Tuesday, May 19, 2020


CA Gov. Newsom Says Congress Has a 'Moral' and 'Ethical' Obligation to Bail Out States

This is absolute garbage.  But there is a case for the feds bailing out the States ON CONDITION that the States abandon the policies that are impoverishing the states  Abolishing the California Coastal Commission would be a good start

California Governor Gavin Newsom weighed in on the question of bailing out states whose budgets have been blown up by the coronavirus pandemic.

Newsom told CNN’s “State of the Union” that a state bailout was not “charity” and that Congress has a “moral and ethical obligation” to help Americans across the country.

The House passed a $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill last week which contained almost a trillion dollars to bail out states. It also contained goodies for all — another stimulus check, help for renters, college debt relief, and cash for illegal immigrants.

Fox News:

“Not to act now is not only irresponsible in a humanitarian way, it is irresponsible because it’s only going to cost more,” warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “More in terms of lives, livelihood, cost to the budget, cost to our democracy.”

Republicans mocked the bill as a bloated Democratic wish-list that was dead on arrival in the GOP-led Senate and, for good measure, faced a White House veto threat. Party leaders say they want to assess how $3 trillion approved earlier is working and see if some states’ partial business reopenings would spark an economic revival that would ease the need for more safety net programs.

I challenge any supporter of this bill to argue it’s the taxpayer’s “moral” and “ethical” obligation to bail out state pension plans that have been underfunded and mismanaged for years. Or bail out states who have borrowed against the future to buy the support of one constituency or another.

States that were experiencing serious budget problems before the pandemic hit have no moral right and Congress has no responsibility to bail them out of their troubles. Making up part of a budget shortfall is one thing. The crisis is so serious and the fall in tax revenue so precipitous that even most Republicans are eventually going to come around and vote for some kind of bailout for states.

But not this monstrosity of a bill. Most states experiencing the greatest crises have been controlled by Democrats for years. The House bill is, indeed, a political document and has nothing to do with the reality facing the country.

Just how “responsible” is that? Newsom laid it on thick in his plea for aid.

Newsom, who recently announced that California had gone from an almost $30 billion surplus earlier this year to a deficit of $54 billion because of the virus, painted a grim picture of what would happen if the federal government did not provide assistance to states.

“I hope they consider next time they want to celebrate heroes and first responders they will be the first ones laid off by cities and counties,” Newsom said of federal lawmakers. “I’m not looking to score cheap political points, but we have an obligation to support cities, states and counties.”

There is a lack of leadership in this crisis where governors could and should cut spending before going to their fellow countrymen and holding their hand out. Republican Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio is looking for $775 million in budget cuts. And a decent leader would call on the people to sacrifice as well and accept a temporary tax hike.

Then, and only then, should a governor come hat in hand to Washington. But that way is too hard, too politically risky. So we’re going to add a trillion or two more to the national debt because of the cowardice of governors.

Trump reluctantly agrees that a “phase 4” bailout is necessary. But I’m willing to bet Democrats will balk at any proposals by Republicans so they can make the “irresponsible” GOP an issue in the November election.

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San Francisco Besieged by Homeless Demanding Free Hotel Rooms, Pot, and Booze

“People are showing up in San Francisco from other places and asking where their hotel room is,” Mayor Breed complained.

“People are coming from all over the place, Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield,” Jeanine Nicholson, the first lesbian head of the San Francisco Fire Department, grumbled. “People are getting released from jail in other counties and being told to go to San Francisco, where you will get a tent and then you will get housing.”

The people coming to the City by the Bay weren’t wearing flowers in their hair, they were homeless junkies who had heard that they were going to get free hotel rooms, along with pot and booze.

And it was all true. Every word of it.

San Francisco was spending $200 a night to house the homeless, or as the current politically correct euphemism insisted that they be called, the ‘unhoused’, in hotel rooms at a cost of over $100 million.

The hotel rooms were Plan B after an attempt to house the homeless (or the unhoused) in the Palace of Fine Arts. The degradation of the former imitation Roman bath built for the 1915 Exposition would have been a fitting symbol for the new San Francisco, but homeless advocates thought it wasn’t good enough.

Hotels weren’t exactly enthusiastic about having paranoid schizophrenics urinating in their lobbies. Also, under San Francisco law, staying there for 30 days might give the homeless tenancy rights.

And then good luck evicting them.

Meanwhile the homeless were willing to take the hotel rooms, but they weren’t following the rules.

The whole reason that San Francisco taxpayers were going to be out $200 a night for months was to save each crazed homeless junkie from spreading the coronavirus. But how do you do that when they won’t stop punching each other from less than 6 feet away, and won’t wash their hands before shooting up?

“It’s been very challenging to get even some of the residents who are part of the shelter system and our hotels to comply with the orders, to even wear masks," Mayor London Breed complained. "It’s been so much harder to really care for this population especially when they won’t comply with simple directions or the orders we’re implementing.” She described it as an, “incredible logistical challenge.”

The problem with homeless shelters has always been getting the homeless to stay in them. No matter how comfortable the facilities might be, the inhabitants go off searching for drugs and alcohol which they’re not allowed to have in the shelters, and there goes your whole shelter in place strategy.

But San Francisco is a uniquely creative place and the Health Department decided to convince the homeless to stay in their hotel rooms by delivering booze, pot, and cigarettes as part of room service.

Along with three meals a day.

In San Francisco, you can’t smoke in restaurants or bars (back when they were open), in public parks (when you could visit them), or near open doorways (back when people still left them open), and smoking in hotels was almost impossible, but now San Francisco has thousands of smoking hotel rooms.

All it took was a pandemic and a bunch of characters from a Tom Wolfe novel running the city.

And, best of all, the same Health Department waging a campaign against smoking is providing the tobacco, along with “medical cannabis”, and “medically appropriate amounts of alcohol”.

Don’t worry folks, it’s all medicinal.

The San Francisco Health Department claims that handing out drugs and booze to junkies with coronavirus is actually a "harm reduction practice" that has "significant individual and public health benefits".

That’s a hell of a public health benefit.

Next time someone tries to stop you from lighting up in San Fran, tell them that the Health Department said that it has "significant individual and public health benefits".

"Our behavioral health experts are offering services every day, medication assisted treatment including nicotine and opiate replacement, behavioral health counseling," Dr. Grant Colfax, Obama's former National AIDS Policy Director, gushed, "and in cases where people decide that they are going to continue to use, our focus is using the best evidence to help people manage their addictions."

Hey, if they’re going to get high, let’s help them “manage their addictions” by giving them the stuff.

Inexplicably, if you open up hotels for junkies and provide them with the stuff, they will come. They’ll come from Sacramento, Lake County, Bakersfield, Stockton, and anyplace that isn’t nice enough to offer drug and alcohol hotel rooms free of charge to anyone with open sores and delusions of grandeur.

"It is a mystery why the homeless are coming to San Francisco," the San Francisco Chronicle wondered.

What’s a mystery is how anyone associated with the paper figures out how to put their pants on, but this correspondent might speculate that it has something to do with the free hotel rooms and booze.

Homeless “structures” have increased 285% and San Francisco can’t figure out where to stick them. And the first lesbian head of the San Francisco Fire Department is stuck with the problem because in that wonderous utopia, the job of the fire department isn’t just putting out fires, but dealing with vagrants.

"Our folks are embedded in their communities and they know who is on the streets,” she said.

The homeless immigrating to San Francisco from less friendly parts of California are even dialing 911 to get a hotel room.

“These people are very honest when you talk with them,” a paramedic quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle said, “They come right out and ask, ‘How do I get a hotel room?’”

Then they start coughing and demand to be taken to their hotel suite.

Mayor Breed has tried telling foreign homeless vagrants to go home and leave San Francisco alone. But how do you keep them down in Stockton once they’ve seen the free hotel rooms and booze in SF?

“The reality is we’ve got to focus our limited resources on reaching the people who have been here on our streets for a long time,” she insisted.

First squat, first served.

The interim director of the homelessness department (presumably soon to be changed to the unhoused department or the ministry of poop walks) warned that free hotels rooms and pot will only be dispensed to those homeless who "have roots in San Francisco." The new arrivals will have to wait their turn.

You can’t just show up in San Francisco and demand free booze and a hotel room. They’re not suckers.

If you aren’t descended from the first hippies who came here with the first communes, go home. The free booze and hotel rooms are reserved for those with roots in the crackhead community.

But homeless advocates rightly argue that this sort of NIMBY attitude is cruel and selfish. Why shouldn’t the homeless of the coast, the country, the continent, and the planet all show up in San Francisco?

What’s with this homeless nativism that puts San Fran citizenship ahead of need?

Sadly, San Francisco responded parochially to the influx of homeless by sending police officers out to intimidate the new homeless and prevent them from displacing the old homeless. Sometimes you have to destroy the new makeshift homeless encampment to save the old homeless encampment.

And then, soon, you’re beating the undocumented and unhoused with nightsticks for social justice.

Mayor Breed might as well just start building a wall to keep the Stockton homeless out while vowing to Make Homelessness Great Again by giving away pot and booze only to the city’s own homeless.

SOURCE







California City To Allow Reopenings, Declares Itself A ‘Sanctuary City’ For Business

The central California city of Atwater has declared itself a “sanctuary city” for businesses.

The Friday resolution passed by the Atwater City Council allows business owners to open, openly defying Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus-related stay-at-home order.

The resolution affirms “the city’s commitment” to “fundamental” human rights. Churches and other nonprofits are included in the resolution, according to ABC30’s Vanessa Vasconcelos.

“A resolution of the city council of the city of Atwater affirming the city’s commitment to fundamental rights of life, liberty, and property, and declaring the city of Atwater a sanctuary city for all businesses,” the resolution read. (RELATED: Los Angeles County Intends To Extend Stay-At-Home Order For 3 Months. What Does It Mean For Sports?)

A statewide shelter-in-place order has been in effect since March 19, with gradual easements happening this month. While some counties were reportedly approved to move to “Phase 2” of the state’s reopening plan, which would allow some non-essential lower-risk business to reopen, Atwater’s Merced County was not included.

Meanwhile, many Californians are flocking to other states to escape government-imposed lockdown measures.

SOURCE






The Struggle for Science in Demented Times

A few years ago the University of Vienna mathematician Karl Sigmund published a book under the title Exact Thinking in Demented Times, and his focus was on the rise of the Vienna Circle and positivism as a response to the ideological delusions of the 1920s and 1930s. The book has much to recommend it, but a critical engagement is not my concern here. In my own book on Hayek, I also invoke this phrase, as I think it captures Hayek’s scientific and philosophical quest as well – to strive for exact thinking in demented times. Hayek’s answer is different from those of the Vienna Circle, but the desire is the same.

Science is motivated either by a sense of awe and wonder, or by a sense of urgency and necessity. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is curiosity that fuels science. Basic scientific knowledge is perhaps the domain of the curious, while applied scientific knowledge and in particular the transformation of scientific knowledge into commercially valuable knowledge may be the domain of the courageous. And, scientific progress may, more often than not, follow more naturally from that sense of awe and wonder than urgency and necessity. This is because, I would argue, that science so pursued unleashes human curiosity and encourages creativity and the back and forth of critical engagement.

Awe and wonder imposes on us from the start of our inquiry a deep epistemic humility in the face of the amazing, the beautiful and the complexity of the object of our study. We are humbled by this mysterious phenomena that stimulates our thinking in a quest to understand and bring it into sharp relief. We question and we offer tentative answers, and we question some more as we ponder the mysteries of the universe. We are always willing to ask questions, which may not have answers, and we never accept answers that cannot be questioned. The scientific quest continues and progresses as we push back frontiers of knowledge, only to realize that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. This is how scientific knowledge grows.

Urgency and necessity, on the other hand, often begin with a confidence that any problem posed has a solution that science can provide. As a result, in response to a sense of urgency and necessity we often organize inquiry as if it is a military mission, with a central command, and a common purpose, and scientific energy is mobilized as opposed to being cultivated and unleashed. Not always, but more often than not, these efforts lead us down a dead end as opposed to what the popular caricatures of the Manhattan Project, or the Space Race, would have us believe.

In fact, one of the great defenders of science and the free society – Michael Polanyi – moved from a practicing physical chemist to a philosopher of science precisely because he witnessed his scientific colleagues and friends working in the communist countries of East and Central Europe and the Soviet Union suffer under the yoke of the command and control approach to scientific inquiry. At the same time, there are moments of urgency and necessity where the scientific discovery of new and vital knowledge will determine questions of life and death of people, nations, and civilization itself.

It would be a huge mistake to think this was just a problem for scientific inquiry found in the former totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Even in the Western democracies the scientistic attitude took hold after the Great Depression and WWII, and transformed the scientific and intellectual culture.

President Dwight Eisenhower, for example, in his farewell address famously warned about the “military industrial complex,” but he also warned about the dangers that the transformation of science and scholarship had undergone since WWII and its impact on science in a free and democratic society. As he wrote:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. (emphasis added)

Obviously, awe and wonder do not need to ever be at odds with urgency and necessity, but the epistemic humility encouraged by the first runs into the epistemic confidence embodied in the second, and the institutions and organizational practices of inquiry balance the tension.

Science can bear fruit in the practical – just look around us at all the amazing accomplishments of applied science from engineering to technology to medical advances. Science is amazing. Human ingenuity is amazing. Remember AWE and WONDER, and the ultimate resource is the human imagination.

The concern that Eisenhower raised in that address is the “capturing” of science by a technocratic elite, and thus insulating themselves from the democratic process of collective decision-making, and maintaining a position of monopoly experts. In times of a crisis, when urgency and necessity trump awe and wonder in science, scientific inquiry gets organized and requires leaders like Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves.

During a crisis, fate appears to hang in the balance, and mental and material resources must be coordinated and that requires a commander who is in control of the process. But that will not work if curiosity is squashed in the effort to courageously command.

In economics, such moments confronted the community of scientists in the wake of the Great Depression, in the wake of the Collapse of Communism, in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, and it appears today in the wake of COVID-19. Our knowledge learned from our explorations motivated by awe and wonder must be applied to address what must be done due to urgency and necessity. At least, that is what I would argue science in real time should do if we hope to make progress on tackling the issue at hand.

But, in reality, science in real time always operates within the context of the brine of politics. Emotion, mood affiliation, and electoral concerns substitute for sound reason and careful empirical analysis. All of this makes perfectly rational sense. Politicians are not saintly creatures, nor are their appointed public officials. They may be perfectly scientifically competent, but they – like all of us – face incentives in the context within which they operate. And as analysts it is vital to always remember that context matters.

Knowledge is necessarily imperfect. As Einstein repeatedly stressed about research, if we knew the answer, then we wouldn’t call it research. And, the scientific process is one grounded in a culture of criticism. As Richard Feynman often stressed, the true scientific attitude is reflected when one understands that it is always preferred to ask questions that cannot be answered to offering answers that cannot be questioned. Science motivated by awe and wonder has this luxury, science motivated by urgency and necessity often does not. A fire is raging, and we must put that fire out.

The idea of mobilizing science to address pressing practical issues of an existential threat due to natural or man-made disaster, or economic crises or global public good, tends to favor command and control “task force” initiatives. The resources go to fund a process that has a single goal in mind – defeat the enemy, end poverty, whip inflation – and talent is focused on that single goal.

To invoke an image from cinema concerning space travel, remember the scene in Apollo 13, when it is realized that they have a CO2 problem with the air filters, and the lead engineer comes into the room and says we have to build a filter that fits into this hole with only these materials. The other engineers work feverishly to solve that problem before the air quality becomes so dangerous that the astronauts succumb to the situation.

That is a classic engineering problem. It is not a problem of scientific discovery, but of puzzle solving. Similarly, once was step back from immediate urgency, one must always remember that the resources involved in mobilizing scientific energy require resources, and those resources come from the public purse.

To invoke another scene in another space movie, The Right Stuff, the test pilots are bantering back and forth and a journalist reminds them that “without bucks, there is no Buck Rogers.” They need to get appropriations, and that requires political gladhanding. Back to Apollo 13, remember that James Lovell (played by Tom Hanks) is leading a tour of Congressmen through the NASA command center when he learns that he will be leading the next Apollo mission.

At the present moment our demented times are not defined by ideological delusions of communism or fascism, nor military aggression by a foreign enemy combatant, nor a hurricane or tsunami that has swept away a city, but a virus that has spread throughout the globe. The movie reference perhaps most applicable isn’t Planet of the Apes or World War Z, but And the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s. One of the things I loved about this movie is the depictions of both the passion and sense of urgency that the scientists exhibit. The field scientists exist in that borderland between natural and social science. With respect to infectious disease, the natural science is molecular virology, but the social science is in the interaction of the virus with human populations that have choices with regard to how they behave when confronted with knowledge of the virus.

The natural scientists may be confronted with the troubling aspect of human strategy only with respect to their own behavior with regard to jockeying for prestige, position, and funding, but the epidemiologists and social network analysts must try to capture not only the natural science, but the strategic response of the populations impacted by the virus, and their own jockeying for prestige, position, and funding.

In the movie And the Band Played On, the science at the CDC is guided by the mantra of (1) what do I think, (2) what do I know, (3) what can I prove, but the everyday operation is guided by a concern for responsible communication that does not cause either panic or upset political interests so that funding can be secured. The entire point of the docudrama is to show the audience the role that politics – at a personal, organizational, and local, state and federal government level – played in the frustrating process of the discovery of scientific knowledge and the dissemination of useful scientific knowledge to address a policy issue of urgency and necessity.

If you think this is any different this time around with COVID-19, just look around. And, it isn’t just at the public bureaucracies at the federal level. The association of Governors issued a joint statement about a month ago saying that COCID-19 funds should not be restricted just to COVID-19 expenses. The CARES Act includes a 20% premium on top of normal Medicare payments to hospitals for patients classified as COVID-19. Mayor Muriel Bowser of DC recently announced that in response to the COVID-19 crisis, the city will allocate more than $300 million for construction of St Elizabeth’s East that will be operated by George Washington University, and also an expansion of 225 beds to Howard University Hospital. These projects are expected to open in 2025 and 2026.

Whatever the need for high quality health care in underserved parts of the city is, the pretext that these construction projects are to address the current COVID-19 situation must be looked upon with some suspicion. On the relevant margin, choices will be biased in one direction rather than another because of the simple economic calculus of marginal costs and marginal benefits of this or that choice. None of this relies on any claim that a conspiracy of corruption is underway. All that is being stressed is that incentives are at work on a multiplicity of margins that will direct attention away from the immediate problem at hand, and focus instead on the ordinary yet peculiar business of politics. It is just vital to our quest for exact thinking about current affairs to never forget that politics at the local, state and federal level are the one constant in a fluid and dynamic search for some knowledge and wisdom in public policy.

Recognizing the ever-present reality of politics involved does not take away either from the virology, or the epidemiology, but it may impact the theory choice of the decision-makers. The models that best serve the interest of public health officials, or the electoral chances for the politician, are going to be chosen. Again, nothing in that guarantees they will be the wrong choice of theory; it just means that a citizens one should always think critically not only with the information one is being asked to process but through the theoretical lens which information is being conveyed to you and which is guiding public policy decisions that impact your health and well-being.

This does put a burden on citizens, as they are being asked to critically verify information that may be extremely difficult for them to actually do. But that would be true no matter what I say. One of the primary goals of economics teachers is to convey to their students the tools required for them to become informed participants in the democratic process of collective decision-making. If we are failing in our task as educators, that is on us as educators at the high school, college and university level, but it doesn’t change the basic truth that epidemiology models must account for changes in human behavior and that another layer in all of this is not only the interaction with politics on human behavior within the populations we study, but that politics is involved in the choice of which models are chosen to guide public policy.

In our quest for exact thinking in these demented times, we are dealing with a situation of essential complexity. It is a dynamic and fluid reality we are trying to capture at multiple levels – the virus itself (natural science), the interaction of the virus with human populations (epidemiology), the adjustment and adaptations of human actors to the knowledge of the virus (social science), and the ever-present politics of policy response, and the choice of models attempting to capture all of what I just described.

Scientific understanding is always difficult to acquire; it takes training and diligence, but when our awe and wonder excite our imagination our creative powers are unleashed. Science in real time, on the other hand, relies on our sense of urgency and necessity, and in doing so is more prone to emotion, mood affiliation, and the ordinary business of politics.

To address a public health crisis, sound science must be deployed intelligently. What I am warning about is precisely about that. How can reason within democratic action on pressing issues be assured? The answer to that, I would argue turns not on the rejection of sound science, nor doubting the need for science in real time, but in effectively challenging the presumed monopoly status of experts and the command and control notion of mobilizing scientific energy to address a crisis.

It is not ‘Moon Shots’ that are needed, but nimble and diverse experimentation, and lots of it. Epistemic humility, not epistemic confidence in technocratic elites, should be how we enter the process, and diversity of viewpoints and contestation at different decision nodes must be built in. Not the mobilization of resources, but cultivation of curiosity and creativity should be the goal.

The Manhattan Project or NASA should not be the model we desperately turn to in our hour of need, but instead to examples of private and public sector ingenuity and gumption that leads to improved treatments and ultimately, hopefully, to a vaccine. That will require acts of entrepreneurship at each and every node of decision.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here.
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