RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/tearing-down-thomas-jefferson-over-slavery-is-moral-idiocy/#slide-1

Actually, Thomas Jefferson did a lot of good, even on slavery.

Y ou can always count on woke progressives to live up to the worst caricatures of their ideas. Democrats on the New York City Council have now removed a statue of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson, from the City Council chamber in New York City Hall. The statue has been in City Hall since 1834 (eight years after Jefferson’s death), when it was erected to celebrate his advocacy of religious liberty. It is a sign of how proud Democrats are of their decision that they tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.

This is madness, and it vindicates many on the right — prominently including Donald Trump — who argued that the campaigns against Confederate statues were dangerous precisely because the people pushing for the removals were certain to move next against the Founding Fathers. When Trump made that argument in 2017, he was met with sneers. In a piece titled “Statues of Washington, Jefferson Aren’t ‘Next,’ But It’s Complicated, Historians Say,” Dartunorro Clark of NBC News wrote:

Historians who spoke to NBC News said such fears are slightly misplaced and that Trump is championing a murky interpretation of history. . . . “The president can raise the slippery slope, but it’s a false slippery slope,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based historian who specializes in American Civil War history.

John Oliver:

I’ll tell you where it stops. Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer’s always . . . somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar heroin. You don’t just go, “Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?”

Actually, you do ask that, and this is why. Whatever Trump understood about history, he understood the madness of mobs better than Kevin Levin or John Oliver did.

Without rehashing here the whole debate over Confederate icons — which has been going on for years now and has been vigorously debated on this website, sometimes by me — the strongest argument for removing some or all Confederate statutes and monuments is that the Confederate cause was not just flawed in the way that many great Americans are flawed; it was actively wrong, and the people who supported it made the country worse, or at any rate tried to, and thus should never have been memorialized in the first place.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/and-the-fair-land-11637710823?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Any one whose labors take him into the far reaches of the country, as ours lately have done, is bound to mark how the years have made the land grow fruitful.

This is indeed a big country, a rich country, in a way no array of figures can measure and so in a way past belief of those who have not seen it. Even those who journey through its Northeastern complex, into the Southern lands, across the central plains and to its Western slopes can only glimpse a measure of the bounty of America.

And a traveler cannot but be struck on his journey by the thought that this country, one day, can be even greater. America, though many know it not, is one of the great underdeveloped countries of the world; what it reaches for exceeds by far what it has grasped.

So the visitor returns thankful for much of what he has seen, and, in spite of everything, an optimist about what his country might be. Yet the visitor, if he is to make an honest report, must also note the air of unease that hangs everywhere.

For the traveler, as travelers have been always, is as much questioned as questioning. And for all the abundance he sees, he finds the questions put to him ask where men may repair for succor from the troubles that beset them.

His countrymen cannot forget the savage face of war. Too often they have been asked to fight in strange and distant places, for no clear purpose they could see and for no accomplishment they can measure. Their spirits are not quieted by the thought that the good and pleasant bounty that surrounds them can be destroyed in an instant by a single bomb. Yet they find no escape, for their survival and comfort now depend on unpredictable strangers in far-off corners of the globe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/strategic-political-oil-reserve-opec-biden-11637701493?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Crude prices rose Tuesday after the Biden Administration announced that the U.S. and other countries would tap their petroleum reserves. Sorry, Mr. President. Markets know that this political gesture won’t fix the supply shortage and could make it worse.

The Energy Department next month will begin releasing 50 million barrels from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve (SPR), the first major release since the Libyan conflict in 2011. Congress already requires that some 18 million barrels are to be sold to raise revenue, and the other 32 million will be returned to the reserve when prices drop. China, India, Japan, South Korea and the U.K. will also make modest drawdowns.

So why did crude prices tick up? One reason is the release was less than markets expected. For weeks the Administration has been hinting at a coordinated release, so traders overbaked it into prices. Oil stocks also rose smartly— Continental Resources by 8.3%.

Some also expect the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia to respond in kind at their next meeting in December by reducing supply. OPEC+ has been steadily raising supply by about 400,000 barrels per day each month, though the Administration for months has been lambasting the cartel for not doing more.

It’s true that the Saudis are content with crude averaging the current price of about $80 per barrel, which is about break-even for the Saudi budget. The Kingdom also worries that Iranian supply could increase if the Biden Administration renegotiates a nuclear agreement and lifts sanctions.

For a decade the U.S. was the world’s swing oil producer. But U.S. drillers have retreated amid a regulatory assault from Washington, pressure from progressive investors, and challenges obtaining capital. Some say they are also struggling to find workers. Output is set to hit a record in the Permian Basin, where the break-even costs are low and new production doesn’t require long-term investment.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/paul-krugman-michael-lind

How a trash-talking neoliberal economist harmed America by vilifying strategic trade and industrial policy

Strategic trade and national industrial policy are back. Growing U.S. military and economic competition with China, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have revealed the dependence of the United States on manufacturing supply chains in China and other foreign sources. The neoliberal consensus in favor of indiscriminate trade liberalization and against government support for strategic industries is evaporating: The Biden administration, in a more nuanced way, has continued many of Donald Trump’s nationalist economic policies, including some tariffs and programs to promote reshoring. In an era of extreme polarization, there is a high degree of bipartisan support for measures like the CHIPS for America Act, which seeks to reduce U.S. reliance for semiconductors on a few Asian sources like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics.

The last time these issues were at the center of public debate was during the 1980s and early 1990s. At that time, both the industrial revival of Japan and West Germany after the devastation of World War II and the increasing offshoring of production to low-wage countries by U.S. corporations were challenging America’s manufacturing sector and its workers.

Then as now, America’s university-based economics profession was dominated by the otherworldly neoclassical school, which, having purged the empirical and realistic institutional school of economics after 1945, specializes in using mathematics to model unrealistic assumptions. Even so, a generation ago the debate over whether the U.S. should adopt a strategic trade and industrial policy—favoring some industries over others and including selective protectionism or export promotion—was causing a few bold academic economists to rethink the discipline’s creed that free trade is always and everywhere good for everyone.

One was a promising young economist named Paul Krugman. In a 1987 paper for The Journal of Economic Perspectives, “Is Free Trade Passe?” Krugman noted:

If there were an Economist’s Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations “I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage” and “I advocate Free Trade.” … Yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publication of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy … because of the changes that have recently taken place in the theory of international trade itself. … There is still a case for free trade as a good policy, and as a useful target in the practical world of politics, but it can never again be asserted as the policy that economic theory tells us is always right.

Only a few years later, however, Krugman had become one of the most vehement critics of scholars, public servants, and journalists who questioned free trade, doing his best to destroy their reputations in the eyes of the trans-Atlantic media and business and academic establishments. He and other intellectual vigilantes like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and the economist Jagdish Bhagwati who policed the borders of acceptable discourse about trade in general and offshoring to China in particular were all too successful. It might have happened anyway, but Krugman’s prestige and skill as a polemicist helped persuade elite media outlets, think tanks, government agencies, and business institutions that they could ignore the experts from varied backgrounds who were raising alarms about the consequences that offshoring U.S. manufacturing would have for supply chain fragility, domestic jobs, and U.S. military power. By the time Krugman confessed that he and others had been wrong to minimize the problems involved in globalization for a quarter of a century, the damage to the United States had been done.

.https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/23/atlas-i-watched-the-nations-top-scientists-lie-about-covid-and-get-away-with-it/

This is an excerpt from the author’s new book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” which releases December 7 and is available now for preorder.

[CDC Director Robert] Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23 immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.

The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.

First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.

Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.

Some antibody totals were pulled from several months earlier, before many of those states had experienced a significant number of cases. It therefore grossly underestimated the number of cases that had already occurred. The data was simply not valid, but you needed to pay attention to the details.

More importantly, Redfield’s basic claim was fundamentally flawed. The conclusion that serum antibody testing revealed the entire population of those protected from COVID was counter to an entire body of published literature and contrary to fundamental knowledge of immunology, including other coronavirus infections.

It was well known that antibody tests showed one cross-section in time—they were transient—even though immune protection can last. From studies on SARS-2 and most other viruses, antibody levels change over a span of months. They typically appear in the first couple of weeks, peak in a few months, and then decrease over a span of several months.

The literature on COVID had already shown these patterns. A month before this press conference, a Nature Reviews Immunology study on COVID-19 explicitly stated, “The absence of specific antibodies in the serum does not necessarily mean an absence of immune memory,” and explained, “memory B-cells and T-cells may be maintained even if there are not measurable levels of serum antibodies.”

Japan’s study demonstrated this dramatically. In their study, antibody levels increased from 5.8 percent to 46.8 percent over the course of the summer. The most dramatic increase occurred in late June and early July, paralleling the rise in daily confirmed cases within Tokyo, which peaked on August 4.