There’s something about Rick Kriseman’s recent post at RealClearPolitics about recycling which reminds me suspiciously of the underpants gnomes.

First, steal underpants:

One of the biggest challenges facing our current recycling infrastructure is that materials recovery facilities (MRFs) are overwhelmed with a growing amount of recyclable material, much of which cannot be salvaged because of inbound contamination. What’s needed is updated recycling equipment and technologies that would improve the sorting and processing of these materials. This would make the system more efficient and strengthen our domestic market for recycled materials. This added capability will reduce pollution, conserve natural resources, and decrease the amount of recyclables that end up in landfills. However, to move this vision along, we will need the help of Congress to invest in it.

Then ?

Third, profit!

The benefits to this investment are clear. Recycling helps control future waste costs and increases the lifespan of materials that would otherwise end up in regional landfills. This in turn reduces the cost of transportation to landfills outside local regions and the stress of this transport on our traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges. In addition, recycling provides marketable goods, which reduces costs of packaging for consumers.

Recycling also has real economic benefits. According to the EPA, recycling in the United States contributes approximately 700,000 jobs, $37 billion in wages and $7 billion in tax revenues per year. Recycling is having a positive economic impact in the states too. For example, a 2017 study in Texas found an overall economic benefit of more than $3.3 billion from recycling.

Yeah, new equipment will definitely solve the problem. Both Mr. Kriseman’s post and the EPA’s paper from which its figures are derived are a bit too “from 50,000 feet” to assess how realistic any of this is.

Let’s summarize how we got where we are. Modern retail packaging, publishing, apparel, and other sectors result in an enormous amount of waste. Some of that waste is recyclable. Starting the late 1960s and accelerating during the 1970s and later, there was a major push to recycle. I was part of that push in the late 1960s. The first curbside recycling program that I know of started in 1974. In 1990 Wisconsin imposed a statewide mandatory recycling program. Recycling had typically been thought of as at least a “break even” if not money-making program.

Most of that waste was shipped to China. In 2017 China stopped accepting “foreign garbage”. Since then we’ve pretty much been stuck with our own trash.

Like all Chicagoans we have been dutifully sorting out our recyclables: aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles, clean paper, putting them in our blue recycling cans and hauling those to the curb every two weeks to be picked up. Unlike all Chicagoans, presumably, I am aware that most of that will go into a landfill. That isn’t true merely in Chicago. It’s true in many if not most places. My understanding is that the labor costs are too high to make recycling practical, there’s too much trash, and there aren’t enough customers for the trash.

I honestly don’t believe it’s an equipment problem. I think it’s a packaging problem which is being solved far too slowly, a too much waste problem which may actually be getting worse, and a plain old supply and demand problem.

I wish I knew how many of the jobs in recycling are related to hauling. If that’s where the jobs are, we’re talking about a “cat and rat farm” situation, a perpetual motion scheme, which won’t work.

The preliminary results of the 2020 decennial census are in and I’m not really sure what they mean or what the implications will be. From Yahoo News:

The U.S. became more diverse and more urban over the past decade, and the non-Hispanic white population dropped for the first time on record, the Census Bureau said Thursday as it released a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw the nation’s political maps.

The new figures offered the most detailed portrait yet of how the country has changed since 2010, and they are sure to set off an intense partisan battle over representation at a time of deep national division and fights over voting rights. The numbers could help determine control of the House in the 2022 elections and provide an electoral edge for years to come. The data will also shape how $1.5 trillion in annual federal spending is distributed.

The figures show continued migration to the South and West at the expense of counties in the Midwest and Northeast. The share of the non-Hispanic white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record, driven by falling birthrates among white women compared with Hispanic and Asian women. The number of non-Hispanic white people shrank from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million.

White people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group, though that changed in California, where Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group, growing to 39.4% from 37.6% over the decade, while the share of white people dropped from 40.1% to 34.7%.

From the Census Bureau’s web site:

• The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone. Overall, 235.4 million people reported White alone or in combination with another group. However, the White alone population decreased by 8.6% since 2010.
• The Two or More Races population (also referred to as the Multiracial population) has changed considerably since 2010. The Multiracial population was measured at 9 million people in 2010 and is now 33.8 million people in 2020, a 276% increase.
• The “in combination” multiracial populations for all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category.
• All of the race alone or in combination groups experienced increases. The Some Other Race alone or in combination group (49.9 million) increased 129%, surpassing the Black or African American population (46.9 million) as the second-largest race alone or in combination group.
• The next largest racial populations were the Asian alone or in combination group (24 million), the American Indian and Alaska Native alone or in combination group (9.7 million), and the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone or in combination group (1.6 million).
• The Hispanic or Latino population, which includes people of any race, was 62.1 million in 2020. The Hispanic or Latino population grew 23%, while the population that was not of Hispanic or Latino origin grew 4.3% since 2010.

all of which supports what I’ve been saying about race in the U. S. for decades.

The reality is that, except for a handful of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, all “blacks” in the U. S. are mixed race while, except for a handful of pure-blooded Spaniards or Portuguese who’ve emigrated from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Central, or South America or even fewer full-blooded Native Americans who’ve emigrated from Mexico, Central, or South America nearly all “Hispanics” are mixed race as well. I think that what we can conclude is that it has become much more respectable to admit it which I think is a positive development. What it means politically I have no idea.

Note, too, that the number identifying themselves as “multi-racial” in the census is about 10% of the population. That’s smaller than the number of those who’ve identified themselves as “white”, “black”, or “Hispanic” but larger than the number of any other ethnic or racial group tracked by the census.

Update

The Wall Street Journal adds this bit of analysis:

Texas will gain two House seats and five states will gain one each: Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon. Seven states will lose one each: California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

That change in the Electoral College will be in effect for the 2024 election.

And, as I said before, New York should thank its lucky stars. If the census were taken today, the state might well lose two seats.

If, as Adam Smith said, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation, how much is there in a world? Rather than responding to Daniel Henninger’s most recent and rather harsh Wall Street Journal column:

The currently observable reality is that progressives, who have now captured the Democratic Party at all levels of government, don’t seem able to run anything anymore—not cities, not Covid, not a national border. Why would letting them run climate policy be different?

Whatever one thinks about the “root causes” of the rise in violent urban crime or the more than one million migrants apprehended at the southern border in the current fiscal year, both stand as significant case studies in political mismanagement.

The nonresponse to the overrun border by the Biden administration and to urban violence by progressive mayors in Chicago, New York, Washington and Portland, Ore., suggests this high-probability scenario on climate: They will make mistakes, the world will go to hell, and then they will deny we are in hell—and what’s worse, insist that we keep doing the same manifestly wrong things.

He concludes:

It was not always this way with Democrats. After it became clear that Vermont’s three-year experiment in a single-payer healthcare system had manifestly failed to control costs, its then- Gov. Peter Shumlin admitted as much and ended it in 2014. Still, single-payer advocates dismissed Vermont as too small to disprove their idea, and progressives like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have persisted.

With climate regulation, we have the test case of California, the world’s fifth-largest economy. Progressive-run California for years has been the most climate-correct state in the union, and the most screwed up.

By suppressing the use of fossil fuels and natural gas while elevating solar and wind, California has created an electrical grid that performs poorly under stress, causing statewide power outages. Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to shut down the state’s only nuclear power plant, which is emissions-free, in 2025.

New York’s defrocked Gov. Andrew Cuomo closed the state’s Indian Point nuclear plant in April. This Wednesday, amid a heat wave, the Con Edison utility text-messaged residents that if the power goes out, “Reply HELP for help.”

If only life under progressive misgovernance were that easy.

I’m going to solicit comments on what will happen. Is Mr. Henninger’s assessment correct?

My interpretation of events is that my original assessment of Joe Biden was correct: he’s moved to the center of the Democratic Party and, since that center has moved left, so has he. I also think that we need more pragmatists and fewer ideologues in office in both parties but I see no way of making that happen until things get much, much worse. Even then I suspect it’s more likely that the present ideologues would be supplanted by even worse ideologues.

While the media remain steadfastly focused on the weather (remember what Sam Clemens said), Cuomo, and the regular political infighting, I strongly suspect that the most significant news of the day will come from the Census Bureau. UPI reports:

Aug. 12 (UPI) — The government on Thursday will unveil detailed data from the 2020 Census that will have a significant impact on federal elections for the rest of the 2020s, beginning with next year’s midterms.

The Census Bureau will release key population data that will begin a political redistricting process — redrawing congressional districts — that occurs once every decade.

he data includes how the ethnic, racial and voting-age makeup of neighborhoods across the United States have shifted since the last Census in 2010.

“The U.S. Census Bureau will hold a news conference to discuss the release of the first local level results from the 2020 Census,” the bureau said in a statement earlier this month. “States use these data on race, Hispanic origin, and the voting-age population to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts.

“The news conference will provide initial analysis of the first local level results from the 2020 Census on population change, race, ethnicity, the age 18 and over population, and housing occupancy status.”

The results will be released at the news conference, which is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. EDT Thursday.

That’s just about an hour from now. The data that will be released will be “raw data” which I interpret as meaning that it will take a while for the news outlets and most politicians to figure out what happened.

If you think there has been a lot of bitching, moaning, complaining, and finger-pointing over the last 18 months, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The complaints, particularly from places like New York, Illinois, and California, will be deafening. They should count their lucky stars. I strongly suspect that were the census to be redone today they would fare much worse.

The delays in the release of this information will necessitate a mad dash to redistricting. In some places incumbents will be pitted against incumbents of the same party. The inevitable court challenges will only make the problem worse.

The most recent Labor Department report has not assuuaged the concerns about inflation on the part of the editors of the Wall Street Journal one bit:

The meaning of “transitory” is getting longer all the time. That’s one conclusion from the Labor Department’s report Wednesday for July that consumer prices rose 5.4% over the last 12 months. That’s two months in a row, after a 5% annual increase in May. When does transitory, in the Federal Reserve’s inflation lingo, become persistent?

White House economists looking for silver price linings can note that the monthly increase in the consumer-price index slowed in July to 0.5% compared to 0.9% in June. But the smaller increase was mostly due to used car prices stabilizing somewhat after months of astronomical growth. Inflation rose anyway.

Notably, the “core” CPI that strips out volatile energy and food prices increased 0.3% in July and 4.3% over the last 12 months. Prices last month rose for most goods and services including toys (0.4%), pet products (1.4%) and haircuts (2.2%). Rents climbed (0.4%) and have been accelerating.

Food prices surged 0.7% while restaurant meals rose 0.8%, the most since 1981. None of this is any surprise to Americans who have visited a supermarket or eaten out lately. Labor costs are rising as businesses have to raise wages to attract workers who can make more unemployed. The result: Higher prices.

Based on the conflicting reactions I’m seeing in various media outlets I suspect that reactions, based on party and ideology, are largely of the glass half empty vs. glass half full sort. I think some of the analysis is what you find when the innumerate (journalists) meet people who see things entirely in terms of numbers (the Fed governors).

What the numbers tell me is that inflation is continuing but it’s proceeding at a slower rate than before. Prices are still going up but they aren’t going up as fast as they were at one point. What will happen next month? Beats me. If I knew I’d be a commodities trader.

What I do know is that the administration’s preferred strategy, spending more money, would actually exacerbate the problem.

What the situation on the ground tells me is that those with incomes below the median are already hurting for basics like food and rent. What that portends for the mid-term elections, again, I have no idea.

I wish we had more bankers at the Fed and fewer econometricians.

William Galston analyzes Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in his most recent Wall Street Journal column. Citing facts and figures he summarizes:

Mr. Biden prevailed because he made enormous gains in suburban America, increasing the Democratic vote share from 45% to 54% in a part of the country that is home to a majority (52%) of the electorate. Mr. Biden’s performance in the suburbs accounted for more than 100% of his 3-point improvement in the Democrats’ national vote share, easily swamping Republican gains in urban and rural America.

It also wasn’t a progressive victory:

Despite liberals’ steadily increasing share of the Democratic Party and of the electorate over the past two decades, moderates contribute more votes to winning Democratic presidential candidates than do liberals, as they have for half a century. Moderates made up 52% of Jimmy Carter’s winning coalition in 1976—and 48% of Joe Biden’s in 2020.

and concludes:

The gains that led to Mr. Biden’s win were broad, a tribute to his ability to balance the interests and beliefs of a diverse coalition. Progressives contributed to this outcome, but they were neither its sole nor even its predominant author. They represent only one of many equities Mr. Biden must consider as he works to pass legislation and help his party in 2022 and 2024. The progressive tendency to equate balance with equivocation and compromise with betrayal is, paradoxically, both self-serving and self-defeating.

I have two question and, sadly, answers for neither of them:

1. Is he delivering for his winning coalition?
2. Will the same coalition carry Democrats to victory in the mid-terms?

I simply do not have an ear to the ground in the suburbs.

I think that Michael Shellenberger’s post, “Why I Am Not a Progressive”, is important. I don’t just mean important to him. I think he’s making a larger point although I’m not sure he and I would agree on what that is. I find it hard to except meaningfully but I’ll sample a few snippets for you:

When President Barack Obama ran for office in 2008, it seemed fitting to me that he chose the slogan, “Yes we can!”

But now, on all the major issues of the day, the message from progressives is “No, you can’t.”

or here:

The reason progressives believe that “No one is safe,” when it comes to climate change, and that the drug death “homelessness” crisis is unsolvable, is because they are in the grip of a victim ideology characterized by safetyism, learned helplessness, and disempowerment.

or here:

On climate change, drug deaths, and cultural issues like racism, the message from progressives is that we are doomed unless we dismantle the institutions responsible for our oppressive, racist system.

and, coincidentally, responsible for our prosperity, self-determination, and freedom.

Or here:

After World War II, it was progressives, not conservatives, who led the charge to replace mental hospitals with community-based care. After the community-based care system fell apart, and severely mentally ill people ended up living on the street, addicted to drugs and alcohol, progressives blamed Reagan and Republicans for cutting the budget. But progressive California today spends more than any other state, per capita, on mental health, and yet the number of homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and suffering addiction, increased by 31% in California since 2010 even as they declined by 18 percent in the rest of the US.

Among the reasons I think the post is important is that he’s putting reasonably well-documented flesh on the bones of a point I have made here repeatedly: progressives are not liberals. It is liberals who believe in equality and empowerment. Progressives are Whigs. They are the heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, radicals. Convinced they are in the vanguard of history they are insistent on overthrowing the institutions they detest, essentially all of them, in favor of what? Whatever it is, surely it will be better. They reject the very notion of human nature, that people respond to incentives, or that physical principles can possibly be any barrier to their vision of the future.

The “will to apocalypse” to which he refers is not a liberal trope; it is radical. They need an apocalypse to provide a pretext for overthrowing the existing order. This:

A major report by the National Academies of Science in 1982 concluded that abundant natural gas, along with nuclear power, would substitute for coal, and prevent temperatures from rising high enough to threaten civilization. But progressives responded by demonizing the authors of the study and insisting that anybody who disagreed that climate change was apocalyptic was secretly on the take from the fossil fuel industry.

and this:

People are shocked when I explain to them that the reason California still lacks enough homeless shelters is because progressives have opposed building them. Indeed, it was Governor Newsom, when he was Mayor of San Francisco, who led the charge opposing the construction of sufficient homeless shelters in favor of instead building single unit apartments for anybody who said they wanted one. While there are financial motivations for such a policy, the main motivation was ideological. Newsom and other progressives believe that simply sheltering people is immoral. The good is the enemy of the perfect.

That’s the very definition of radicalism and it’s a typical example of flawed progressive thinking.

I would suggest that, contrary to Mr. Shellenberger’s belief, he may never have been a progressive. Maybe he has actually been a liberal which is to say an apostate all along.

There is so much I find baffling in Max Boot’s most recent Washington Post column I hardly know where to start. He’s very upset about the present state of affairs in Afghanistan. After describing the situation:

The situation in Afghanistan is going from bad to worse. The Taliban has captured nine provincial capitals, including seven in northern Afghanistan — making it more unlikely that its adversaries can regroup in that region, as they did in the 1990s. The Long War Journal reports that the Taliban already controls 57 percent of the country’s districts, compared with only 16 percent for the government. (The rest are contested.) The Taliban is now besieging major cities, including Mazar-e Sharif, Herat and Kandahar, and U.S. military officials are now reportedly warning that Kabul could fall in 30 to 90 days.

followed by quoting Biden Administration spokespersons:

Here is White House press secretary Jen Psaki: “If the Taliban claim to want international legitimacy, these actions are not going to get them the legitimacy they seek.… They could choose to devote the same energy to their peace process as they are to their military campaign. We strongly urge them to do so.”

Here is Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “We’re actively engaged in diplomacy because there is no military solution to this conflict.”

And here is Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to the Afghan peace talks, who is trying in vain to persuade the Taliban to stop its offensive: “We don’t see a military solution to the war in Afghanistan. There must be a political solution, a political agreement for a lasting peace, and we will stay with it.”

he makes his assessment:

I’m sorry, but this is simply delusional. The administration has convinced itself that the Taliban desires international “legitimacy” so badly that it will refrain from achieving its aims by force of arms. There is no evidence for this view.

I’m not as convinced as he. I think the Biden Administration is trying to get out of a no-win situation in Afghanistan by removing our troops from the country. They’re making diplo-speak happy noises to cover up the bitter reality.

What baffles me? What’s the unit of measure of “delusion”? When has Mr. Boot ever advocated a position on Afghanistan that was not delusional? How can you compare Mr. Boot’s delusions with the Biden Administration’s? After removing the Taliban and occupying the country there have only been two alternative strategies for the country that border on not being delusional. Maybe call them “delusion adjacent”. Either we could leave troops there and occupy the country permanently or we could do what we are doing now. Every other position has been delusional.

Furthermore no president in the years that have intervened since we invaded and occupied Afghanistan has ever advocated a permanent occupation. It’s been one delusion after another. I opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. Punitive raid—yes; invasion and occupation—no. I thought that President Bush was remiss in neither attempting to prepare the American people for a permanent occupation of the country (it would have been entertaining to watch him try) nor withdrawing our troops back in 2005. Everything else has just been temporizing.

Farhad Manjoo’s latest New York Times column is to my eye a great example of how two people can look at the same phenomena and draw completely different conclusions. Consider:

Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”

And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.

A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.

Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?

He attributes the change to global climate change; I attribute it to too many people trying to live in a fragile environment suited for only a few. As evidence Mr. Manjoo produces the bleak present weather patterns:

Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.

Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.

which certainly appears to have become a regular, recurrent pattern. I take a more longitudinal view. There are records of weather in the Los Angeles Basin going back for millennia, everything from tree rings to actual written records starting in about 1770 when the Spanish began to develop the region. When the Spanish came they planted orange, lemon, and olive trees and the weather became cooler and wetter; during the great post-war influx of people into the region they cut the orange, lemon, and olive groves down and replaced them with cement and houses—the temperature rose and it became drier.

Furthermore I think that California’s fires are pretty obviously a consequence of expanding residential areas into where more scrub and trees are conjoined with bad land management.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t dispute that global climate change could play a role. I do wonder how you’d go about disaggregating local conditions from global ones. It reminds me a bit of blaming problems on “systemic racism”. It tends to remove any possibility of the problem’s being because of your own behavior.