AN ELABORATE SHELL GAME: California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the state’s housing crisis. Here’s why they’ve failed.
“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.
Archive for 2017
June 29, 2017
WHAT HATH ANGELA MERKEL WROUGHT? Migrant Surge: 12,000 to Italy in 48 Hours.
Italy is taking a formal step with the European Commission in relation to the large numbers of asylum seekers landing on its shores, ANSA sources said. Over 10,000 asylum seekers arrived in Italy from Saturday to Tuesday and some 12,000 have arrived in the last 48 hours. The government gave its ambassador to the EU, Maurizio Massari, a mandate to formally raise the issue with European Migration and Home Affairs Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, the sources said.
Massari went on to tell Avramopoulos that the situation regarding asylum seekers landing in Italy was at the limit, diplomatic sources said. Massari said the situation was having an impact on the country’s social and political life and, as a result, it would be difficult to allow new arrivals, the sources said. Rome’s message to the Commission is that Italy is facing a serious situation and Europe cannot look the other way. It is unsustainable, Italian diplomatic sources said, that all rescue ships should land in Italy. If the situation does not change, they said, Italy may be forced to deny permission to dock to non-Italian-flagged ships or ones that are not part of European missions.
The Italian government is in fact mulling whether to deny docking privileges in Italian ports to ships rescuing migrants off Libya that are flying non-Italian flags, government sources said.
At this rate, they’ll be sinking migrant boats before it’s over. All because of Angela Merkel’s thoughtless virtue-signalling.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Let’s Stop Pretending Medicaid Saves Lives.
Remember Deamonte Driver? He was the 12-year-old who died of a toothache in 2007. The boy lived in Maryland and was enrolled in that state’s Medicaid program, which covers dental care for children, as all Medicaid programs are required to do.
But Deamonte’s mother couldn’t find a dentist who would take Medicaid. At the time, only about 16 percent of Maryland dentists accepted Medicaid patients, and Deamonte was in dire need of basic dental care—as was his younger brother, DaShawn, who had six rotted teeth.
By the time Deamonte’s toothache got attention, bacteria from an abscessed tooth had spread to his brain. He underwent two emergency operations and six weeks of hospital care that cost more than $250,000. But it was too late, and Deamonte died. A routine, $80 tooth extraction could have saved his life.
Deamonte’s case prompted a national conversation about Medicaid. How had Maryland’s Medicaid program so thoroughly failed the Driver family? Why hadn’t they been able to find a dentist? And what is the point of being enrolled in Medicaid if there are no doctors or dentists willing to treat you?
Those questions were never really answered, but they’re as pertinent today as they were a decade ago—arguably more so, since we’re once again engaged in a national debate over health care reform and the fate of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Then as now, the reality is that Medicaid doesn’t save lives. In some cases, like Deamonte Driver’s, it bars access to basic life-saving treatments.
It isn’t just that Medicaid doesn’t save lives, it’s that it has put Washington on a course to bankrupt the nation. But if you think of it as the world’s most expensive example of virtue signaling, it all makes sense.
THE MOST BUSTED NAME IN NEWS: CNN’s Month-Long Nightmare. I don’t think it’s over yet.
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED, WE’D SEE OPEN RACISM ON CAMPUS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Prof who called whites ‘inhuman assholes’ put on leave.
DROPPING IN ON ITALY: Colorful photo of a recent 173rd Airborne Brigade parachute exercise in Pordenone, Italy.
RICK MANNING: Missed It By That Much – The Obamacare Enrollee Lie.
Opponents of changes to the failing Obamacare system are using the fairy tale assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office to contend that millions will be left without health insurance coverage next year, when in fact as many as one million more will likely have insurance.
Incredibly, the CBO even goes so far as to guess that seven million people will flee the Obamacare exchange if they are not compelled to use it through the threat of a punitive tax for not having health insurance.
For once their number might inadvertently be right, since seven million people is also their overestimation of how many people are going to be in the exchange at the end of 2017.
Only in the crazy world of Washington, D.C. math could someone wildly overestimate the number of people to use a program, creating a political firestorm that millions will be harmed, and then through their dire predictions actually get the number of Obamacare exchange users back to the real numbers.
An honest press corps would have dug into these numbers weeks ago.
Anyway, do read the whole thing.
COMPETITION: Amazon’s Whole Foods Deal Adds Pressure on Grocery Services to Deliver.
Now, with the e-commerce giant planning to buy Whole Foods WFM -0.31% Market Inc. for $13.7 billion, giving it a large foothold in the food retail industry, the stakes are all the higher for companies such as Instacart Inc., Peapod LLC, Shipt Inc. and FreshDirect LLC to deliver not only fresh food—but continued growth.
Midwestern grocery chain Schnucks Markets Inc. is expected Thursday to announce its partnership with Instacart for online delivery will extend to most of its 100 stores by next month. Ahold Delhaize’s Peapod is expanding its push into New York City, a key market, after spending more than $94 million on a warehouse in Jersey City, N.J., in 2014.
Shipt, which delivers food orders for retailers including Costco Wholesale Corp. COST 0.57% , Meijer Inc. and Whole Foods, intends to almost double its markets by next year, from 51 to 100. Founder Bill Smith says the company’s expansion is targeting suburban customers in less saturated regions like the South and the Midwest to gain an edge.
The largest U.S. food sellers, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT 0.66% and Kroger Co. KR 2.55% , meanwhile, are testing delivery services using Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc.
My wife and I have been mostly happy ordering online for delivery (King Sooper) or for pickup (Walmart). We have only two complaints. One is that the quality of the produce is hit or miss, and if you need some meal-critical veggies or the ripest fruit, you’re still better off getting it yourself. The other is that their online ordering frontends are simply not very good, which seems like an area where competition from the online-shopping giant ought to force improvements.
But delivering only the best produce — reliably, affordably, and at a profit — is the Holy Grail of online grocery shopping. The first company to figure that one out stands to dominate.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Late, Great Russian Collusion Myth. “Even news producers at CNN, the chief engine that drove the collusion fairy tale, were caught on camera admitting that the entire story was mostly ‘bulls—t.’ And one producer added, ‘And so I think the president is probably right to say, “Look, you are witch hunting me.”‘ Recently, three staffers, including a reporter and an executive editor, resigned from CNN in disgrace for peddling more fake news accounts of collusion between Trump and the Russians.”
JOURNALISM: Michael Goodwin: The media will do anything to bash Trump — and now they’re hurting. The thing is, professionalism doesn’t just protect the people you report about. Ultimately, it protects you from losing credibility.
IT’S HARD TO BE A FEMINIST WITHOUT ELEVATING FANTASY OVER REALITY: Emily Jashinsky: The only women living in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ are feminists.
Planned Parenthood organized a protest of Republican healthcare legislation where women dressed like characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale” outside the Capitol building on Tuesday, ostensibly seeking to send some type of dire warning about the impact of the GOP’s latest reform bill.
Activists have staged similar demonstrations around the country in recent weeks.
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” a Hulu series based on the dystopian novel of the same name, depicts a society where women face brutal repression, forced to don the same jarring red robes and white hats the Planned Parenthood protesters wore in Washington this week. As Liz Wolfe described for the Washington Examiner on Sunday, “In [the book], the theocratic Republic of Gilead has conquered the United States in the wake of a fertility epidemic.”
“In Gilead,” Wolfe wrote, “a group of red-robed women called handmaids must serve as human incubators for the upper class of politicians, via rape, centered around their monthly fertility cycle. Women cannot read, are unable to vote, and are not supposed to own property. Dissenters are hanged.”
On what grounds feminists feel it is appropriate to draw comparisons between modern America, the freest and fairest society for our sex to exist in history, and Gilead, all because a healthcare bill will affect access to and funding of Planned Parenthood, is a mystery. The only way Americans will ever experience any taste of Gilead is if feminists continue attempting to convince people that unthinkable fate is imminent. The American patriarchal dystopia is a delusion entirely of their own fabrication.
Honestly, the more they talk, the better patriarchy looks.
HMM: OPEC, have no fear: The U.S. oil-shale output crash is here.
The energy industry is already suffering from the impact of spending cuts over the past several years, said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at Price Futures Group, in a webinar held Tuesday afternoon.
“We’re losing investment in the energy industry,” he said. “It’s taking its toll.”
Global energy exploration and production capital expenditures are expected to fall by 22%, or $740 billion, between 2015 and 2020, he said, citing a report from Wood Mackenzie issued last year. Including cuts to conventional exploration investment, Wood Mackenzie said that figure increases to just over $1 trillion.
Discovery of new oil fields has already “plunged” to its lowest level since 1947, as exploration companies cut back in the wake of the drop in oil prices, Flynn said. Year to date, West Texas Intermediate crude CLQ7, +1.27% and Brent crude LCOQ7, +1.18% prices have dropped by roughly 18%.
Shale-oil production is climbing, but that growth is slowing down, said Flynn. He pointed out that while the number of U.S. rigs drilling for oil has grown for 23 weeks in a row, based on Baker Hughes BHI, +0.24% data, new-well oil production per rig among the shale plays has slowed.
A crash in shale-oil production is “starting now,” Flynn told MarketWatch in an email. “It will become more clear in a few months.”
Shale oil production rebounded very quickly after the last crash, and drove prices right back down. Is there some reason that can’t or wouldn’t happen again?
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE: Florida woman, 25, arrested for sex for 3 years with boy, 11, which led to a child.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND: “The people most vehemently against topless sunbathing were older, married women.”
IT’S BRIEF, BUT IT’S FANTASTIC: Liz Sheld is stuck in a meeting, but she still managed to wrangle up all the links you need to get you going.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: My University Wastes Time and Money on Sexual Assault Training.
I am on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater (UWW), where I teach English. Last February, all members of the campus community were informed by our Title IX Coordinator, Paige Reed, that all members of the campus community would have to complete an online training program because the university’s newly approved “Sexual Violence, Sexual Harassment and Intimate Partner Violence Policy” requires it.
Further details, I read, would be forthcoming from the university’s office of human resources and diversity.
I found it a curious fact that, six years after having received the “Dear Colleague” letter, the issue remains so severe as to warrant this anachronistic reeducation on workplace discrimination. And it had never occurred to me that I might need to be “trained” how to avoid committing a crime, or that there is any need to reprise rudimentary lessons in refraining from boorishness in public life.
Although the training seemed unnecessary, UWW wasn’t asking for my time—it was demanding it.
Soon, the follow-up email arrived. I found out that the training required me to go through a program devised by a company named LawRoom. This company is cashing-in on the training market, but I have not been able to find out how much UWW paid for its program.
Why are higher education institutions such cesspits of sexual coercion and administrative overreach?
KICK ‘EM WHEN THEY’RE UP, KICK ‘EM WHEN THEY’RE DOWN: Trump Unloads on Media Again.
“The failing @nytimes writes false story after false story about me,” he said on Twitter. “They don’t even call to verify the facts of a story. A Fake News Joke!”
“Some of the Fake News Media likes to say that I am not totally engaged in healthcare,” he added. “Wrong, I know the subject well & want victory for U.S.”
The story that seemed to have angered him was published online Tuesday night and on the Times’ front page Wednesday morning, saying “if Republicans do manage to broker a deal … it is not likely to be because of Mr. Trump’s involvement.”
“Until Tuesday afternoon, the president was largely on the sidelines as the fate of one of his most important campaign pledges played out,” the Times reported.
Trump hasn’t exactly been leading the repeal reform restore effort in Congress, but the NYT — and all the major media outlets, really — doesn’t have much goodwill left to draw on no matter what they’re charged with. And that situation is one entirely of their own making.
BUSINESS CLASS REVOLT CIRCUMVENTED: Laptop ban on planes to US replaced by tighter security.
The US Homeland Security Department has decided not to expand a ban on laptops in the passenger cabins of planes flying to the States. Instead it’s requiring tighter security measures for all aircraft and airports.
The DHS made the announcement Wednesday, saying the enhanced security standards would apply to all commercial flights to the United States. The 10 airports in the Middle East and Africa affected by the current laptop ban will have that prohibition lifted if they implement the new standards.
We may have finally found a hard limit on security theater.
JOURNALISM: Politico Reporter Drunkenly Unloads On Trump Allies At Four Seasons. “It was like a crazy homeless person coming up to you on the street and rambling.”
ROSS DOUTHAT: Of “Meritocrats” And Muggles:
So even from the perspective of the enlightened, progressive wizarding faction, then, Muggles are basically just a vast surplus population that occasionally produces the new blood that wizarding needs to avoid becoming just a society of snobbish old-money inbred Draco Malfoys. And if that were to change, if any old Muggle could suddenly be trained in magic, the whole thrill of Harry Potter’s acceptance at Hogwarts would lose its narrative frisson, its admission-to-the-inner-circle thrill.
Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted — though not by a magic hat, admittedly — according to your talents and your just deserts.
One difference is that in Potterland the magical elites are actually magical, while in our world our “meritocratic” elites don’t seem to be all that merit-ful, at least if one judges by results. Nor the combination of ETS and Ivy League admissions officers a match for the Sorting Hat. In fact, we should probably abolish the Ivy League outright if we actually care about fairness.
Douthat’s column is really quite good, and might even open at least a few NYT readers’ eyes. But the ultimate take on Harry Potter politics is still my colleague Ben Barton’s Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy.
PERHAPS THEY SHOULD LOOK AT CNN FOR WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ROLL LEFT: At least, before they die. Salon Stops Pretending to Be Journalists, Won’t Publish Trump’s Name.
AS REAL AS ANYTHING ELSE ON CNN: CNN Trots Out Elmo to Spout Leftist Talking Points About Syrian Refugees.
ALMA BOYKIN SAYS NOT EVERYTHING IN NORTHERN GERMANY IS CREEPY: So maybe my youthful memories of the area are bad! Boats! (And Ships, and Engines, and Fish-in-a-Jar, and Letters, and Art, and…)