My heart goes out to the people of Lahaina who’ve lost their homes, all of their possessions, and, in many cases, family members to the fires that have swept through their town. We won’t know for a while how great the fatalities were. It will turn out to be something between 1% and 10% of the town’s population. Claire Rush, Beatrice Dupuy and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher report at the Associated Press:

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.

“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”

The scale of the destruction and damage is substantial:

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, nearly all of them residential. Across the island, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion.

To give you some idea the total permanent population of Lahaina is something around 12,000 people, nearly all of them employed in the hospitality sector: groundskeepers and cleaning workers, cooks, waiters and waitresses, etc. Not exactly high-income people.

The article goes on to strike a parallel between the Lahaina fire and the Paradise fire in northern California a couple of years ago. I think the parallel is too many people living in a environment that can’t really support such a population, low housing construction standards and weak regulations, and emergency infrastructure inadequate to the task.

At this point none of our friends or acquaintances who have cadaver dogs have been called into service although I wouldn’t be surprised if some were.

Clearly, such a poor population cannot be expected to bear the costs of this tragedy but I don’t think having the costs fall on poor people on the mainland is just, either. That’s what happens when the federal government spends more than it receives in revenue and borrows the rest. The burden of that falls mainly on the poor.

This disaster was no surprise. They have been warned of it for more than a decade, as reported by Dan Frosch and Jim Carlton at the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly a decade before a wildfire destroyed the coastal Maui town of Lahaina this week, killing at least 89 people, a report by Hawaiian fire researchers warned that the area was at extremely high risk of burning.

Another report, in 2020, tied fires to winds from a passing hurricane—similar to the ones that fanned the Lahaina blaze.

And the state’s electric utility had for years worried about wildfire risk in the area. It even flew drones to monitor conditions.

Yet local authorities said in the aftermath of this week’s devastation that though they knew wildfires were becoming more frequent in Hawaii, they weren’t prepared for one to roar through Lahaina.

IMO it’s pretty clear that the tourism and hospitality sectors need to bear more of the risk of such catastrophes. There are 378 hotels in Lahaina. Poor mainlanders shouldn’t be subsidizing them.

I think the award for Rant of the Day should go to Jacob Howland at UnHerd:

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

That’s just a snippet. It goes on in a similar vein at some length. If anything I’d say he’s understating the problems.

I for one do not believe that we get the government we deserve. I think we get the government inflicted on us by people trying to gain wealth and power.

I’m starting to see demands that each employee have his or her individual office (with a door) as a means for luring them back into the office. That will not happen for all sorts of reasons. It requires too much space. It’s too expensive. It does not facilitate collaboration and communication but rather encourages isolation.

For the last 60 years American businesses have been oscillating between bullpens and cubicles. Here’s a bullpen:

and here are cubicles:

The transition from bullpens to cubicles began in Germany in the 1960s, an attempt at giving people more pleasant, practical workspaces.

Companies like Google (Alpha), Twitter (X) and Facebook (Meta) have been transitioning back to bullpens.

When I worked for a German company in the early 1970s there was only one private office in the entire company, that of the CEO. Other top managers staked out conference rooms as their “offices”. It was comical. And tragic. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the CFO rooting through a big cardboard box for the right ledger.

Here’s a generous snippet of Andrea R. Flores’s op-ed about changing our asylum system in the New York Times:

U.S. asylum laws were designed to protect people fleeing harm. They were enacted in the decades following the Holocaust to ensure that the United States never again turned away people fleeing persecution. But now, many blame these laws for the chaos and inhumanity at the nation’s southern border.

The biggest blow to America’s commitment to asylum came during the pandemic, when former President Donald Trump invoked Title 42, an emergency measure that allowed border agents to turn away asylum seekers, under the justification of preventing the spread of the virus.

When Title 42 restrictions were lifted in May, President Biden enacted a carrot-and-stick approach aimed at deterring new asylum seekers from traveling by foot to the border. These new measures included a set of legal pathways, including a parole program that allows people from select countries, including Cuba and Haiti, to legally enter the country for at least two years, provided they have a financial sponsor in the United States. Doing so has discouraged would-be migrants from taking a dangerous trek with a smuggler, often through multiple continents.

This approach would have been a great step forward if it hadn’t been paired with a countermeasure that prohibits some asylum-seekers at the border from applying for protection in the United States. The vast majority of migrants must secure appointments at an official port of entry, which are difficult to obtain, or else they will be subject to expedited removal if they cannot prove that they sought legal protection in another country along the way.

On July 25, a federal court ruled that the president’s asylum ban was illegal. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put the ruling on hold for 14 days to allow the administration to appeal.

The nation’s asylum system was not designed to meet the needs of all immigrants forced to flee their homes. But the global challenges we’re facing require a reimagining of the country’s immigration framework. Until Congress finds the political will to act, the president should use his authority to relieve pressure on our asylum system and give migrants the ability to legally work once they reach the United States.

Here’s my question. Unless you assume that no one ever lies, how does that differ from an open border? Basically, I can think of no surer way to guarantee that we adopt restrictions on immigration and asylum tighter than those imposed in the 1920s and changed in the 1960s than Ms. Flores’s proposal.

There’s quite a bit of fulmination about Justice Thomas’s “luxury vacations” today, spurred, I guess, by this piece by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica:

During his three decades on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas has enjoyed steady access to a lifestyle most Americans can only imagine. A cadre of industry titans and ultrawealthy executives have treated him to far-flung vacations aboard their yachts, ushered him into the premium suites at sporting events and sent their private jets to fetch him — including, on more than one occasion, an entire 737. It’s a stream of luxury that is both more extensive and from a wider circle than has been previously understood.

I agree that’s outrageous. I just want to point out two things.

1. That doesn’t prove that the other justices aren’t getting the same or similar treatment. Indeed, the article observes:
   

   Stephen Breyer accepted a flight to a Nantucket wedding from a Democratic megadonor. Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tour of Israel and Jordan paid for by an Israeli billionaire. Those gifts are public because Breyer and Ginsburg disclosed them.

2. As I’ve said before I think there should be a 100% tax on all such gifts for all public officials extending during their entire terms of office and possibly longer, say, for as much as five years.

What is does prove is that the folks at ProPublica are especially interested in Justice Thomas’s behavior. That might be explained because among sitting SCOTUS justices Justice Thomas is the most likely to rule in a way considered ideological. He’s not the only one. That roster includes Justice Alito, and Justice Sotomayor. Justice Jackson doesn’t have a track record yet but that she will join their ranks is a reasonable assumption based on performance to date.

Journalism ain’t what it used to be. Once upon a time not that very long ago, a scoop was a scoop wherever the chips might fall. It’s not that way anymore.

A major piece of news this week is that Yellow Corporation, the 90 year old fifth largest less-than-truckload (LTL) transport firm in the country has declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It and its subsidiaries have ceased operation. Wyatt Grantham-Philips reports at the Associated Press:

NEW YORK (AP) — Trucking company Yellow Corp. has declared bankruptcy after years of financial struggles and growing debt, marking a significant shift for the U.S. transportation industry and shippers nationwide.

The Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which was filed Sunday, comes just three years after Yellow received $700 million in pandemic-era loans from the federal government. While a Chapter 11 filing is used to restructure debt while operations continue, Yellow, like other trucking companies in recent years, will liquidate and the U.S. will join other creditors unlikely to recover funds extended to the company.

Yellow fell into severe financial stress after a long stretch of poor management and strategic decisions dating back decades.

For me the question is why? Obviously, it’s not because people aren’t shipping anything any more and I doubt it’s because of competition from, say, Amazon. Amazon is a customer of YTC’s. Clearly, the company was mismanaged but how?

Corporate management blames their problems on the Teamsters and there may be kernel of truth in that but I doubt it’s the whole story. As might be expected at Vox.com Whizy Kim remarks:

Labor has long been a major presence in the logistics industry — there are about 340,000 union UPS workers, for example — but unionized drivers and dock workers have become less common since the deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s. “There’s a lot more competition now,” says Patel — competition that often uses cheaper, non-union labor. Yellow, like many others in the sector, had failed to be “nimble,” Patel adds. “Time has caught up with this company, and the financials have caught up with this company.”

I can’t help but notice that Yellow went on a sort of buying spree about 20 years ago and has been on shaky ground ever since. Did rising interest rates doom Yellow?

Kendara’s What a Character, our beloved Kara, has died. The IBD that has plagued her all of her life has finally been too much. She had stopped eating a week or so ago. We took her into animal emergency care two days ago and, since she was actually deteriorating, we made the determination to end her suffering today.

I probably loved Kara more than any dog we have ever had (except possibly our first)—she needed me the most. I will miss her.

This report from Fortune lists the nine countries that continue to have AAA credit ratings after Fitch’s downgrading of U. S. sovereign debt:

Economies with the highest credit rating at S&P Global Ratings, Fitch and Moody’s Investors Service include Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore and Australia. Canada is rated AAA by two of the ratings companies.

Rather than producing a table of the military expenditures of those countries, I’ll just ask a question. What would the credit ratings of those countries be if they were spending 2% of their GDP or more on military spending? I’m guessing it would change their entire economies substantially. We spend more than those countries as a percent of GDP, per capita, and in dollars. That influences our whole economy.

George Friedman assesses the status of the war between Russia and Ukraine. Following the Wagner Group’s march towards Moscow, whatever the heck that was:

Two things became unlikely: that Russia would destroy the Ukrainian army and occupy Ukraine, and that Ukraine’s army would drive Russia out of Ukraine. The only logical step is a negotiated settlement. The question is what that settlement might consist of. The only logical settlement – on the surface, at least – is a division of Ukraine. One option might be that Donbas, full of ethnic Russians and on Russia’s border, is ceded to Moscow. But Ukraine cannot cede more – or even this – because it reasonably doesn’t trust the Russians not to base a force there and attack again in the future. The Russians will have a great deal of trouble accepting this. They have lost much in the war, and returning with only Donbas would be an insult to the dead and devastating to Putin. Ukraine must have a militarily defensible boundary and a shallow concession. Russia must validate the claim that it is a great power and can settle for far more than Ukraine can concede. Each side must make a powerful move to convince the other that a bad compromise is better than defeat.

Not everyone sees it that way. For example, Peter Juul sees the U. S. war aims as:

1. Complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory—including Crimea and territories seized by Russia since 2014. Russia renounces any and all claims to Ukrainian territory within its internationally recognized borders as part of an agreement formally ending hostilities.
2. As part of an agreement formally ending hostilities, Russia formally and explicitly recognizes and reaffirms Ukraine’s freedom to choose its own alliances and geopolitical alignments—explicitly including potential Ukrainian membership in NATO and the European Union.
3. A de-militarized zone is created along the Ukrainian-Russian border, overseen by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The precise parameters of this zone should be cleared with Kyiv before the publication of any American war aims document.
4. The full, immediate, and unconditional release and return of all Ukrainians now held by or deported to Russia, including prisoners of war, civilians, and the more than 700,000 Ukrainian children Russia has abducted from Ukraine.
5. The United Nations, European Union, or some other credible multinational organization establishes a special war crimes tribunal for Ukraine to investigate and try Russian war criminals.
6. Russia ceases its threats against the territorial integrity and political independence of all OSCE member nations—in particular Baltic and Eastern European states—in accordance with its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations.
7. Removal of all Russian nuclear weapons from Belarus. Russia refrains from implicit and explicit threats of nuclear weapons use and nuclear war. Nuclear arms control talks including but not limited to Russia and the United States recommence at the earliest possible date.
8. The United States, the European Union, and Turkey guarantee the free flow of Ukrainian grain and other agricultural products via the Black Sea. Russia formally pledges not to interfere with Ukrainian agricultural exports.
9. The reduction and removal of certain sanctions against Russia, not including those on military equipment, goods, and technology or on Russian energy exports.
10. A certain portion of Russian frozen financial assets will be seized or surrendered to help pay for reconstruction of Ukraine. The exact details of this point should be negotiated with relevant European allies and cleared with Kyiv.

Since the U. S. does not have the ability to supply the Ukrainians I have no idea how the United States would achieve those goals short of direct intervention of U. S. forces in the war, something President Biden has categorically rejected.

Mr. Friedman goes on to describe how he sees Russia’s actions but I think his explanation is far too complicated and he’s ignoring something. The simplest possible explanation of Russia’s actions is that John Mearsheimer was right: Russia plans to “wreck Ukraine”. Putin doesn’t want to occupy it, at least not all of it, but to wreck it.

Update

Another precinct heard from. Here’s Dominick Sansone at The National Interest:

The issue at the center of the disagreement is that the respondents do not believe that such an end can be reached unless it proceeds from total Ukrainian victory and the destruction of the current Russian regime. The reason for this is presented as a matter of fact: Russia can simply no longer be treated as a real nation-state. As articulated by Stent, any negotiation with Moscow is impossible because they are liars, and an armistice will inevitably be a “temporary solution while Russia regroups and plans its next attack.” Such a conclusion obviously leads the international community to an impasse in which the only way out is through.

I have no idea how the outcome (the end of Russia) can be accomplished. He concludes:

Unfortunately, this seems to be the mindset of not only those experts and diplomats responding to Charap’s sensible argument, but the Western foreign policy establishment more broadly.