There’s also some hubbub about this weekend’s notable activity here in Chicago: NASCAR street racing.

I honestly don’t know what the consternation is about. As far as I can tell it will turn out like pretty much any other weekend except that the racing will take place during the day and fewer of the drivers will be shooting at each other.

There are quite a few bitter recriminations going on about the Supreme Court’s striking down of racial quotas by institutions of higher education. It raises a host of questions:

• Do you think it is alright to discriminate against Americans of Asian descent?
• How about racial discrimination more generally?
• Whatever happened to “critical mass”? IIRC that was the basis for SCOTUS’s prior judgment. It seems to have been cast into the dustbin of history not just by conservatives but by progressives as well.

What I wish were being commented on is the light this casts on our whole educational system.

Unlike some I don’t believe that Asians are genetically superior or that blacks are genetically inferior. Similarly, I don’t think that 70% of NBA players are black because of some genetic predisposition towards basketball. I think black athletes try harder and there is cultural support for that within their communities. Contrariwise, I think there is a pathology in black communities which places barriers to academic success.

In addition I would indict our entire education from top to bottom. Our public schools have lost site of their putative mission and are primarily run for the benefit of teachers, administrators, and union organizers. I wouldn’t let institutions of higher learning off the hook, either. If they actually cared about recruiting more blacks and Hispanics, they might have created feeder systems in “disadvantaged” neighborhoods to prepare K-12 students for college. They didn’t do that. IMO they were more interested in appearing to be concerned than in actually taking action.

Yesterday President Biden was in Chicago touting the virtues of his economy policy. He has embraced the neologism “Bidenomics” in describing it. The editors of the Wall Street Journal, predictably, are unimpressed:

In 1982-84 dollars, which takes account of inflation, average hourly earnings were $11.39 when Mr. Biden took office but started to decline immediately and didn’t stop falling until inflation peaked in June 2022. They have bounced up a little but were still back only to $11.03 in May. That’s a 3.16% decline in real earnings for the average worker across the 29 months of the Biden Presidency.

These are official Labor Department statistics. Mr. Biden can’t deny them, so he had someone fudge the point by writing in his Chicago remarks that, “Look, pay for low-wage workers has grown at the fastest pace in over two decades.” We’d like to see how his economists cherry-picked the data to justify that one.

All of which reminds us of the old Marx Brothers joke: Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Regarding Bidenomics, Americans should believe their own eyes.

Much of what has happened over the last several years was predicted by Keynesian economics. When you increase aggregate demand by sending out checks, for example, beyond aggregate supply, you would expect it to result in inflation. The sad fact is that we do not produce enough of what we supply. There is no longer any surplus supply.

Clearly, Bidenomics isn’t Keynesian economics. It also isn’t Modern Monetary Theory which would have predicted the same thing. It’s old fashioned pork barrel politics. I will leave it as an exercise for the interested student to figure out where the pork is going. It isn’t to aid the poor. You can’t help the poor by giving them a check for $5 while increasing the prices of the things they spend money on by $10.

The central planning component of Bidenomics comes with fine print. In the short term it is hypothetically possible for central planning to increase production. It is more likely and certain in the long term to produce deadweight loss.

There’s a certain amount of clucking going on about a piece by Tom Lasseter, Lawrence Delevigne, Makini Brice, Donna Bryson, Nicholas P. Brown and Tom Bergin at Reuters on the present political leaders whose ancestors owned slaves:

In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.

The entire piece is interesting but not particularly surprising, at least to me. However, I think they’re drawing the wrong conclusion:

As Harvard’s Gates wrote, Sherman did issue a special order in 1865 calling for liberated families under his protection to be issued land and, later, a mule. The property in question was a strip of land down the country’s southeastern coast.

Had the order been followed, it would have provided Black Americans assets upon which to build new lives and perhaps pass wealth to subsequent generations.

But the program ended quickly, Gates wrote. President Andrew Johnson, the Southern sympathizer who succeeded Abraham Lincoln, “overturned the Order in the fall of 1865” and returned the land “to the very people who had declared war on the United States of America.”

The United States has never paid restitution for slavery.

There are many reasons why I think that, not the least because at this late date paying reparations for slavery would satisfy no reasonable definition of “justice” since it would involve paying people who were never enslaved at the expense of people who never held slaves. As Dr. Gates also is quoted in the piece:

Gates said identifying those familial connections to slaveholders is “not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.”

But I think it goes beyond that and delving a little into my own family history might illustrate why. Not only do I have no ancestors who held slaves, some of my ancestors were abolitionists, and you would be hard put to find anyone in my family who benefited either from slavery or Jim Crow in any but the most indirect way.

I think there’s actually some prediction criteria for slave ownership:

• Residence in a slave state prior to abolition
• Family wealth in that time period
• English ancestry
• French ancestry

more or less in descending order of significance. I have ancestors who lived in a slave state prior to abolition (Missouri), who had the requisite level of wealth, and were French. Nonetheless my researches have revealed that none of them ever owned slaves. And this is the critical point. Not only do I doubt that I am unique in that regard but I suspect that the percentages of Americans whose ancestors never owned slaves and who never benefited in any but the most indirect way from slavery or Jim Crow is growing. Furthermore, I suspect that the percentage of Americans whose families included American slaves is actually decreasing.

Consequently, I think they’re asking the wrong question. Rather than trying to enumerate the Americans who owned slaves, why not figure out what percentage of Americans’ families never owned slaves? My suspicion is that the issue of reparations for slavery becomes less relevant with every passing year.

Touching on a subject I mentioned yesterday Marc Morano does not back-of-the-envelope calculating at the New York Post:

But how many pizzas would you have to order to equal just one trip on John Kerry’s private jet?

In 2021, Kerry’s private jet emitted an estimated 116 metric tons of carbon in less than a year.

Private jets emit up to 40 times as much CO2 per passenger as commercial flights.

By comparison, the carbon footprint of a wood-burning stove (a reasonable facsimile of a pizza oven) is barely measurable. The 8 Billion Trees project estimates that the “carbon footprint of wood-burning stoves” can be up to 15.6 grams an hour or 374 grams a day. This is measured in grams, not metric tons.

You would have to burn that stove for 310,160 days — that is, 849 years — to equal what hypocrite Kerry puts out in a year.

But wait, it gets better!

Physicist Dr. Will Happer, emeritus of Princeton University and the chair of the CO2 Coalition, told the New York Post that restrictions on wood- or coal-fired pizza ovens may increase the carbon footprint of pizza in New York City.

“To the extent that the wood-fired ovens are replaced by electrically heated ovens, which I suppose is what is intended, CO2 emissions will probably increase,” Happer said.

“Even for New York City, most of the electrical power probably comes from burning gas or coal. For a gas-fired pizza oven, all the heat of combustion is used to bake the pizza. For an electrically heated oven, you have to convert electrical power back to heat.

“It is hard to see how emissions could decrease if people want to continue eating the same amount of pizza,” he added.

The figures I’ve seen suggest that fewer than 100 locations would be affected by the new regulations.

Doing a little back-of-the-envelope calculating of my own if the relative number of private to commercial flights holds true (it’s about 1:10) 300 private jets land in New York City airports daily. Why not ban those aircraft from landing? Wouldn’t that accomplish more than trying to regulate wood-burning pizza ovens out of existence?

That leads to the question what are they actually trying to accomplish? Clearly, based on the foregoing it isn’t reducing carbon emissions.

As my brief shopping excursion this morning confirmed to me, Chicago has the worst air quality in the world. Vivian La, Jenna Smith and Deanese Williams-Harris report in the Chicago Tribune:

Thick smoke from Canadian wildfires coated Chicago and the surrounding areas with haze as weather officials issued an air quality alert for parts of the Great Lakes, Lower Mississippi and Ohio valleys Tuesday morning.

According to the monitoring site IQAir, Chicago had the worst air quality out of 95 cities worldwide Tuesday.

As of 11 a.m., the air quality index had risen to a level considered “very unhealthy,” according to AirNow, a website that combines data from county, state and federal air quality agencies nationwide. This means everyone is at risk of experiencing health effects.

Smelling smoke is an immediate sign to stay indoors, said Zac Adelman, executive director of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium.

Whatever the role of anthropogenic climate change in the Canadian wildfires, I wonder when people will figure out that no steps that Canada takes other than changing how they manage wildfires and forests will mitigate the risk wildfires in terms of polluting the air?

The haze you’re seeing isn’t carbon dioxide, of course. It’s particulates. The best way of dealing with them is to prevent them from getting into the air in the first place. Converting from coal-fired steam engines to diesel engines had a major impact in reducing the amount of particulates in the air during the 20th century.

I was also amused this morning to see that New York City is cracking down on wood-fired ovens, much to the consternation of pizza lovers. Wood-fired ovens and furnaces are actually increasing in number. They are presumed to be carbon neutral which I would guess is true in the long run but you know what Lord Keynes said about the long term.

While I agree with Nick Tiller’s skepticism about the new weight loss drugs coming along in his piece at Skeptical Inquirer:

Semaglutide is a breakthrough in the noninvasive treatment of obesity. First made available in 2017 under the brand name Ozempic for treating type II diabetes, it was re-approved by the FDA in 2021, with a distinct dosing regimen, under the brand name Wegovy as a therapeutic aid for obesity. Both drugs mimic glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1)—a hormone secreted during digestion to suppress appetite. More specifically, by acting through the central and peripheral nervous system, semaglutide slows the rate at which food empties from the stomach, increases insulin release from the pancreas (for better blood glucose control), and alters the perception of taste (thereby causing “taste aversion”). The drug can effectively restore the GLP-1 signaling pathway, which is thought to be dysfunctional in certain obese patients. As with all medications, Ozempic and Wegovy come with side effects. Nausea, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, and vomiting are all common. But for clinically obese patients or diabetics, who have a considerably greater risk of cardiometabolic disease, the risk-to-benefit ratio is generally thought to be favorable.

But not for everyone. Experts broadly categorize obesity into one-of-four subtypes: people who need to eat more food than normal to become full (referred to as “hungry brain”); people who become full with a regular meal but with short-lived effects (“hungry gut”); people who eat to cope with difficult emotions (“emotional hunger”); and people with a relatively slow metabolism (“slow burn”). Semaglutide, as a GLP-1 analog, is an effective intervention for those with “hungry gut,” but it may not be appropriate for people with obesity classified as “slow burn” or “emotional hunger.” Chronic depression and anxiety are two of the most common psychopathologies that trigger binge eating, and many people eat to transiently improve their mood. These behaviors won’t simply subside along with one’s appetite. In such cases, semaglutide may bury the symptoms, leaving the causes to root.

For all its clinical efficacy, semaglutide doesn’t show people how to change their relationship with food or eat in a healthy, sustainable way. Studies show that people who stopped the therapy after twenty weeks regained most of the weight they’d initially lost because the appetite suppressant reduces diet quantity without improving quality. What’s more, “yo-yo dieting”—large and periodic fluctuations in body weight—poses a considerable risk of cardiovascular disease and life dissatisfaction. For optimal outcomes, semaglutide must be taken alongside the dietary and lifestyle changes that obese patients have historically been unable to do implement. Where they have previously failed, semaglutide may provide the conditions to succeed.

I still don’t think he gets to the biggest problem. Maybe my understanding is flawed but as I understand it these drugs function by reducing the appetite. They don’t make you eat the things you need to eat to sustain life and health. Unless there’s a lot more to your regimen that taking these drugs, won’t you gravitate to eating what you like rather than what you need?

I won’t be at all surprised if we start seeing a rash of cases of scurvy, pellagra, rickets, osteoporosis, etc. in rich countries.

At Portugal News Robert Cavaleiro reports something of which I was unaware:

n 1993 the Clinton administration signed an accord with the Russian Federation for a continuous supply of enriched uranium to fuel U.S. reactors. Astonishingly, this trade has never ended. In the last year, U.S. nuclear energy companies are estimated to have paid to Rosatom (the enormous Russian marketing monopoly) around USD one billion for material which could have been produced in its own planned centrifugal plants; of these only one, in Ohio, is anywhere near completion. In Europe, Germany and France gladly bought Russian over-production to the tune of €450 million during 2022 while four other EU states – Bulgaria, Finland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic – operate a total of fifteen Russian made nuclear reactors but have not contracted a separate, authorized alternative to this source of fuel. It brings little profit in itself to Rosatom which relies on the sale of hardware and Russian technical expertise to pile up the roubles.

‘Splain me, Lucy. That’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder if we’re serious.

Reading the tea leaves on what is going on in Russia is pretty hard right about now. I materially agree with George Friedman’s interpretation of events:

What we must think through now, though, is to what extent the Prigozhin debacle will destabilize the Russian government, weaken Putin or affect the war in Ukraine. Putin’s status is at the center of it all. If this was indeed a coup attempt, it never seriously threatened the Kremlin. Prigozhin’s issues with elements of the central government were well known. Why, then, would Putin be weakened by a putsch from a known malcontent that went nowhere? And what does being weakened even mean? Does it mean that department heads, and particularly the General Staff, would disregard his orders? Does it mean he no longer has a job?

In a political sense, weakened might mean that Putin would no longer be able to make executive decisions or eliminate bureaucrats and generals. This would be a serious development. Russia is at war, and it needs an effective command structure. If Putin were weakened, then the command structure would break down, which would also mean there would be no supreme commander. In that scenario, it is unlikely Putin would be weakened; he would be replaced. The question is who would replace him? Prigozhin might have been angling for the job, but he ultimately capitulated to a different Putin puppet, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Someone unknown to me might emerge, of course, but short of an heir apparent I don’t know what it means for Putin to be weakened. And even if I did, I don’t know why a coup attempt broken in less than a day should weaken him.

The more serious question concerns what the Wagner Group was doing on the battlefield in the first place. Private military contracting is common enough, but Wagner’s role in Russia was fairly unique in that it took on responsibilities usually reserved more for conventional forces than for paramilitary groups, charged as it was with executing some of the war’s most important battles. As its role evolved, Prigozhin began to pursue his own strategy outside the chain of command of the military, sometimes openly ridiculing his rivals, who would cut off his supplies in kind. Two armies thus tried – and have so far failed – to fight a common enemy.

He goes on to point out that the real problem that Putin has is that enabled the Wagner Group in the first place with which I agree completely.

Meanwhile at Asia Times James Davis remarks on something I have been pointing out for some time:

The Wagner Group mutiny over this weekend elicited a storm of editorial and social media comments to the effect that the Russian president might be deposed after all. After Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin took the deal proposed by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, called off his march on Moscow and decamped to Moscow’s closest ally, Putin was still in place.

But the political sands have shifted toward Russia’s ultra-nationalist right, raising grave strategic risks including a higher probability of the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

Russia has been shifting towards a nasty form of nationalism since Maidan, which Nuland and her colleagues saw as a prelude to the overthrow of Putin. The American-sponsored coup against the elected president Viktor Yanukovych threatened Russia’s tenure in Crimea, home of its Black Sea fleet, and prompted Russia’s annexation of the peninsula, which has been Russian territory since the rule of Catherine the Great.

Prigozhin reflects a growing consensus in the Russian armed forces and important parts of civil society that Putin has been a weakling in the face of Western designs against Russia. This consensus includes Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, who Putin prevailed upon to send troops to defend Moscow against Prigozhin’s mutinous march on the capital. Kadyrov and Prigozhin have been allies against Putin’s military leadership, demanding more aggressive and decisive action in Ukraine from a perceived as cautious Kremlin.

There is no liberal opposition to speak of in Russia. That is a fantasy. Regime change in Russia is the very last thing we should want—it would mean a much more truculent and Russian nationalist posture for them.

All of that is contrary to the party line being promoted by the Biden Administration. Is what they’re saying based on some intelligence they’re not sharing with us, political happy talk, or wishful thinking?