This strikes me as a story worth more attention than it’s receiving. State Farm Insurance, which writes more homeowners insurance policies than any other company in California (it’s also the largest in the U. S.), has announced it will accept no new homeowners insurance policies. Ashley Capoot reports at CNBC:

State Farm General Insurance Company on Friday announced that it will stop accepting new homeowners insurance applications in California, citing “rapidly growing” catastrophe risks like wildfires, “historic increases” in construction costs and a challenging reinsurance market.

“We take seriously our responsibility to manage risk,” the company said in a release.

State Farm said it will stop accepting new business, personal lines property and casualty insurance applications starting Saturday. The new policy will not impact personal auto insurance, according to the release. State Farm’s independent contractor agents will also continue to serve existing customers.

This move has some serious implications including probably increasing the cost of homeowners insurance in the Golden State and discouraging selling your home to upgrade or downgrade.

Well, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden have reached a tentative agreement on the debt limit. Far-right Republicans are already castigating the deal as “caving in”. I suspect we will start hearing complaints from progrssive Democrats along the same lines. Now comes the difficult chore of getting something to pass both houses of Congress. Moira Warburton, Katharine Jackson, and Gram Slattery report at Reuters:

WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – After tough negotiations to reach a tentative deal with the White House on the U.S. borrowing limit, the next challenge for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is pushing it through the House, where hardline Republicans are already threatening to sink it.

As Democratic and Republican negotiators iron out the final details of an agreement to suspend the federal government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in coming days, McCarthy may be forced to do some behind-the-scenes wrangling.

“We’re going to try” to stop it from passing the House, Representative Chip Roy, a prominent member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said on Twitter. House and Senate Republicans were critical of the deal’s time frame and emerging terms.

A failure by Congress to deal with its self-imposed debt ceiling before June 5 could trigger a default that would shake financial markets and send the United States into a deep recession.

Republicans control the House 222-213, while Democrats control the Senate 51-49. These margins mean that moderates from both sides will have to support the bill, as any compromise will almost definitely lose the support of the far left and far right wings of each party.

For the last 50 years or so both political parties have been drifting away from being the “big tent”, catch-all parties they have always been to being programmatic parties. This contretemps illustrates the hazards of that transition. Over the next few days we’ll see just how strong a speaker, majority leader, and president we have. I suspect the answer is “not very”.

BTW although I’ve read dozens, maybe hundreds of complaints about the debt limit, I haven’t read one credible explanation of why the Congress preferred it a century ago when they created it to fund World War I.

I wanted to call your attention to Seth Cropsey’s post at TheMessenger because, although I agree with some of his bullet points, I found the premises of his piece gobsmackingly, shockingly wrongheaded.

Here are his bullet points:

• Show political commitment to a lengthy Eurasian war
• Freeze ship retirements
• Accelerate the distribution of naval and air basing networks
• Expand air-naval logistics
• Be prepared to strike Chinese mainland targets

Although I think we can, indeed, reduce the likelihood of a war between China and the United States, I don’t think that those measures, severally or in combination, will accomplish that.

The misconception under which Mr. Cropsey is operating is that some things are deterrable while others aren’t. You cannot deter a country from pursuing their core interests. Period. They will pursue them regardless of what we do. Furthermore, we don’t get to dictate to them what their core interests are.

Here’s my alternative list, starting with the most important.

• Stop assuming that China and the U. S. are headed towards an inevitable war
• Stop encouraging Taiwanese independence
• Produce a lot more of what we consume
• Reduce our dependence on Taiwan
• Reduce our dependence on China
• If we use military force anywhere it should be dispositive. We should accomplish our objective.

There are others but that’s a start. I could explain why those are so necessary but I think it’s pretty obvious.

A war between the U. S. and China would benefit no one. We should stop pretending it’s an acceptable idea.

There’s quite a bit of hubbub this morning about a Supreme Court decision, Sackett v. EPA. The decision is being castigated as “gutting the Clean Water Act” or praised as “a victory for liberty”, depending. Here’s the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s take (spoiler alert: they come down on the victory side):

The Supreme Court issued another landmark decision pruning back an overgrown administrative state on Thursday in Sackett v. EPA. Don’t believe the cries that the 5-4 decision will despoil America’s precious wetlands. The majority simply stopped a regulatory land grab.

Michael and Chantell Sackett’s ordeal reveals how rule by an unfettered administrative state can cause significant cost and hardship. For 16 years the couple has been battling the bureaucracy to build a home. The Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers claim their dry property is a wetland subject to federal regulation.

The Clean Water Act (CWA) authorizes EPA to regulate only “navigable waters” in interstate commerce. Yet the EPA said the Sacketts’ property was connected to a wetland some 30 feet away, which was connected to a ditch that connected to a nonnavigable creek that connected to a lake. Follow that?

Americans anywhere in the country could have their backyard declared a wetland, but they wouldn’t know it until the EPA swoops in and threatens enormous penalties for pouring herbicide on weeds. EPA advises landowners to solicit the Army Corps’ opinion before doing anything with their property. But 75% of the time the Corps claims jurisdiction.

There’s one bit of context that so far has been missing from most editorial comment I’ve read including this one. Both the five conservative justices who formed the majority and the four other judges who were in the minority agreed that the EPA had violated the plantiffs’ rights. Nonetheless I agree with one of the minority justice’s expressed opinion that the Supreme Court shouldn’t be in the business of making every environmental decision in the country. The whole kerfuffle reminds me of this:

with Congress being in the position of Henry Blake and the EPA being in Radar’s. Congress left ambiguities in the law to save themselves work but being a Congressional representative shouldn’t be a sinecure. Had the Congress intended the EPA to micromanage every bog, swamp, marsh, damp spot or other wetland in the country they should have written that into the law explicitly. The decision which Sackett v. EPA overruled allowed the EPA to overreach in just the way that the justices agreed violated the plaintiffs’ rights.

What’s the lesson in this situation? First, Congress shouldn’t be signing blank pages, allowing the civil bureaucracy to fill in the details. Sadly, the voters have abrogated their responsibility by electing and re-electing the same people time after time.

It seems to me the other lesson of this, like other recent SCOTUS decisions, is that if you don’t want to violate people’s rights, don’t just assume you can depend on the courts to do the legislators’ work for them or that the civil bureaucracy will be philosopher-kings. If your Congresscritter won’t assume his or her responsibility, vote for someone who will.

Today is Jack’s first birthday. We took at extra-long walk this morning and I must say he behaved very well (for a change).

However, when I saw the enormous bash that Jack’s littermate, Astelle’s owners were throwing for her I must admit it made me feel like a piker.

Okay here’s the situation. A guy intentionally crashes a truck across the street from the White House. He is quoted as saying that he wants to “get to the White House, seize power, and be put in charge of the nation”. He pretty obviously needs psychiatric help. He is arrested on a variety of charges including trespassing, damage to property, assault with a deadly weapon, reckless driving, and “threatening to kill, kidnap, or inflict harm on a president, vice president or family member”. He appears to be an Indian national; there’s some confusion over whether he’s a lawful permanent resident or not.

All but the least serious charges are subsequently dismissed.

Here’s my question: what’s going on? Do the authorities figure that the least significant charges are a slam dunk and sufficient to deport him? Or is it something else?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment on the same tax and spending proposal I (and the editors of Crain’s Chicago Business) remarked on earlier. They don’t add a lot to the conversation. Basically, if you make it costly enough to do business in Chicago businesses will leave and those hurt most will be the most vulnerable.

Except this:

The mayor’s pals say a “city budget is a moral document.” Readers can decide what kind of morality lets criminal gangs run wild while shrinking the police force and chasing taxpayers out of the city.

I join the editors in wondering what sort of moral code they’re following? It sounds more like “nature red in tooth and claw” than any moral code of which I am aware.

One final remark. You can no longer say that the progressives in the Democratic Party don’t want to defund the police with a straight face. The proposal is quite clear; not only does the proposal eliminate the 1,000 positions for uniformed officers presently unfilled permanently it cuts 9% from the CPD budget on top of that. Saying “we don’t want to defund the police we just want to spend less on them” doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Arguing whether having more police officers on the street is the most effective way of improving public safety is a reasonable point and worth discussing. Claiming that cutting spending on the police isn’t defunding the police isn’t.

I’ve already made my views clear: I think that the problem doesn’t start and end with the police. I think that the CPD, the Cook County States Attorney’s office, and the Cook County judiciary need to arrest more people, try more cases, and convict more people found guilty respectively. Our problem is everybody is not rowing in the same direction. The direction should be greater public security rather than reducing incarceration.

In response to a flurry of news and commentary reports on Chinese hacking, James Joyner posts:

This seems to go beyond normal, low-level “competition below armed conflict,” in the current Defense Department vernacular, into something more like preparation of the battlespace. Cyber operations are inherently murky compared to traditional “kinetic” operations, making drawing lines difficult. But we seem to be at a point where China is more than a “strategic competitor” but rather an adversary. Which would seem to portend a considerably different economic relationship.

Here’s my question: is it the activity that is “beyond normal” or is it the reporting on the activity? There has been an enormous amount of Chinese state-sponsored hacking activity being carried out over the last several decades. Is what’s going on now different in kind from what’s gone on in the past?

On the one hand I think it’s good that people are finally noticing just how much Chinese cyberespionage is going on. It constitutes a ridiculously large amount of total Internet traffic. At one point I made a regular practice of blocking Chinese IP addresses. I was shocked at just how much of my total traffic consisted of what were mostly probing attacks originating in China. I once saw a log in which you could see the attacker going systematically through a list of known vulnerabilities.

On the other hand I find the prospect of raising the temperature when nothing has actually changed troubling.

The video embedded above is a recent talk given by John Mearsheimer. It’s lengthy.

In it he makes several points:

• No meaningful negotiations are possible since both the Russians and Ukrainians see the war as existential.
• The Ukrainians can’t win.
• The Russians aren’t interested in conquering all of Ukraine and incorporating it into Russia.
• The Russians will seize more formerly Ukrainian territory, leaving a dysfunctional rump state in eastern Ukraine.

I don’t believe that’s either what he or I want to happen but in all likelihood it’s what will happen.