As context for the remarks of the Wall Street Journal editors, consider the graph above. In March some, including the Biden Administration, were explaining the sharp increase in immigrants crossing our southern border as a timeshifting of May or June “encounters”, as they are called, into March. That explanation is no longer supportable. The editors remark on recent developments:

The Biden Administration’s immigration policy has been a debacle from the start, but two events Friday ought to spur a reboot. Democrats will need one if they want to avoid a political backlash in 2022 and beyond.

Customs and Border Protection reported that its agents had some 188,000 migrant encounters in June. CBP has made more than a million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this fiscal year, already more than any full-year total since at least 2005.

The number of families caught trying to cross reached 55,805 for the month, a 25% increase from May, and unaccompanied children encountered rose to 15,253. These numbers don’t count those who cross illegally and aren’t caught, and they mask the human exploitation of migrants by the cartels that control border crossings.

The migrants keep coming despite the vocal pleading of Biden officials because migrants perceive the benefits are worth the risk. The Biden Administration is expelling adults under a pandemic-era emergency policy. But news reports say it is considering an end to that policy, which means migrants would be able to seek asylum and remain in the U.S., often with permission to work, while they wait for their cases to be heard. That can take years given the backlog, and many will never show up in court.

No wonder so many pay the cartels and take their chances on the trek through Mexico rather than stay in Central American countries with little economic opportunity and no rule of law. Apparently America’s “systemic racism” isn’t as awful as the Biden Administration claims. But the surge of migrants is a growing political crisis for Democrats, whose failure to fix the broken incentives is costing them support, including among Hispanic-Americans in the border counties of Texas.

Meanwhile on Friday, federal Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is illegal. The George W. Bush appointee ruled that Congress never gave the executive branch the power to grant mass work permits to immigrants who are in the U.S. without authorization.

Apparently, when you encourage people to “surge across the border”, as Candidate Biden did during the campaign, they believe you and they may not change that behavior without some additional incentives. Or disincentives as the case may be.

I support the rule of law and think that the presidential oath of office means what it says. There is no “unless it’s politically unpopular among activists in your own party” clause. I also think that President Obama overreached in DACA. I support Congress’s enacting a law to replace the executive order and enforcing that law once it is enacted. I don’t believe that “poisoning the well” is the best strategy for gaining the support that such a law will require.

Rick Newman cites some evidence in his post at Yahoo/Finance that calls the notion that employers are having difficulty hiring due to overly generous jobless benefits into question:

Moody’s Analytics looked at four different sets of data, including weekly unemployment claims, Google mobility data, job search trends and small-business payrolls. There’s some evidence red states are recovering economically faster than blue states—but that has been the trend all year and hasn’t changed since red states began canceling jobless benefits. One reason may be that blue states tend to have more big cities that continue to struggle with residual Covid outbreaks, such as Los Angeles.

First-time claims for state-based unemployment insurance, for instance, fell 22% in blue states from May 2 through July 10, and 35% in red states during the same time period. That makes it seem as if employment has been recovering faster in red states as governors have been canceling federal jobless aid. But the gap between red and blue states was the same from February through May, before any Republican governors began killing benefits. So there’s been no change since the governors blocked those $300 weekly checks.

Job search firm Indeed found that search activity ticked upward after a few of the first Republican states announced they would be ending federal jobless aid. But that trend reversed, and last month Indeed reported that job-search activity in 12 GOP states that cut off jobless benefits was lower than it had been earlier in the year. “It is unclear why search activity is below the baseline in states where federal benefits have ended,” Indeed economist Jed Kolko wrote. “If overly generous federal UI benefits were holding back job seekers, then we would expect search activity to increase, relative to the national trend, in states where those benefits have ended.”

In 13 other states ending the benefits later, job-search activity was a bit above the national trend in late June. That may reverse, too, however.

Oxford Economics examined the income consequences for people losing jobless aid in red states, and found that about 1 million people will lose the $300 weekly benefit once cancellations have gone into effect in all red states. That represents about $1.2 billion in collective lost income per week. While not huge compared with the overall economy, it’s probably enough to offset anything gained from spurring people back to work. “Benefits discontinuation may end up doing more bad on the personal income ledger than good on the employment ledger of the economy,” chief US economist Gregory Daco wrote on July 14.

There are probably some people who are sitting out the job market because they make more in jobless aid than they would from working. But research has consistently found this to be a much smaller slice of the unemployed than Republicans typically acknowledge.

[…]

A June study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that only one worker out of seven is likely to turn down a job offer because of the current $300 per week federal benefit. That’s nearly the same portion as in the Morning Consult survey.

I don’t know quite how to interpret this. Maybe someone can elucidate it for me.

Does $300 a week just not mean that much to people? If that’s the case it calls the policy itself into question. Do people expect that something better will come along if they wait long enough? My offhand guess it that the results have multiple causes and vary from place to place in the country and from sector to sector. Thoughts?

At RealClearPolitics John Curiel argues that it’s time to increase the size of the House of Representatives:

There is nothing sacred about the number 435 in regards to representation. The Constitution and ensuing amendments never established a hard ceiling on the size of the House. Article 1, Section 2 sets a starting ratio of one representative for every 30,000 people within a state, with at least one representative per state. Applying this original ratio to the modern day, the size of the House would be 10,000 members, which is clearly too large. But the Constitution does allow Congress to change the ratio of members to state populations following each census via reapportionment acts.

How bad is the present situation?

Due to the freeze at 435 members, the average House district now represents over 760,000 people, which is set to increase to over 800,000 by 2030. Worse yet, House members effectively represent more constituents than every other major Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development country in the world. Pakistan ranks second to the U.S. at just under 600,000 people per district, and most other countries, such as the U.K., have well under 200,000 people. What distinguishes the U.S. relative to other OECD countries is that the size of its lower legislative chamber shares more similarities with competitive oligarchical/authoritarian nations such as Russia, China, Brazil and Pakistan, than actual representative democracies, such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany.

He argues for using something called the “cube root rule”:

Increasing the size of the House therefore appears like a straightforward way to reform some obvious obstacles to representation. The question then arises: How large should it be? A House of 10,000 members is certainly too large for any business to be accomplished. As Madison noted in Federalist 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” It turns out, however, that there is a general mathematical rule, the cube-root rule, that most other industrialized democracies follow. Following the rule, 435 seats would be appropriate for a nation with a population of about 82 million. With the U.S. population around 330 million, we should now have around 691 seats. A House with that many members would result in an average district size of around 480,000 constituents, approximating the size of districts in the 1970s.

While I agree that with today’s technology it is possible for a representative to represent adequately many more people than in 1790, I’m skeptical that it is possible with his cube root of 450,000 constituents per representative. While I would support his reform I think it is necessary but not sufficient.

In my opinion the other reform that is necessary is to reduce the size and scope of the federal government, returning more power to the states. Bear in mind that neither of the reforms mentioned will ever be adopted by our present Congress because it reduces the power and wealth of its members. The only way for it to happen would be for it to be imposed on them.

But let’s ask a more basic question: what is democracy? What are the dividing lines among mobocracy, representative democracy, and oligarchy? I think for representative democracy to be anything a cruel charade representatives must be able to know and respond to their constituents which means that districts much be much, much smaller and much, much more cohesive than is the case at present.

I found Razib Khan’s post on human genetic diversity fascinating. Here’s one of the key passages:

93-98.5% of the ancestry of humans outside of Sub-Saharan Africa (among those with no recent Sub-Saharan African ancestry, obviously) derives from a breeding population of 1,000 to 10,000, which expanded rapidly 60,000 years ago (reaching Australia and Europe around 45,000 and 50,000 years ago, accordingly).

So the simple “Out of Africa” narrative of a population crash and explosion across the world holds for North Africans, Eurasians, Oceanians, and Amerindians, some six and a half billion of us. But the origins of modern populations south of the Sahara are clearly more complex. Any bottleneck’s effects were much weaker within Africa, and multiple proto-modern populations seem to have been separating into distinct lineages as early as 200,000 years ago.

More graphically from a genetic standpoint Swedes and the Han Chinese resemble each other more closely than some people in neighboring villages in sub-Saharan Africa.

And speaking of graphics he includes some stunning graphics in his post. His map of migrations highlights and documents a point I have made here: as long ago as 15,000 years ago and almost certainly as long ago as 5,000 years ago human beings were just about everywhere in the world. No wonder the 16th and 17th century European explorers weren’t surprised to find people wherever they went. They were only surprised when they didn’t find people.

His post also ties in with another little news story, from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — What makes humans unique? Scientists have taken another step toward solving an enduring mystery with a new tool that may allow for more precise comparisons between the DNA of modern humans and that of our extinct ancestors.

Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

“That’s a pretty small percentage,” said Nathan Schaefer, a University of California computational biologist and co-author of the new paper. “This kind of finding is why scientists are turning away from thinking that we humans are so vastly different from Neanderthals.”

The research draws upon DNA extracted from fossil remains of now-extinct Neanderthals and Denisovans dating back to around 40,000 or 50,000 years ago, as well as from 279 modern people from around the world.

all of which supports a point I’ve made here: the available evidence supports the hypothesis that present day human beings, Neanderthals, and Denisovans all belong to a single species. The relationship among us is more like the relationship among different breeds of dogs or horses than it is like a difference between species. What about Homo antecessor (800,000 ya) or erectus (1.7 million ya)? We may never know but I wouldn’t bet against all of us being members of the same species.

Does anyone have a prediction for what the Social Security trustees’ report for 2021 will say? It’s already three months late (not unheard of although if it hasn’t been produced by August that will be unheard of). What are the odds that the Medicare trust fund is already depleted or will be within a year or so? IIRC the 2020 report said 2025.

At The Strategist professor of strategic studies Brahma Chellaney is critical of President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in no uncertain terms:

Afghanistan is on the brink of catastrophe, and it is US President Joe Biden’s fault. By overruling America’s top generals and ordering the hasty withdrawal of US troops, Biden opened the way for Taliban terrorists to capture more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s districts. Now, the Taliban are pushing towards Kabul, and the United States is looking weaker than ever.

Unlike most he does not shrink from proposing his alternative:

Biden had a better option: the US could have maintained a small residual force in Afghanistan, in order to provide critical air support and reassurance to Afghan forces. Yes, that would have violated the deal Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, struck with the Taliban in February 2020. But the Taliban have already violated that Faustian bargain. Biden was happy to overturn many of Trump’s other actions, making his insistence on upholding this deal difficult to understand.

which is not unlike what I proposed 16 years ago: maintaining a small, lethal force with the dual missions of counterterrorism and force protection in Afghanistan indefinitely. Notate bene: I didn’t think we should have invaded Afghanistan in the first place. If it were felt that we needed to do something, we should have engaged in the punitive raid to end all punitive raids and left it at that.

But all of this makes me wonder if we’re going to see the return of something like the malaise about which President Jimmy Carter warned 42 years ago. There are major differences between now and 42 years ago not the least of which is that then we had the world’s largest economy very nearly by an order of magnitude. If we have another “crisis of confidence” it will be well-deserved.

If you like polemic, you might try reading Matt Taibbi’s critique of Robin DiAngelo and her latest book, probably in that order. Here’s a snippet:

DiAngelo is a unique writer, being dishonest, dangerous, and moronic in magnificent quantities, probably in that order.

and later:

Reading DiAngelo is like being strapped to an ice floe in a vast ocean while someone applies metronome hammer-strikes to the the same spot on your temporal bone over and over.

Don’t hold back. Tell us how you really feel, Matt.

I should have titled this post “Monetizing White Guilt”.

I wish that Americans would refrain from criticizing or even commenting on the internal matters and politics of other countries, with which they are even less familiar than they are their own. Or, at least count 10 before letting fly. Let’s begin with the first sentence of the Washington Post editorial to which I linked earlier:

Poland’s right-wing nationalist ruling party, Law and Justice, has been steadily losing ground in recent months.

What is a “right-wing” party in Poland? I have no idea. These characterizations do not translate well. So, for example, the UK’s Conservative Party more closely resembles the American Democratic Party or, at least the Democratic Party before it began its mad dash towards its progressive wing, than it does anything an American conservative would recognize. Actually, both of our major political parties are more like the Tories than any other British political party, as the Brits have laughed about for years. A “right-wing party” in continental Europe is frequently a royalist party.

Also is the PiS (no comment) actually a “nationalist” party? Again I have no idea.

Poland has a parliamentary system. The ruling coalition (called “the United Right”) is twice as large as any other coalition. Said another way it doesn’t matter whether PiS loses a seat or two as long as the coalition remains in power which is a pretty good likelihood.

After the throat-clearing here’s what they’re complaining about:

It should be no surprise, then, that Law and Justice is reviving an effort to neuter the country’s highest-rated news station, TVN24, which unlike state-owned channels broadcasts independent news and critical commentary about the government. This week the head of the state broadcast regulator, a former Law and Justice member, told Reuters that the station was in violation of foreign ownership rules, and that its license might not be renewed by a Sept. 26 deadline.

What’s their specific complaint? The news is dominated by a state-owned channel practically everywhere in the world other than the U. S. France 24 is state-owned. Germany didn’t even have privately-owned channels until the late 1980s. Why isn’t the WaPo complaining about the BBC?

Here’s their conclusion:

The Biden administration has taken note of what would be a devastating blow to media freedom in Poland. The U.S. charge d’affaires in Warsaw and the State Department’s spokesman have tweeted their concerns. “Strong democracies welcome a free and independent press,” said State’s Ned Price. That’s just the problem: Under Law and Justice, Poland’s democracy has become progressively weaker. The United States must use all the leverage it can muster to ensure that independent television news in the country survives.

which I think is hyperventilating. Let me provide another way of looking at matters. The Poles and Hungarians are fighting a rather desperate rearguard action to preserve their own languages and cultures. Both Polish and Hungarian are spoken almost exclusively within their respective home countries, by their diaspora and children, and a few language scholars. Both are rather small countries. Both are very Christian countries which struggled under Communist rule for 40 years. Both countries have historic experience of depradations by Muslim invaders and they see themselves as having defended Germany from the same fate.

The actual problem is Germany. The euro is a vehicle for German exports. It was Germany that invited open immigration from the Middle East and North Africa—it furthered German ends. I feel safe in suggesting that very few of the people from the Middle East who accepted Germany’s invitation spoke either Polish or Hungarian. Shouldn’t the Poles and Hungarians be excused for believing they are fighting for national survival?

One more point. The German are quite ignorant of history including their own. They don’t know what happened during World War II. They don’t know what happened in the 1930s. They don’t know what happened during World War I. What they do learn invariably casts Germany in a favorable light. What else would you expect when the education (other than job training) of 2/3s of Germans ends at 10th grade?

It used to be that the Washington Post was the news outlet closest to and that most accurately reflected the prevailing wisdom in the nation’s capitol. Is that still the case? If so, I think we have a lot about which we should be concerned.

This morning when I checked the WaPo’s online opinion page, as I do every morning, I was treated to George Will’s column to which I linked yesterday as the lead opinion piece. As was noted the piece reflected an oddly distorted view of events and called attention to events of whose interpretation I am far from certain. Certainly not as certain as George Will. They were events that could be leading us closer to a major war.

I can’t remember the last time that one of Mr. Will’s columns held the lead position on the WaPo’s online opinion page. Clearly, the piece has caught some attention and the WaPo’s editors broadly approve of it.

Today’s lead editorial is about the Polish government’s move against an (ultimately) American-owned 24 hour news station on the grounds that it violates foreign ownership rules in Poland. I’ll have more to say about the editorial later but here’s my question: why refer to it as an “attack”? Journalists are supposed to be wordsmiths so any claim that it was inadvertent rings hollow. “Move” as two fewer letters so the word wasn’t chosen to save space.

Which leads to the question in my title: why is the WaPo so bellicose? Does that reflect the prevailing view in DC these days?