J-POWER, sold those three units to Dairyland Power Cooperative, of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, which by virtue of being a nonprofit is allowed by CEJA to operate gas-fired power plants over the next few decades that otherwise would have to shutter in a few years.
So those emissions also will continue well into the future, but only because ownership changed from a private company to a nonprofit.
Yes, that’s how CEJA works. If you’re not a privately held gas-plant operator, you can continue to pollute.

This is far more than the empty virtue signal that the WSJ article suggested. This is the wanton foolishness resulting in destruction that Party is so enthusiastically pursuing for reasons only Party members can have a glimmer of understanding.