I want to commend this analysis by George Fishman at the Center for Immigration Studies to your attention. After reading the summary I was prepared to do a complete fisking of the piece but after reading the whole thing I am much more favorably impressed.

The analysis considers “why asylum grant rates have been plummeting”, providing a number of plausible explanations including Mr. Dooley’s (translating from the transcribed Irish brogue): “The Supreme Court justices may hold tenure for life but they do read the election returns”.

My explanation, as is frequently the case, is the simplest: when the numerator remains about the same but you increase the size of the denominator sharply, ratios will “plummet”.

I learned something of which I was unaware in reading the article: the adjudication of asylum requests is not handled on a “first come first served” basis. Here’s an interesting quote:

So what is the average wait time for all asylum decisions by IJs — on the regular docket and on the dedicated docket, colloquially known as the “rocket” docket? TRAC reported that for asylum cases decided by IJs in fiscal year 2022, the average time to completion for dedicated docket cases was 276 days vs. 1,594 days for regular cases. Overall, TRAC provided data that indicated that 56 percent of all decisions involved a period from NTA to closure of over three years, 14 percent more than a year and a half to less than three years, 26 percent more than three months to less than 18 months, and 5 percent up to three months.

If wait times do not occur in a normal distribution, “average” and “median” assume different roles than they would if the distribution were normal. Basically, “average wait time” has no referent.

Some of the revelations in the analysis are shocking if not horrifying. For example:

Starting on May 11, 2023, asylum seekers who entered at the U.S.-Mexico border and who did not make an appointment using the CBP-One app are barred from asylum. Though there are some narrow exceptions, many migrants are being denied asylum because they failed to use the app, and I expect this contributes to the higher denial rate in court.

or this:

Simply put: the Biden administration’s parole policy allowed a lot of weak cases into the immigration court system. This is not the same as saying that these cases are fraudulent, nor does it imply that asylum applicants or their attorneys are acting in anything other than good faith. But it does mean that a lot of migrants were promised a bite at an apple that almost certainly was far out of reach.

If you hold a low opinion of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration, the analysis should confirm your opinion. If you approve of the Biden Administration’s handling of immigration, the analysis may change your mind.

Just for the record I think we should admit more immigrants legally and with due consideration and that we should accept more asylum-seekers. I think that far fewer low=skill migrant workers with limited command of English should be allowed into the country illegally and that the causes for asylum are limited to those described in the statute. That doesn’t include poverty, low-paying jobs, or generalized crime and violence. As the analysis points out

The Biden administration stated that its goal to “was create additional safe and orderly processes for people fleeing humanitarian crises to lawfully come to the United States”. Well then, why didn’t his administration admit them as refugees? Because it well knew that they wouldn’t qualify — they simply did not face persecution. What they certainly faced were low wages and scarce job opportunities (compared to the U.S.) in their home or adopted countries. What they may have faced were gangs or generalized violence at home. But these are not grounds for refugee status. Ironically, many ended up in gang-infested U.S. cities with far higher murder rates than in their communities abroad.

Speaking of history, I wanted to point a few things out about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I just finished watching From Here to Eternity which may have motivated this post.

The Japanese attacked with a strike force of 353 aircraft. Of those almost all survived. Only 29 aircraft were downed by some combination of anti-aircraft guns on battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and airfields and small arms fire.

The attack was very nearly a complete tactical success while also being a catastrophic strategic failure as Admiral Yamamoto had warned. While he probably never said the more poetic “sleeping giant” quote with which he has been credited he did say

If ordered to do it, we can fight hard for six months — but I have no confidence if it lasts two or three years.

One more thing. To the best of my knowledge no Japanese national or Japanese-American was executed for espionage during World War II. One German was condemned to death for espionage for activities leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor. His sentence was later commuted. In 1942 six Germans were condemned by a military tribunal and executed for espionage.

There’s an old idiom about “closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted”. It refers to implementing a solution too late to do any good.

That’s how I react to the complaints about Hollywood’s shedding jobs through the use of artificial intelligence in film making. Hollywood has been on a slippery slope for very nearly a century. Perhaps something could have been done about it twenty or thirty or fifty or more years ago but trying to do something about it now is too little too late.

You can practically draw a straight line from Westworld (1973) to A New Hope (1977) to Looker (1981) to Tron (1982) to The Last Starfighter (1984) to The Abyss (1989) to Jurassic Park (1993) to Minority Report (2002) to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) to Avatar (2009). I’m sure I’m leaving some steps out but you get the idea.

Many of these steps involved Michael Crichton who is clearly a seminal figure in the replacement of practical effects with CGI and now artificial intelligence.

You can draw similar (and related) evolutionary chains for dubbing (from the earliest days of sound films), “stop motion”, and for animation starting with Steamboat Willie.

Yes, AI will make a lot of jobs in filmmaking obsolete. Yes, that will include actors and actresses. I doubt that the “Tillie Norwood” strategy (as highlighted on todays Sunday Morning) will go anywhere and the first AI A Trip to the Moon hasn’t been made yet but it will be.

Yes, an enormous amount of “slop” will be produced. What I’m hoping will happen is that AI will democratize filmmaking. Anyone with an idea and enough patience will be able to create a full-length motion picture on their own or with a small team of friends. It would be interesting to see what a young Sam Raimi could do.

The editors of the Washington Post take time to criticize our NATO allies:

With friends like these, who needs enemies? “There is a chance that the U.S. will betray Ukraine on territory without clarity on security guarantees,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz during a conference call, according to Der Spiegel. Macron warned of “a big danger” as the Trump administration continues its mission to bring the war to an end and negotiate concessions between Russia and Ukraine.

European leaders should make sure they are without sin before casting such heavy stones. How does Macron explain, for example, France’s ranking as the third largest buyer of Russian energy in Europe? That’s not pre-2022 or pre-2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his illegal invasions of Ukraine. That’s as of August.

This is a Europe-wide problem. Leaders offer up their “unwavering commitment and solidarity with Ukraine.” In theory. In practice, the continent often cannot agree, let alone act, to make the choices and sacrifices required to help its neighbor.

Netherlands is fourth and Belgium is fifth. Both are spending a higher percentage of GDP on oil and gas imported from Russia than France. Furthermore, there’s a certain amount of sophistry involved as well. Netherlands is Germany’s second-largest supplier of refined petroleum products and Netherlands is importing a substantial amount of the petroleum it refines from India which in turn gets it from Russia.

Shorter: Europe is financing Russia’s war against Ukraine.

BTW, the United States isn’t entirely off the hook. We continue to buy oil, gas, and refined petroleum products from India which is importing from Russia so we’re financing Russia, too.

Everyone is patting Germany on the back (especially the Germans) for spending 2% (maybe 2.4%) of its GDP on defense. The flip side of that coin is that they’re spending that much for the first time in 30 years. At that rate of spending when will Germany’s military reach the highest level of preparedness? My back-of-the-envelope guess is “never”. To the best of my knowledge the only European country whose military is at the highest level of preparedness is France. Maybe. That’s the best case scenario.

As I’ve said before I think that the most obvious explanation for our European allies’ relative nonchalance is that they don’t really believe that Russia poses a threat to them and they’ll spend just enough to convince Uncle Sugar to provide their security for them anyway.

Yesterday I posted about the “merger” between Netflix and Warner Brothers/HBO Max. I use quotation marks because, although it’s being referred to as a merger, I think it is more properly viewed as an acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix. Today the editors of the Washington Post jump into the scrum:

Netflix’s Friday deal to acquire Warner Bros. might create more drama than either company has produced in a while. The Hollywood brand has been around for basically as long as movies, and the streaming service is on millions of TVs daily. The Trump administration has expressed skepticism of the tie-up, as have Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts).

Warner Bros. passed on a bid from Paramount Skydance, which wouldn’t be so remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that the company is very friendly with President Donald Trump. The need for government approval of the merger gives the president leverage to demand things from Netflix or guide the company into his friends’ hands.

It feels like Warren has never seen a corporate merger she liked. Even though a long train of industry deals over the decades have never led to the entertainment monopoly she fears, she claims this one will lead to “higher subscription prices and fewer choices” while “putting American workers at risk.”

Maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. Perhaps Netflix will be the company that cracks the code. But Warner Bros. is the cursed monkey’s paw of the entertainment industry, tricking several corporate titans into believing they could take over the world by acquiring or merging with it.

concluding:

It’s hard to say what the new company would have a monopoly on. Netflix is a leading streaming service, but it only has a 25 percent market share and faces intense competition from several companies, including Amazon, which was founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos. If the market is defined as TV in general, Netflix’s current share is under 10 percent.

As Warner Bros. history proves, it’s nearly impossible to predict business trends in the entertainment industry. As long as both companies’ shareholders approve, the government would need to prove there will be harm to consumers if it wants to block the deal. Political favoritism and fear of bigness aren’t good enough reasons.

After writing my post yesterday I received the following email from Netflix:

Hi David,

We recently announced that Netflix will acquire Warner Bros., including its film and television studios, HBO Max and HBO. This unites our leading entertainment service with Warner Bros.’ iconic stories, bringing some of the world’s most beloved franchises like Harry Potter, Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Casablanca, Game of Thrones and the DC Universe together with Stranger Things, Wednesday, Squid Game, Bridgerton and KPop Demon Hunters.
What’s changing?

Nothing is changing today. Both streaming services will continue to operate separately. We have more steps to complete before the deal is closed, including regulatory and shareholder approvals. You’ll hear from us when we have more to share. In the meantime, we hope you’ll continue to enjoy watching as much as you want, whenever you want – all on your current membership plan.

Notice that, reading between the lines, the email completely supports the first scenario I proposed yesterday. All that is mentioned is content. The memo is silent about production and there is no hint about whatever plans there are to reduce or even eliminate theatrical releases.

As I said yesterday, I don’t think much of companies acquiring their competitors and, when the companies are large enough, I think the practice should be banned. As Adam Smith wrote more than three centuries ago:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices

The bigger the companies, the broader the conspiracies and I don’t believe there is any foreseeable benefit to the public in two enterprises each worth tens of billions of dollars becoming one.

So now I’m waiting for the next shoe to drop. After considerable legal and bureaucratic wrangling I suspect that shoe will either take the form of an increase in the price I’m paying now or a decrease in what I’m able to stream (to induce me to subscribe to multiple services).

I’ve mentioned before that when I was about 10 years old my mother started reading Adelle Davis and completely changed our family’s diet. White bread, Twinkies, potato chips, etc. completely disappeared and were replaced with whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and so on. We even drank Tiger’s Milk (a mixture of lowfat milk, brewers yeast, wheat germ, and banana). We replaced the margarine we had been using with a healthier variety (it used safflower oil rather than cottonseed or soybean oil).

When I went away to college and then graduate school I tried to maintain that diet but it was tough. The university cafeteria had different ideas. For breakfast I ate eggs, bacon or sausage, and oat meal. For lunch and dinner I ate salad, vegetables, meat, poultry, and fish, avoiding pasta, potatoes, and other starchy carbohydrates. I drank low-fat milk with my meals to boost my protein consumption. I rarely drank soft drinks.

I’ve tried to maintain that ever since. I can’t have eaten a whole loaf of white sandwich bread in total over the last nearly three-quarters of a century. For the last twenty-five years my total annual beef consumption has been around 20 lb. I cook (I do nearly all of the cooking) using butter, olive oil, and canola oil as fats. Recently, I’ve replaced the canola oil with avocado oil. I find it has a higher smoke point.

I hate it when my primary care physician’s records characterize me as “obese”. That’s because my BMI is around 30. It’s only that because I am built differently than most American men—my legs are shorter relative to my torso (which is how they calculate BMI) and I’m more muscular. I walk 5 miles or more a day and consume fewer than 2,000 calories per day, mostly along the lines described above.

This is being much-discussed in some circles so I thought I’d comment about it. To fill you in on the backstory, Scott Nover remarks at the Washington Post:

When Netflix announced a blockbuster $83 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, among the elements not included in the purchase was a conspicuous one: CNN, the cable news giant that has been associated with the Warner name for decades.

CNN will anchor a spin-off company called Discovery Global, which will also include cable outlets TNT Sports, the Discovery Channel and other properties including Food Network and Bleacher Report.

The economics are challenging for the stand-alone company, which Warner Bros. chief executive David Zaslav said would be spun off by the third quarter of next year. Cable TV viewership has been declining for years, and CNN generally lags behind rivals Fox News and MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) in ratings.

But industry experts and a number of CNN staffers said they felt that the storied news channel could emerge stronger as a leading part of this new company because of what happened Friday — and also because of what didn’t happen.

Jeremy Goldman, a senior director at the market research firm eMarketer, said that while CNN didn’t get “invited to the Netflix party,” this could be the best outcome for the cable news brand.

“CNN is no longer a political football, its 2026 budget is approved and growing, and the spin-off gives the network the focus and stability to pursue its digital transition without being weighed down by streaming-first economics,” he said.

Paramount is livid about it—they’d been trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery for some time. The noises are that this argument isn’t over but I think it’s over.

The following is what I think will happen. Not what I think should happen—I’ll add that at the end of the post.

I think that, following a lot of legal wrangling and bureaucratic angst, the acquisition will be approved. After that I see two possibilities, one if Netflix thinks there is no future for movie-making as it has been done for the last century and another if they think there is.

If Netflix thinks that LLM AI is making traditional movie-making and television production obsolete it will stripmine Warner Bros./HBO Max for content, their substantial libraries. Then it will sell off the various physical properties and pieces, in all likelihood leaving the vestiges saddled with the debt from the leveraged buyout.

The other alternative is that Netflix is acquiring Warner Bros./HBO Max to bolster their own content-production capacity and bring it in-house. Warner Bros. and HBO will remain as brands under the Netflix umbrella, probably a mainstream brand (Warners) and a premium one (HBO).

In either of these possibilities the costs to stream the stuff you’ve been streaming will probably rise, possibly substantially. I suspect that the only ones who will make money from this deal are the lawyers and David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery.

What I think should happen is quite different. I don’t think that enterprises (companies with annual revenues of $1 billion or more) should be legally allowed to grow by acquiring their competitors. Quite to the contrary, I think those that have should be split up into smaller companies. Anybody who thinks that a $39 billion company can realize economies of scale by acquiring another $39 billion company should show their work. I think that the economies of scale were realized a long time ago.

I want to admit from the start that I don’t understand the brouhaha over administering Hepatitis B vaccines routinely to infants. I don’t understand why the administration chose to pick a fight by altering the guidelines; I don’t understand why the reaction has been what it has. Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

For background in 1991 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended that the Hepatitis B vaccine be administered too all newborns, a change from the previous risk-based recommendation. This is estimated to have prevented 16,000 to 18,000 cases of Hep B in children with some subpopulations having a higher prevalence than others. That in turn reduced the number of other liver diseases including cancer later in life. The complete course of immunization is three doses.

The risk of adverse reactions appears to be nominal. There is no identified relationship between the immunization and autism, for example. Allergic reactions are most common and those are rare. Last year there appear to have been no reported deaths from administering the vaccine to newborns.

The cost appears to be fairly nominal (around $300 for the entire three-dose course) with little out-of-pocket. Like everything else in healthcare the markups and administration fees are high but the figure cited above includes those.

Routine immunization has reduced the number of diagnosed cases but hasn’t eliminated them (it’s stated objective).

So, the bottom line is that I don’t understand the argument at all. Immunization reduces the number of cases at the margins and is fairly harmless and inexpensive to the extent that anything in healthcare is. I don’t understand why there’s an argument. On either side since it hasn’t achieved its stated objective and it’s obviously not much of a profit center. Is it a turf battle?

Perhaps someone can explain it to me.

My German ancestors arrived in the United States in the 1820s, settling in a German-speaking part of Southern Illinois on land they had purchased from a land developer while still living in Germany. My French ancestors arrived in the United States in the 1840s. Since by 1850 they were already quite prosperous and marrying into some of St. Louis’s most prominent “original settler” families, it’s reasonable to speculate they were not impoverished when they arrived.

My Irish ancestors arrived pre-famine in the 1840s. All indications are that they were dirt-poor. My great-grandmother (a third generation American), grandmother, and family were among the poorest people in St. Louis at a time when there was no such thing as public assistance.

My Swiss ancestors arrived immediately after the American Civil War. Since the 1870 shows them as living on their own farm, clearly they were not impoverished. “Schuler” was originally spelled with an umlaut which was dropped when they arrived since there was no umlaut in the English alphabet. My great-great-grandfather Schuler spoke German and, presumably, accented English. His sons spoke German but were also fluent in English and although my grandfather spoke a little German he primarily spoke English.

Basically, my father’s family was middle class or upper middle class while my mother’s family was working class or class-less (depending on how you classify entertainers). What they had in common was the mutual desire for a stable, solid family life, something neither one of them had while growing up.

Update

There are several lines I neglected to mention, the most notable being the Blanchards who are, shall we say, complicated. My great-great-grandfather Blanchard was born in Clinton County, New York in the 1820s. They may have arrived earlier than that. They were either French or Irish. Who knows? The records seem to have been lost.