Pravda says “The U.S. is now two years into abnormally high inflation“:
The U.S. is now two years into abnormally high inflation. But 2023 inflation is drastically different from the price increases that first appeared in 2021. Here’s why.https://t.co/2ksnZPLkWv
But wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we have roughly the inflation that we should expect given the level of deficit spending that we voted for? To prevent runaway inflation, the EU established a deficit limit of 3% of GDP for member countries and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 60%. The US deficit has been 5-15% since 2020 and was higher than 3% before that:
U.S. inflation today is drastically different from the price increases that first appeared in 2021, driven by stubborn price increases for services like airfare and child care instead of by the cost of goods.
We can buy as many DVD players as we want, in other words. It is only services that are going to be unaffordable to the non-elite. What percent of the economy is subject to a wage-price spiral, then? 77.6 percent.
“Gender-Affirming Care Covered by MassHealth” describes taxpayer-funded surgical procedures for residents of Maskachusetts who are smart enough to refrain from working (or at least keep their hours to the minimum). MassHealth is the Science State’s version of Medicaid, so it is partially paid for by federal taxpayers and partially by working chumps within Maskachusetts.
As described in the GAS MNG, gender-affirming surgery refers to one or more reconstruction procedures that may be part of a multidisciplinary treatment plan involving medical, surgical, and BH interventions available for the treatment of gender dysphoria. GAS may be part of therapeutic treatment to better align physical characteristics to gender identity.
To complete the miracle of transformation, Maskachusetts hatefully demands that transitioners be at least 18:
(Florida and similar states are pilloried in the corporate media for their denial of gender affirming surgery for minors while Maskachusetts is celebrated for its acceptance of all elements of Rainbow Flagism. Yet the minimum age for genital surgery is apparently the same in both states, at least for those from households where nobody works.)
Bad news for patients like me: “Hair transplantation” is not covered (those suffering from thinning hair must work extra hours, pay taxes to fund Medicaid, and then buy a ticket to South Korea). Also buried in the “Non-Covered Surgeries and Treatments” section:
Reversal of previous GAS [gender affirming surgery]
How can this be? If a patient experiences gender dysphoria and Science has proven that the correct treatment is surgical transition to a different gender, why wouldn’t reversal, which is a similar gender transition, also be covered? The explanation is thin:
As explained in MassHealth’s Guidelines for Medical Necessity Determination for Gender Affirming Surgery, MassHealth has determined that certain procedures and surgeries are either not medically necessary or lack sufficient medical evidence to support their use as treatment for gender dysphoria.
Let’s check those guidelines… there is no explanation of why reversal isn’t covered. The document simply states that “certain procedures and surgeries are not medically necessary for the treatment of gender dysphoria”. You we are informed by the New York Times that if you have gender dysphoria you need surgery, i.e., it is medically necessary.
It looks as though one legislator in Florida is trying to force employers to cover procedures symmetrically. SB 952 says if the employer pays for A-to-B transition it must also pay for B-back-to-A transition. However, it appears as though the bill did not attract any co-sponsors.
“Bud Light has been a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community since the 80s and we are excited to continue our long-standing partnership with GLAAD by collaborating with them on this new commemorative bottle that celebrates the LGBTQ+ community and everything GLAAD does to support it,” said Andy Goeler, Vice President of Marketing for Bud Light. “The way we see it, our beer is for everyone to enjoy, so we are looking forward to seeing Pride bottles at bars throughout the month of June and beyond. With the release of these new bottles, we hope to create something that everyone can feel proud to hold during Pride month that also makes a positive impact for GLAAD’s initiatives and the LGBTQ+ community overall.”
“For twenty consecutive years, Bud Light has partnered with GLAAD in its mission to accelerate acceptance of LGBTQ people,” said Zeke Stokes, GLAAD Chief Programs Officer. “Bud Light stood with the community at a time when many brands did not, and their continued outspoken support sets the bar for other global brands.”
As my only exposure to this channel is when walking through FBOs, I’m not an expert on Fox News or the recently departed Tucker Carlson. However, I’m wondering if Fox would be smart to try to replace him with Casey DeSantis, who has experience as a TV newscaster. Here is the kinder/gentler DeSantis in 2021 (source):
Readers who do watch Fox News: will you miss Tucker Carlson and whom should Fox hire as a replacement?
Also, what does Tucker Carlson do for a second act? Wikipedia says that he is 53, so he won’t be ready to run for U.S. president until at least 2045. Could Mr. Carlson succeed in a run for Congress in a district where Fox News viewership is high? Presumably he can never achieve a comparable level of fame/following as what he had on Fox, so why bother trying to reboot as a TV personality?
Also, readers who watch CNN (again, not me, except when passing through some commercial airports): will you miss Don Lemon? The BBC says that he hatefully suggested that men were better at soccer than women, contrary to ChatGPT’s findings. He also dissed my favorite Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, for being “not in her prime” at 51 years old (“prime” for a Democrat is 86, the age that Joe Biden will be when he passes the baton to President Harris in January 2029).
(Harvard cannot offer free admission to the people who have granted it freedom from paying taxes on what it earns from its $50 billion cash hoard, except for on a few days.)
Note the Science-driven COVID prevention strategy of 1 out of 4 people wearing a non-N95 mask. The same email promotes an event in which it appears that 2 out of 3 visitors are wearing Fauci-approved cloth masks:
We are informed that income inequality is one of the biggest problems facing Americans, but I wonder if the activities of central planners is going to make it ever-tougher to get accurate measurements. Looking at gross cash income is relatively easy. Adjusting for federal, state, and local income taxes is also relatively easy. It gets tougher when we want to factor in the value of means-tested welfare programs such as housing subsidies from a housing ministry, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone, but some valiant attempts have been made in this area (see “Is rising income inequality just an illusion?” (The Hill, 2021) for a description of some of the efforts).
I’ve noted here that spending power for cultural activities is actually infinite in many states for those who are on welfare (see “Why you want to be on SNAP/EBT“) because the price of museum or garden admission, for example, is reduced to $0.
Customers for California’s three major power companies — including PG&E ratepayers — can expect to see some big changes in their monthly electricity bills in the coming years as compliance with a new state law begins to unfold.
PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, the three major California utilities whose services include electricity, have filed a joint proposal with the state Public Utilities Commission that sketches out proposed changes in monthly bills.
At present, those bills are primarily based on how much electricity and gas customers consume.
A new proposal would add a fixed monthly charge that would be based on the household income levels of the respective customers.
PG&E says many customers would ultimately pay less for electricity — although the distinct possibility remains that an unknown and potentially significant number of more affluent customers might wind up with even higher electric bills.
The new law creates a need for a new government ministry of income verification:
It also appears that a formal effort will be made by state officials to confirm the household income declarations of utility ratepayers.
“The proposal recommends a qualified, independent state agency or third party be responsible for verifying customers’ total household incomes,” PG&E said in an emailed statement.
California is usually the leader in new ideas for expanding government. As more states adopt programs like this, I wonder if it will become practically impossible for academics to estimate spending power inequality in the U.S. (the relevant measure; if you can spend $200,000 per year on housing, health care, food, etc., what does it matter if your earned income is $0?).
This reminds me to relive some happy California memories. From Queer Ecology at Muir Woods (November 2020; San Francisco schools were closed, but youngsters could go to the forest (reservations required) and learn):
A few weeks ago, there were news reports of Biblical rain in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area. I checked the FAA’s web site for NOTAMs (no longer an abbreviation for the sexist “notices to airmen”) for FLL.
At first glance, using the default sort order, things looked pretty good on the morning of April 13:
There are some amendments to instrument procedures that you’ll probably not need (it’s sunny Florida!) and some signs and markings aren’t standard. If we scroll down a couple of screens, however, we find that there are some plans to maintain the runway status lighting system on April 18 and…. the entire airport is closed. That was the very last NOTAM presented.
Annoyed by all of the ads and filler in online recipes? ChatGPT to the rescue!
I asked “I have some beets that are 5 inches in diameter. How long should I cook them in an instant pot pressure cooker?” and immediately got back a page of instructions that included a 35-40-minute high-pressure cooking time with natural release.
What about a tougher challenge?
The prompt “I am serving a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of the Panama Canal. What foods should I serve?” yielded a menu that would have taken a full restaurant staff to prepare. I followed it up with “That’s much too complicated. I want to cook just two dishes.” and received
Looking ahead, new Pew Research Center U.S. population projections show that if current demographic trends continue, future immigrants and their descendants will be an even bigger source of population growth. Between 2015 and 2065, they are projected to account for 88% of the U.S. population increase, or 103 million people, as the nation grows to 441 million.
In America today, far too many of us are disconnected from each other, lonely, self-protective, or at each other’s throats. Sacrifice for the common good feels anachronistic.
Immigration is nowhere mentioned in the article. It is a curious blind spot, perhaps reflecting how detached American elites are from their subjects. Why would they expect a Hindu immigrant from India who had lost all of his possessions to Pakistani Muslims to feel connected to a Pakistani Muslim immigrant to the U.S.? Why would an immigrant from Cambodia want to sacrifice to help an asylum-seeker from Haiti or Venezuela? Cambodians in Cambodia don’t sit around wondering what they can do to help Haitians and Venezuelans. If we transport Cambodians to the U.S., what would motivate them to suddenly want to sacrifice to help recently arrived Haitians and Venezuelans?
But suppose that a truly altruistic person were to exist in the U.S., someone who can measure up to the standards set forth in this article. He/she/ze/they actually wants to sacrifice to help a person whom he/she/ze/they has never met. Why does he/she/ze/they choose to help someone who is in the U.S. comfortably enrolled in means-tested public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone? Why doesn’t he/she/ze/they be like Bill Gates and instead try to help the world’s poorest, nearly all of whom are found in very poor countries?
In short, once a country is sufficiently filled with immigrants, neither the selfish nor the altruistic will seek to sacrifice for the common good of other residents of that country. The selfish will concentrate on themselves and their families. The altruistic will sacrifice some of their time and money to help those humans who need the help the most.
If you were wondering where the forefront of medical research is…
Researchers found that in-person interactions with friends, family, and health care providers during the pandemic were associated with fewer mental health concerns https://t.co/GFsFZtl992
NAPOLEON BROWARD declared war on the swamp during his 1904 campaign for governor, unfurling giant multicolored maps of the Everglades at campaign rallies, promising to bust a few holes in the coastal ridge and create an instant Empire of the Everglades. “It would indeed be a sad commentary on the intelligence and energy of the people of Florida to confess that so simple an engineering feat as the drainage of a body 21 feet above the level of the sea was beyond their power,” he taunted his audiences.
Broward has been vilified by modern environmentalists for his intense assault on the Everglades, but he was considered a staunch conservationist in his day. He supported strict laws to protect fish, game, birds, and oysters, and his top priority was the reclamation of a swamp for agriculture and development. Broward never stopped to think what draining the Everglades might do to the fish, game, birds, and oysters that lived there, but hardly anyone did. The conservationist John Gifford dedicated his book of Everglades essays to Broward, explaining that “the man who makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is the proverbial public benefactor, but the man who inaugurates a movement to render 3,000,000 acres of waste land highly productive deserves endless commendation.”
When a canal-based drainage project did succeed, the projects could be substantial.
Swampland the state had sold to settlers for 25 cents an acre now produced harvests of $600 an acre for tomatoes, $1,000 for lettuce, $1,500 for celery. At a time when farmers were struggling to survive on 160-acre homesteads out west, the farmer Walter Waldin netted $3,400 on six acres in six months in the Everglades—after building a home and feeding a family of five.
One problem, however, was that the canals were temporary:
[James Wright, a former high school math teacher hired by the Feds to study the challenge] also ignored the high cost of maintaining canals, a problem exacerbated by the gentle gradient of the Everglades, which produced currents too slow for the canals to scour themselves out, and by the explosive proliferation of the water hyacinth, an attractive but invasive weed that had clogged almost all the state’s waterways since a well-intentioned gardener named Mrs. Fuller imported it to Florida in 1884.
The setting aside of swamp for parks began in 1916 with a 4,000-acre Royal Palm State Park that became the core of Everglades National Park. Meanwhile, humans were trashing the rest. Regarding the Miami area:
Meanwhile, 34,000 acres of the Everglades had been converted into farms, and much of the rest was parched by ditches, drought, and the Tamiami Trail. “The drying up of the Glades, due to the various canals, is playing havoc with the birds here,” one surveyor wrote. “The finer ones are fast disappearing. They lack feeding grounds.” The water table was dropping fast, drying out springs that once bubbled to the surface on Cape Sable and within Biscayne Bay, reducing the downward hydraulic pressure caused by the weight of fresh water—the “head”—that kept salt water from the region’s estuaries from intruding into its aquifers. By 1920, Miami’s overpumped well fields at the edge of the Everglades were turning salty. The declining water table was also fueling the fires that raged in overdrained Everglades wetlands. Broward had ridiculed the idea that a swamp could catch fire, and Randolph had predicted soil shrinkage of no more than eight inches, but some of the Everglades had already lost three to five feet of the black muck that had inspired so many pioneer dreams. This was not only the result of subterranean fires; it was also caused by “oxidation,” the exposure of historically flooded organic soils to the open air. The aeration of the muck breathed life into long-dormant microbes in the soil, which consumed organic material that had accumulated underwater over thousands of years. The soils then dried into powder and blew away on windy days, kicking up dust storms so violent that pioneers “could hardly get out of the house without wearing goggles.”
Charles Torrey Simpson, an early preservationist, very nearly wondered heretically whether at least some humans should be illegal:
“We shall proudly point someday to the Everglade country and say: Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; today it is an empire. But I wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings.”
Agriculture in the Florida swamp got a huge boost when the state’s research lab figured out that the Everglades soil was deficient in copper, manganese, and some other necessary trace elements.
The idea that the federal government should be in charge of all of the water in Florida got a huge boost from President Herbert Hoover, whose confidence was not shaken in the repeated failures of the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Mississippi. The dike that surrounds Lake Okeechobee is named after Hoover. The effects of the dike were not all positive…
The Depression years were drought years, and the combination of the new dike, which prevented water from the lake from reaching the Everglades, and the old ditches, which carried water from the sky away from the Everglades, left its wetlands desert dry. Its fresh water table dropped like a boulder, allowing salt water to intrude further into its aquifers every year, contaminating wells and ruining tomato farms along the Gold Coast. Meanwhile, soils that had been accumulating underwater for thousands of years were vanishing with exposure to the air; in Belle Glade—town motto: Her Soil Is Her Fortune—the ground was sinking so quickly that settlers had to add an extra doorstep every few years.
Failure and unintended consequences always motivated the experts to go bigger. The late 1940s:
The Army Corps plan for the Central and Southern Florida project called for the most elaborate water control system ever built, the largest earthmoving effort since the Panama Canal. It envisioned 2,000 miles of levees and canals, along with hundreds of spillways, floodgates, and pumps so powerful they would be cannibalized from nuclear submarines. The C&SF project was designed to control just about every drop of rain that landed on the region, in order to end the cycle of not-enough-water and too-much-water that had destabilized the frontier and stifled its growth…
The plan’s first big innovation was its strict separation of the usable Everglades from the unusable Everglades, a concept that first appeared in Captain Rose’s drainage proposal for Henry Flagler. The plan also adopted Rose’s call for piece-by-piece as opposed to all-at-once drainage. The work began with a 100-mile-long “perimeter levee” running more or less parallel to the coastal ridge, walling off the Gold Coast and a wide slice of the eastern Glades from the rest of the marsh. Next, the Corps encircled and reclaimed the rich soils of the upper Glades with more levees and drainage canals, creating an Everglades Agricultural Area the size of Rhode Island. The Corps then built more levees to divide a swath of the central Glades even larger than Rhode Island into three gargantuan “water conservation areas,” a more recent plan devised by the Belle Glade research station. The station’s scientists had suggested that “rewatering” the central Glades could restore the region’s hydraulic head and mimic the natural storage capacity of the Everglades, preventing salt intrusion, soil subsidence, muck fires, and water shortages all at once. The conservation areas would still look like the Everglades, but they would hold onto needed water for farms and cities during droughts, absorb excess water from farms and cities during storms, and recharge the region’s aquifers to keep salt out of its groundwater.
In the mid-1950s, the Army Corps made a movie about their plans and achievements, Waters of Destiny:
One the Corps was on the job, people felt confident that dry land was around the corner and, therefore, real estate could be purchased without much thought regarding whether it was buildable.
The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:
THE C&SF PROJECT did not extend the glories of flood control to southwest Florida, but that did not stop two Baltimore brothers named Leonard and Julius Rosen from selling nearly half a million acres of swampland there during the boom. The Rosens had gotten rich selling an anti-baldness tonic called Formula Number Nine, featuring the miracle ingredient of lanolin—and the immortal tagline, “Have you ever seen a bald sheep?” The brothers could see that shivering northerners yearned for a piece of Florida the way bald men yearned for hair. Their Gulf American Corporation offered “a rich man’s paradise, within the financial reach of everyone,” the ultimate miracle elixir. Gulf American’s most ambitious venture was Golden Gate Estates, where the Rosens platted the world’s largest subdivision in the middle of Big Cypress Swamp. … The Rosens sold tens of thousands of lots in Golden Gate, parlaying their $125,000 investment in Florida swampland into a $115 million payout, but only a few dozen homes were built there.
The Corps’s work did enrich some real estate speculators, but it impoverished the Everglades and the animals:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas had expected the C&SF project to save the Everglades, but it turned out to be an ecological menace. It did a terrific job of draining wetlands and promoting growth, but its expanded canals carried more water out of the Everglades at a time when south Florida’s expanding cities and farms were increasingly dependent on water in the Everglades. Its flood protection prompted additional development in the Everglades floodplain, which prompted demands for additional flood protection. And the Corps and its like-minded partners in the flood control district—often run by former Corps engineers—refused to release water to the park, except when it was already inundated. They manipulated water levels to accommodate irrigation schedules and development schemes, discombobulating the natural water regime to which flora and fauna had adapted over the millennia. “What a liar I turned out to be!” Douglas cried.
Nobody benefitted more from this than the sugar industry:
Big Sugar received no direct subsidies, as its army of spokesmen constantly pointed out, but it depended on federal import quotas, tariffs, and price supports that cost American consumers as much as $2 billion a year. Florida’s growers also relied on a federal program to import their labor pool of 10,000 impoverished West Indian cane-cutters; the industry was notorious for mistreating them, withholding their wages, and deporting any who dared complain. The growers also reaped the benefits of the C&SF project, which irrigated their fields in the dry season and drained their fields in the rainy season. They received more than half the project’s water releases, while paying less than one percent of the district’s taxes.
But that runoff [from sugar cane fields] wasn’t harmless to the Everglades, because the things that extra phosphorus made grow generally didn’t belong in the marsh. The Everglades was “phosphorus-limited,” with flora and fauna peculiarly adapted to a nutrient-starved environment, and ill-suited to compete when even minute amounts of phosphorus became available. And those thimbles added up; the agricultural area pumped 100 tons of phosphorus a year into the Loxahatchee refuge, fertilizing the march of the cattails.
President Nixon began to reverse some of the damage that the 1950s hubris had caused, with the help of Florida’s first Republican governor (voters in the former slave state had previously been loyal Democrats):
The other tectonic shift in Florida politics in 1967 was the ascension of Claude Roy Kirk Jr., a little-known insurance salesman who looked like a mob boss, partied like a frat boy, and stunned the state’s political
