1) Annie Lowery on the mistreatment of dairy cows on even “organic” farms. Our treatment of the animals for meat and dairy is really unconscionable. We should all simply pay more so the animals can have a more humane existence. People say the care about animal welfare, but not enough to pay more or pass laws that truly protect it:
Most american consumers abhor animal cruelty and support laws preventing it. In a recent ASPCA survey, three-quarters or more of respondents said they were concerned about farm-animal welfare and supported a ban on new factory farms. Yet cruelty, even egregious cruelty, against farm animals is often legal, provided that the suffering is “necessary” and “justifiable” by the need for farms to produce food, David Rosengard of the Animal Legal Defense Fund told me.
To determine what is “necessary” and “justifiable,” lawyers and juries often look at what farms are already doing, what agricultural schools are teaching, and what Big Ag publications recommend. In effect, I gathered, animal-welfare law is slanted toward the needs of farms much more than the experience of animals.
Even gratuitously abusive treatment often goes unpunished. Local authorities have jurisdiction over most animal-cruelty complaints. But cows, pigs, and chickens are not great at picking up the telephone to call those authorities. Animal-rights activists are able to perform investigations only sporadically, and at significant legal risk to themselves. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, rarely report violations.
What is a consumer who wants to support a gentle, green system of agriculture to do? DeCoriolis of Farm Forward had a blunt answer: Give up dairy. “As a consumer, you’re just playing roulette,” he told me. Yet the overwhelming majority of American consumers are unwilling to give up milk or cheese for ethical reasons. What they are willing to do is support stricter rules for agricultural producers and pay more for milk and cheese from farms that treat their animals well. The country is failing to provide those consumers with a reliable and navigable system. That’s a policy problem, and a solvable one.
At a minimum, the USDA should require third-party certification of animal-welfare and animal-raising claims, and apply strict regulations to certifiers: preventing conflicts of interest, requiring surprise inspections, and cracking down on rubber-stamping of industry norms. To meet American consumers’ more ambitious demands, Congress should create a farmed-animal welfare standard and an agency separate from the USDA to enforce it, akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Such changes would improve the welfare of billions of animals in our food system. Yet any changes would be too late for one. In the end, nobody stepped in to aid Cow 13039—not law enforcement, not the state veterinarians, not the auction employees. Alexandre Family Farm gave her vitamins and an eye patch, Nunes told me. They should have sold her sooner, she said. Cow 13039 was ailing. And ailing cows are not worth much.
2) I suspect that there’s long been a relatively-silent majority of university faculty who hate mandatory diversity statements, but figured best to keep one’s head down and not be labeled “racist.” Good to see that this is changing:
In what’s likely to be a watershed moment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended the use of diversity statements for faculty hiring, making it the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test…
MIT embraced the diversity statement trend. In late 2023, the university’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering sought an assistant professor “in fields from fundamental nuclear science to practical applications of nuclear technology in energy, security and quantum engineering”. Applicants were required to submit “a statement regarding their views on diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past and current contributions as well as their vision and plans for the future in these areas”.
Such requirements have long been controversial, and the basic argument against them is simple: “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has come to connote a set of controversial views about identity, power, and oppression. Universities which require scholars to “demonstrate” their “commitment” to DEI can easily invite ideological screening, as well as potentially unlawful viewpoint discrimination. Many groups thus oppose the diversity statements on the grounds of academic freedom and free expression.
At MIT, these arguments seemed to have won the day. In a statement provided to me via email, president Kornbluth notes: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
This is momentous. The pushback against diversity statements has succeeded almost exclusively at public universities in red states, encouraged or enacted by lawmakers. Conservative states such as Florida, Texas, and Utah have passed laws banning diversity statements at state universities. Some appointed state university leaders, such as the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, have also barred the practice.
The decision at MIT is different — reform from within, prompted by a university president alongside deans and provosts, at a private institution.
It’s very possible that more private universities, and state universities in blue states, will eventually follow MIT’s lead for one basic reason: a significant number of faculty from across the political spectrum simply cannot stand mandatory DEI statements. Last month, Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy — a self-described “scholar on the Left committed to struggles for social justice” — described the general sentiment: “It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements.”
3) I’ve never used MTurk as I prefer the simplicity of other low-cost survey providers like Lucid. But, I imagine my data is not necessarily a lot better than what MTurk is getting and the latest evidence on that is not great: “Extraverted introverts, cautious risk-takers, and selfless narcissists: A demonstration of why you can’t trust data collected on MTurk”
Over the last several years, a number of studies have used advanced statistical and methodological techniques to demonstrate that there is an issue with the quality of data on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). The current preregistered study aims to provide an accessible demonstration of this issue using a face-valid indicator of data quality: Do items that assess clearly contradictory content show positive correlations on the platform? We administered 27 semantic antonyms—pairs of items that assess incompatible beliefs or behaviours (e.g., “I am an extrovert” and “I am an introvert”)—to a sample of MTurk participants (N = 400). Over 96% of the semantic antonyms were positively correlated in the sample. For example, “I talk a lot” was positively correlated with “I rarely talk”; “I am narcissistic” was positively correlated with “I am a selfless person”; and “I like order” was positively correlated with “I crave chaos.” Moreover, 67% of the correlations remained positive even after we excluded nearly half of the sample for failing common attention check measures. These findings provide clear evidence that data collected on MTurk cannot be trusted, at least without a considerable amount of screening.
4) Love this from Drum, “Stop telling everyone life is horrible”
Just stop it. Joe Biden ended the Afghanistan war and cut American drone strikes nearly to zero. The US is not currently fighting any major wars and in 2022, for the first time in decades, reported no civilian deaths due to US combat.
Health insurance coverage has steadily increased among the young for the past decade:
And infrastructure is not “crumbling” by any stretch of rhetoric. Even the always dour American Society of Civil Engineers says as much: its most recent report gives US infrastructure its highest grade in more than a quarter of a century.¹ Spending on infrastructure has increased by a quarter since 2000:
There is a relentless drumbeat of claims on both sides of the aisle that America is falling apart at the seams and _________ has it worse than ever in living memory. But it’s just not true. Wages are high for every demographic group you can name; life satisfaction is steady; unemployment is low; drug abuse overall is down; our educational system is good; poverty is declining; we have more entrepreneurs than any country in the world by a wide margin; democracy is alive and well; our economy is the envy of the world; social welfare spending is generous; and a future of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, medical revolutions, and abundant energy is practically on our doorsteps. Even our demographic problems are about the least bad of any advanced economy—thanks, in part, to our supposed problem of too much illegal immigration.
Everyone has personal problems. Every country has national problems. The fact that we have problems is completely normal. But honestly, our problems right now are about as mild as they’ve been in our entire history.
5) This is so dumb and so anti-free market. A perfect example of Republican being pro (entrenched) business rather than pro-market, “‘We Will Save Our Beef’: Florida Bans Lab-Grown Meat Other states have also considered restrictions, citing concerns about farmers’ livelihoods and food safety, though the product isn’t expected to be widely available for years.”
Actually it’s even worse than that– just complete culture war BS
Florida has banned making and selling meat that is grown in a laboratory, a move several other states have considered amid worries about consumer safety and concerns that the technique could hurt the beef and poultry industries.
A number of start-up companies are developing technologies to grow beef, chicken and fish by using cells taken from animals without harming or slaughtering them. The process is expensive and the widespread availability of so-called lab-grown meat is years away. Beef and poultry associations, as well as some conservatives, have opposed the industry, calling it anti-farmer.
He also cast the ban as pushback against “global elites” who have a “plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” The news release linked to a 2021 article on the World Economic Forum website discussing global food shortages and lamenting that insects are often overlooked as a source of protein.
Also, I don’t like the opening citing “safety ” when those are almost certainly bad faith arguments, rather than legitimate concerns. In fact, nowhere else in the story are their any actual safety concerns cited. Bad journalism.
6) How the Libertarian Party went insane (and they have):
THE FIRST AND MOST OBVIOUS CHANGE that the new crew brought about concerned the party’s messaging. For many in the Mises Caucus, the question of whether the party’s Twitter account was sufficiently “owning the libs” was more important than workaday political-organizational concerns like ballot access or running candidates.
Shortly after their victory in Reno, the Mises Caucus removed a longstanding plank of the Libertarian party platform that had said, “We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant.” One has to wonder: What kinds of would-be Libertarians were being held back from joining the party by those words—and, more importantly, why did the Mises Caucus want to court them?
The messaging got worse from there. Since the takeover, the official Libertarian party Twitter account has become a hotbed of conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and scorn. State affiliates quickly followed in its wake, with the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire recently tweeting a revised version of the “14 words,” a white-supremacist slogan.
The Mises Caucus faithful were thrilled by this change in the party’s public stance. Still, beyond this contingent, the party struggled to make inroads to new members.
Contra McArdle’s stated commitment to the broader liberty movement, the Mises Caucus has always been pugnacious toward its intramural competition. One of their prime longstanding targets is “regime libertarians,” shorthand for nonprofits like the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. Those organizations’ perceived compromise and lack of radicalism, as well as their willingness to accept imperfect and incremental improvements towards libertarian ends, meant they deserved scorn and sanction from the party.
For example, following the publication of a Cato Institute blog post praising the COVID-19 vaccines as a triumph of globalization and international cooperation, McArdle herself wrote that the Cato Institute “should be excommunicated from the liberty movement” and “has nothing to do with our political movement.” If one of the major, long-established national centers of libertarian thought and policy wasn’t aligned with the new Libertarian party, who is? (Besides, apparently, Donald Trump, who supervised the government-led effort to develop the vaccines in the first place.)…
ALL THIS THRASHING FOR RELEVANCE amid internal chaos helps to explain the Libertarian party’s embrace of bizarre strategies: Its leadership is desperate, out of ideas, and willing to try anything. That’s how the caucus of principle and radicalism has come to court the likes of cracked Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr. and former Republican president Trump.
In this, the party’s current leadership shows that it is willing to abandon libertarian principles built in the party’s platform—and to do so for the sake of visibility and influence. They’re not minor principles, either, but core principles, such as those expressed in the party’s positions on free trade and migration (“Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders”), industrial policy (“We oppose all forms of government subsidies and bailouts to business, labor, or any other special interest”), and justice (“We support the abolition of qualified immunity”). What would DJT or RFK Jr. have to say to a gathering of libertarians on those topics?
7) I quite liked this from Chait, “In Defense of Punching Left”
“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”
Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left. And since the basis of my refusal to take this advice is no longer self-evident to all my readers and colleagues, and appears increasingly deviant to some, their book provides a useful occasion for me to lay out my reasons why liberals should feel free to express criticisms of the left…
Since their goals are both to move the Democratic Party leftward and to hold together the progressive coalition, it follows that criticism from liberals poses a significant strategic threat. “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right,” they write, urging liberals to instead accept “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements.”
Liberal criticism of the left corrodes solidarity among the oppressed, albeit in a weaker fashion than do conservative attacks. “If conservatives wield a scythe, demonizing different groups with sinister and destabilizing abandon,” they write at another point, “their liberal counterparts prefer to use garden shears, perpetually trimming solidarity back to manageable, and certainly not transformative, proportions.”
Notably, while they urge liberals not to criticize the left, they do not make any similar demand that leftists withhold criticism of liberalism. The requirements of factional quietude run one way. There’s a reason why the catchprase is “don’t punch left,” rather than “don’t punch anybody left of center.” Hunt-Hendrix’s radical activists frequently make scathing critiques of mainstream liberals and Democratic politicians, and she seems to have no intention of stopping pouring money into these efforts even as she implores her critics to stand down.
This reflects a common assumption among leftists, conservatives, and even many liberals that liberalism is simply a more pallid, fearful version of leftism. Left-wing critique makes liberals better, by this reasoning, because leftists are braver, more authentic and advanced in their thinking, than liberals. Their criticism drags us to where we must (and, in most cases, eventually will) go. Our criticism is divisive and reactionary…
I don’t want to bore you by attempting the umpteenth definition of liberalism, so I will lay out the distinction as briefly as possible. On economic questions, leftists have an overwhelming bias for state action over markets, while liberals are more selective. (As an example, in dealing with the problem of inflation, state-enacted price controls or restrictions on profiteering are a popular option on the left, while liberals prefer using interest rates and fiscal measures.) On politics, liberals take very seriously notions of individual rights and universally applicable principles, while leftists tend to criticize political liberalism as a recipe for maintaining inequalities of power between the privileged and the oppressed. The debate over speech norms within the left over the past decade has divided political liberals from our more radical critics.
On both economics and politics, the distinction between liberalism and leftism is a spectrum, wherein the differences tend to blend in around the margins without clear-cut borders between them.
One important distinction between the two tendencies is that liberals tend to understand policy as a search for truth and politics as a struggle to bring a majority around to their position, while leftists understand politics as a conflict to mobilize the political willpower to implement the objective interests of the oppressed. “Some see politics as a game of persuasion, not a power struggle,” Taylor and Hunt-Hendrix write critically. “This optimistic view ignores the fact that those with power and motivated by self-interest, including the vast majority of Republican Party operatives and their private sector allies, have little interest in dialogue, let alone compromise.”
8) What the heck, let’s just do two Chait’s in a row, “Why President Biden Is Correct to Denounce Campus Antisemitism The problem is not physical violence.”
The crisis, instead, is the intensification of a long-standing phenomenon. For many years, it has been common for deep criticism of Israel to be a litmus test for participation in left-wing activist spaces. Most American Jews are liberal, and most support Israel’s existence. This litmus test essentially forces many young Jewish people seeking to participate in progressive life to choose between their cultural heritage and full acceptance in a broader community.
The fact that anti-Zionist groups not only allow but encourage and celebrate membership of Jewish students is not a refutation of this problem. It is a description of the problem.
While students are often attracted to the anti-Israel groups out of admirable sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, the beliefs of the organizations behind the protests are murderous and horrifying. They support Hamas and the indiscriminate slaughter and rape of Jewish civilians.
As Jill Filipovic points out, the Columbia encampment’s list of mandatory principles one must align with to join includes support for the right to resist “by all available means.” The demands of the protest coalition at the University of Michigan, which has the support of 81 campus progressive groups, call for “power to our freedom fighters, glory to our martyrs. All eyes on Gaza, the Thawabit is our compass.” (Thawabit is a list of Palestinian political principles, including “the right to resistance in all forms.”)
Media accounts have often described these protests as antiwar, but this is flatly inaccurate. They support one party to the war and call for its victory. Likewise, news accounts have inaccurately depicted the protests as arising in response to Israel’s counterattack (i.e., the Washington Post: “Campus rallies and vigils for victims of the war in Gaza have disrupted colleges since October”). But the groups in fact mobilized in response to, and in support of, Hamas’s attack, and were preparing demonstrations to support what they anticipated would be a war to destroy Israel. (“This action of resistance shatters the illusion of Israel as an impenetrable, indestructible entity. The zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive. The iOF are still in disarray and the resistance fighters are still launching new attacks into 48,” wrote Students for Justice in Palestine’s central organization in the plans for a “Day of Action” in the United States in the immediate wake of October 7.
These beliefs, which are spelled out clearly in the protesters’ foundational documents, have received astonishingly little attention. Their demands have attracted a bit more scrutiny, but much of that commentary has missed the real significance.
My problem is not that the protests in general are “antisemitic” — I would not use that word to describe them, and indeed, I am deeply uncomfortable as a Jew with how the charge of antisemitism is thrown about on the Israel-Palestine issue. My problem is that I am a hardheaded pragmatist who lived in Beirut and Jerusalem, cares about people on all sides and knows one thing above all from my decades in the region: The only just and workable solution to this issue is two nation-states for two indigenous people.
If you are for that, whatever your religion, nationality or politics, you’re part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem.
And from everything I have read and watched, too many of these protests have become part of the problem — for three key reasons…
First, they are virtually all about stopping Israel’s shameful behavior in killing so many Palestinian civilians in its pursuit of Hamas fighters, while giving a free pass to Hamas’s shameful breaking of the cease-fire that existed on Oct. 7. On that morning, Hamas launched an invasion in which it murdered Israeli parents in front of their children, children in front of their parents — documenting it on GoPro cameras — raped Israeli women and kidnapped or killed everyone they could get their hands on, from little kids to sick grandparents.
Again, you can be — and should be — appalled at Israel’s response: bombing everything in its path in Gaza so disproportionately that thousands of children have been killed, maimed and orphaned. But if you refuse to acknowledge what Hamas did to trigger this — not to justify what Israel has done, but to explain how the Jewish state could inflict so much suffering on Palestinian men, women and children in reverse — you’re just another partisan throwing another partisan log on the fire. By giving Hamas a pass, the protests have put the onus on Israel to such a degree that its very existence is a target for some students, while Hamas’s murderous behavior is passed off as a praiseworthy adventure in decolonization.
Second, when people chant slogans like “liberate Palestine” and “from the river to the sea,” they are essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution. They are arguing that the Jewish people have no right to self-determination or self-defense. I don’t believe that about Jews, and I don’t believe that about Palestinians. I believe in a two-state solution in which Israel, in return for security guarantees, withdraws from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Arab areas of East Jerusalem, and a demilitarized Palestinian state that accepts the principle of two states for two people is established in those territories occupied in 1967…
My view: Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not how to think.
I highly recommend a few differentarticles about how angry Gazans are at Hamas for starting this war without any goal in mind other than the fruitless task of trying to destroy Israel so Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, could get his personal revenge.
10) Krugman on the absurd anti plant-based meat culture posturing of RDS:
Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted, “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler.
But even if you’re someone who insists that “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?
And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.
And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects?
By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.
11) I love my VW Jetta and have driven small sedans forever. I had no idea how endangered they were here in the US:
General Motors said on Wednesday that it would stop making the Chevrolet Malibu, the last affordable sedan in its U.S. model lineup and a venerable nameplate that was introduced in the 1960s when the company was a dominant force in the U.S. economy.
For years, American drivers have been gravitating toward sport utility vehicles and away from sedans, compacts and hatchbacks. G.M.’s two Detroit rivals, Stellantis and Ford Motor, have also largely wiped their slates clean of cars in the United States.
Foreign automakers such as Toyota, Honda and Hyundai still sell hundreds of thousands of sedans and compacts each year, but far fewer than in previous decades when the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord ranked among the most popular vehicles on American roads. Last month, Subaru, a Japanese automaker, said it would stop making its Legacy sedan next year…
Several years ago, Ford eliminated sedans from its lineup. The Mustang is the only car that Ford makes for the U.S. market. Stellantis, the owner of Chrysler, now focuses mainly on trucks, S.U.V.s and minivans, though the company has said it will start making an electric version of its Dodge Challenger muscle car in 2025.
12) But I like routine. “If You Want to Get Stronger, Routine Is the Enemy: To get the most out of your strength training, try progressive overload.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a 10-year-old on a soccer team, a 30-year-old interested in general fitness or a 70-year-old trying to reduce the risk of falling — some type of overload is needed,” Avery Faigenbaum, a professor of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey, said.
Overload doesn’t mean you have to clean and jerk 200 pounds, however. It doesn’t even require lifting heavier weights. You can challenge your muscles by doing a more difficult movement — lunges instead of squats — or doing it faster.
13) Bad week for routine (okay, this is old, but a friend sent it to me this week), “Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization”
Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines—paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window—leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives—paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated fewer gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among subgroups that were experimentally induced to exercise at similar rates during our intervention, recipients of routine incentives exhibited a larger decrease in exercise after the intervention than recipients of flexible incentives.
14) Excellent piece, “Bird flu keeps rewriting the textbooks. It’s why scientists are unsettled by the U.S. dairy cattle outbreak”
Most scientists that STAT has spoken to since the H5N1 outbreak in cattle in the United States was confirmed are unsettled by the notion that the virus is spreading in mammals with which humans have close contact. “That’s a different ball game altogether,” said Malik Peiris, chair of virology at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health. “That hadn’t happened in Asia all this time.”
Nancy Cox, who for years headed the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said this particular lineage of H5N1, a descendent of a virus first spotted in a goose in China’s Guangdong province in 1996, is unlike any other family of flu viruses she recalls.
“It seems that these viruses must have some kind of ‘special sauce’ that has allowed them to find ways to persistently spread, evolve, and cause what appear to be increasingly serious problems in both wildlife and domesticated animals,” Cox, who is now retired, told STAT in an email. “There is an element of unexpected robustness and malleability that has surprised even seasoned influenza watchers.”
15) The type of excellent and fair-minded overview of a complex problem that is why I’m such a fan of Leonhardt, “The Debate Over Rafah”
In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the conflicting views of Biden and Netanyahu and summarize The Times’s latest coverage of the war.
Israel’s view
To Netanyahu and his aides, the destruction of Hamas is a vital goal. Israel’s military has already made progress, having dismantled at least 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions since the Oct. 7 attacks. But Hamas’s top leaders and thousands of fighters have survived, many evidently fleeing to tunnels under Rafah.
Allowing a cornered enemy to escape violates basic precepts of military strategy, Israeli officials believe. “Ending the war without clearing out Rafah is like sending a firefighter to extinguish 80 percent of the fire,” Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and Netanyahu’s chief political opponent, has told U.S. officials. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which tends to support Netanyahu, has called Rafah “the crucial city for the terrorist group’s future.” …
America’s view
To Biden — and many leaders of other countries — the destruction of Hamas is simply not a realistic goal. The group’s fighters are in deep, fortified tunnels that could take months if not years to eliminate, U.S. intelligence officials say. Even if Israel killed most remaining fighters, new ones would emerge.
Not only might the benefits of trying to wipe out Hamas be small, but the costs seem large, U.S. officials believe. The hostages Hamas still holds — who are likely being kept alongside the group’s leaders — could die. And the humanitarian toll in Rafah, where many Gazan refugees have fled, could be horrific. “Smashing into Rafah,” a Biden aide said yesterday, “will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”…
A third option
Ultimately, the debate may be less binary than it sometimes seems. There is a third option, and it’s one that the Biden administration seems to prefer, notes my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers intelligence.
In this scenario, Israel would agree to end major military operations — accepting a “sustained calm,” as negotiators call it — and release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. In exchange, Hamas would return all hostages, in phases.
Israel could then pursue a diplomatic deal with Saudi Arabia, in which an Arab coalition would run Gaza, sidelining Hamas. And Israel would retain the right to conduct targeted operations against top Hamas officials, like Yahya Sinwar. U.S. officials doubt the wisdom of a full-scale invasion, but not the strategic value of eliminating the Hamas leaders who planned Oct. 7.
Third option sounds great, if it’s actually possible.
16) I’m with the student on this one, “NC student was suspended after saying ‘illegal aliens’ need green cards. He’s suing.
A North Carolina family has filed a federal lawsuit against a school district that suspended their son for saying in class that “illegal aliens” need green cards.
Christian McGhee asked his English teacher at Central Davidson High School whether her reference to the word aliens referred to “space aliens, or illegal aliens who need green cards.”
Christian was suspended for three days in April, according to school records, for making a “racially motivated” and “racially insensitive” comment.
The family filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court accusing the Davidson County school system of violating their son’s rights to free speech, education and due process. The family wants monetary damages and for the suspension to be removed from school records.
“There is nothing inappropriate about saying aliens need green cards, and there certainly isn’t a case for racism due to the fact that alien is not a race,” Leah McGhee, Christian’s mother, said during public comments at this week’s Davidson County school board meeting.
17) This was great from Jeff Maurer, “You May Have to Wait Longer at Airports Because Jeff Merkley is Afraid of Robots and Can’t Read: He also has other reasons, but they’re not as good”
Congress is set to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration on Friday…now THAT’S a lede! Quite the sexy, clickbait-y first sentence, no? There so much to draw in the reader: Congress, the FAA, a pro-forma continuation of existing policies — that lede is sex on toast! And I’ve paired it with a thirst trap pic of Senator Jeff Merkley — this article is on a bullet train to Viral City!
But there’s a reason why we should care about this: A bipartisan group of senators led by Jeff Merkley is trying to use the reauthorization to force a change that could make us wait longer at airports. Their beef is with facial reauthorization, which the FAA wants to use to speed up check-in lines. If Merkley and his group succeed, airport lines that could move quickly will move slowly, and we’ll be less safe. Merkley has reasons for doing what he’s doing, but, unfortunately, they’re the worst reasons I’ve heard since I roasted Merkley for doing a different dumb thing a few months ago.
In 2019, the TSA started testing facial recognition technology at airports; today, about 301 US airports use facial recognition. Its most common use is during the part of Check-In Hell when you give your driver’s license and boarding pass to an understandably bored person, and that person pretends to match your ID to your face, though they clearly don’t give a fuck. At airports that have facial recognition, you can (but don’t have to) do things a different way: You can place your ID on an iPad, the TSA takes a photo (which is then deleted), and facial recognition matches your face to your ID (plus, if you have TSA pre-check, you don’t even need the ID). This process is faster: An airline official said it reduced the interaction from about 25 seconds to ten. By my math, that’s 15 seconds per person, which doesn’t sound like much, but adds up to 25 saved minutes in a line with 100 people. The TSA also says that the process is more accurate, because of course it is: Nothing could possibly be less accurate than our current system of having a bleary-eyed guy who just looked at a thousand faces try to discern if young, three-hairstyles-ago you is the same as old, tired, half-pulling-your-mask-down-because-fuck-this-let’s-get-a-move-on you.
So, this seems like faster, better way to do things. And the TSA would like to expand the technology to 430 airports. But Merkley wants to stop them because he saw some movies 20 years ago:…
I can’t believe that he started his speech by citing Gattaca and Minority Report. The connection to those movies is something Merkley is supposed to vociferously deny when the debate gets heated — someone like me will say “You just saw Minority Report and freaked out,” and Merkley is supposed to say “How dare you! My concerns are well-founded!” But he’s admitting that part of what’s going on here is that he saw a movie with a bunch of computers and robots in it and got scared. I guess if he saw Harry and the Hendersons, he’d be warning that deforestation is the slippery slope to having a sasquatch come live in your house.
18) I really enjoyed the new Anne Hathaway movie (on Prime), “The Idea of You.” Apparently it’s based on a romance novel I’ll never be reading. Lots of changes were made and from what I can tell, they really worked.
19) Noah Smith, “Biden is right that we need to raise taxes”
Perhaps the MMT people would advise us to just keep borrowing more and more to cover these interest costs, and then borrow even more to cover that interest, etc. That is a bad idea; eventually something in the economy will break. We’ll eventually get a default premium on government bonds, or hyperinflation, etc. In order to avoid the possibility of that, and to avoid having the rest of the budget crowded out by interest costs, the U.S. government will have to get deficit spending under control.
There are two ways we can get deficits under control: 1) cut government spending, and 2) raise taxes. That’s it — those are the only options. So which should we do in this case? Breaking down the deficit into taxes and spending (both as a percent of GDP, of course), we can see that spending is historically high right now, while taxes are historically low:
I drew the purple lines to mark where we are right now. As you can see, spending is higher than it’s been in recent history, except for during the Great Recession. And taxes are lower than they were under Reagan, Clinton, and (mostly) Bush. If we think that the 80s, 90s, and early 00s are a good guide to what our taxes and spending should be, it means we should cut spending and raise taxes right now.
Now you could make a libertarian argument that we should do deficit reduction entirely with spending cuts, because taxation is theft, because government spending is wasteful, and so on. And you could make a progressive argument that we should do deficit reduction entirely with tax increases, because reducing inequality is good, and because pretty much everything the government is spending money on now is good and important. I could argue with both of these cases, but I’m not going to, because A) a political compromise on deficit reduction will inevitably end up with some mixture of spending cuts and tax increases, B) this is what we did in the 90s and it worked, and C) this is what other countries do when they successfully reduce deficits.
So taxes should go up. And two of the best kinds of taxes we could raise right now are capital gains taxes and estate taxes.
Capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and accrual taxes
Biden’s plan has three ideas for tax hikes:
Raise capital gains tax rates to the same rate as the tax rate on other kinds of income,
Eliminate the “step-up basis” that allows people to dodge capital gains taxes if they inherit assets, and
Create a 25% minimum income tax for the wealthy that includes unrealized capital gains as income.
Basically, I think the first two of these are good ideas, and the third should be dropped.
Health insurance coverage has steadily increased among the young for the past decade:
And infrastructure is not “crumbling” by any stretch of rhetoric. Even the always dour American Society of Civil Engineers says as much: its most recent report gives US infrastructure its highest grade in more than a quarter of a century.¹ Spending on infrastructure has increased by a quarter since 2000:
There is a relentless drumbeat of claims on both sides of the aisle that America is falling apart at the seams and _________ has it worse than ever in living memory. But it’s just not true. Wages are high for every demographic group you can name; life satisfaction is steady; unemployment is low; drug abuse overall is down; our educational system is good; poverty is declining; we have more entrepreneurs than any country in the world by a wide margin; democracy is alive and well; our economy is the envy of the world; social welfare spending is generous; and a future of driverless cars, artificial intelligence, medical revolutions, and abundant energy is practically on our doorsteps. Even our demographic problems are about the least bad of any advanced economy—thanks, in part, to our supposed problem of too much illegal immigration.
Everyone has personal problems. Every country has national problems. The fact that we have problems is completely normal. But honestly, our problems right now are about as mild as they’ve been in our entire history.
Fully Myelinated 
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