I’m glad to see this. From Stars and Stripes:

WASHINGTON — A pair of House lawmakers introduced a bill on Thursday that would expedite the visa process for Afghan military translators, amid growing calls from Congress for the Biden administration to act quickly to shuttle allies out of the country ahead of the withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The bill from Reps. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, would allow applicants to the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program to forgo a medical examination, which can cost thousands of dollars.

It’s welcome and long overdue.

It took a while to get to the tactical significance of the air-launched drones described in this article by Garrett Reim at Flight Global. Here it is:

Designed for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency missions, the Reaper and Gray Eagle are increasingly vulnerable to being shot down by fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missile batteries fielded by sophisticated foes, such as China and Russia. Long-range air-launched effects are seen as a way to keep the large UAVs outside the weapons engagement zone of US adversaries, thus keeping the aircraft relevant for more years.

“By employing these smaller [unmanned air systems], Reaper and Gray Eagle operators will be able to penetrate, disintegrate and exploit anti-access and area denial air defences, and support operations in any domain,” the company says. “Meanwhile, the greater standoff afforded by these smaller [unmanned air systems] increases the survivability of the larger aircraft by placing them outside the kinetic range of tactical surface-to-air missiles.”

I wonder what the relationship between these devices and Russia’s hypersonic weaponry that is in development.

All I needed to see was the title of this piece in the New Atlanticist, “An Afghanistan At Peace Could Connect South and Central Asia”, to remind me of one of my favorite Yiddish wisecracks: As di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah (“if my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather”).

While I think that the framing of inflation as “the Biden tax” by Alfred Ortiz in his post at RealClearPolitics is political posturing, I also think that the underlying point is sound. Inflation does fall heaviest on the poor and people earning middle incomes:

Inflation acts the same way as a tax by reducing the value of earnings. It devastates retirees and those on fixed incomes by making them poorer through no fault of their own. And it hurts small businesses, which must constantly raise prices, reducing sales and alienating customers.

It does so in multiple ways. Not only do they not have the excess income to adjust to inflation they are not as well-positioned to seek other jobs or to ask for raises. And raises may not be forthcoming because it’s cheaper to automate their jobs away.

Add this to the mitigation plan—without increasing spending which will merely aggravate the problem—which I keep on asking for in the full recognition that no such plan will ever be proposed.

In his latest Washington Post column George Will notes somewhat wryly that a considerable portion of the financial incentives of the Biden Administration’s electric vehicle (EV) tax credits like those of the Obama Administration before it are captured by the top 5% of income earners:

What the White House calls a “fact sheet” says Biden’s administration will “support market demand” for EVs by “driving demand” with “point-of-sale incentives” to encourage “deployment” of EVs. Translation: Subsidies, including tax credits for purchasers, will fiddle the market by lowering EV prices enough to manufacture a demand sufficient to justify manufacturing the vehicles in quantities that the administration says are vital for the planet. Biden even wants $15 billion to build 500,000 EV charging stations. When U.S. automobile sales exploded from 8 million vehicles on U.S. roads in 1920 to 23 million in 1930 without tax credits, the private sector, responding to real rather than synthetic demand, built sufficient gas stations.

There are tax credits of up to $7,500 for EV purchasers, until a manufacturer sells 200,000. GM and Tesla have reached this camp. GM wants the tax credit restored and made permanent. Internal Revenue Service data for 2014 showed that the biggest beneficiaries were households with adjusted gross income of at least $100,000. One percent went to households earning less than $50,000. States, too, have joined the market manipulation. In California, where about 47 percent of EVs are sold, buyers can gain up to $15,000. That such subsidies “work” is shown by what happens when they end: In 2015, when Georgia ended its $5,000 state tax credit, EV sales plummeted 89 percent in two months.

Biden’s policy to use less affluent Americans’ money to entice more affluent Americans to buy EVs is only one of the contemplated regressive policies by which his administration would transfer wealth upward. Another such policy would cancel student debts for some of the fortunate minority of Americans who, having college degrees, will likely enjoy lifetime earnings significantly higher than those of the less fortunate majority. And if Democrats repeal the $10,000 cap on deductions of state and local taxes by individuals filing their federal income taxes, this would almost entirely benefit very wealthy taxpayers.

I don’t think we should be subsidizing such purchases or “investments” at all but I also don’t be believe that we should be subsidizing oil consumption or driving which we do in thousands of ways. The maze of government subsidies are a tiger from which it is very difficult to dismount.

IMO Mr. Will is misreading the reasons for the policy. I think it’s an attempt at moving the Overton window on EVs by providing incentives to the top 5% of income earners who form the elite and the society’s opinion makers.

I’m skeptical of the assumptions being made by supporters of EVs among them that battery production can be scaled to the necessary levels. Mr. Will is right to call out the small improvements that EVs will provide but I’m not sure that the data are which he relying are up-to-date. This post on the subject suggests they may not be. I think that fans of EVs should also consider that vehicles powered by fuel cells (hydrogen) are greener than either EVs, gas-, or diesel-powered vehicles.

There’s a book review at RealClearEnergy you might find interesting. Here’s its opening paragraph:

On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Read the whole thing.

To some degree the article and the book it reviews is a dialogue between Richard Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty and science and striking some balance between such honesty and mitigating risk. My question is somewhat different: how do you mitigate the risk of eschewing absolute intellectual honesty in favor of politically and economically motivated goals?

I want to commend an Atlantic piece by Amanda Ripley to your attention. The piece, entitled “Can the News Be Fixed?” that largely addresses the question of how can journalists rebuild local TV news, and perhaps even restore trust in the media? Here’s a telling snippet:

In the second year, he began to see a path forward. The problem “wasn’t the way the news was presented,” McLaughlin told me. “It was what the news is. The traditional format was still pretty desirable: the idea of a man and a woman at a desk and a weather segment halfway through. The work that needed to be done was in story selection and production.”

The focus groups seemed to appreciate reporters who had deep knowledge of the community and the subject matter. And, to McLaughlin’s surprise, the groups didn’t just say they wanted more in-depth stories. They actually behaved that way. When Scripps tested Hello SWFL stories that were seven or eight minutes long—an eternity in the business—audiences watched them to the end, as long as they were well told.

Fear, meanwhile, wasn’t working as well. Since the 1980s, TV news stations have inundated people with shocking coverage of crime and other spectacles. “The rule used to be: If you can scare the hell out of people, you can probably get them to watch five more minutes,” McLaughlin said. But across a dozen focus groups, the Hello SWFL test station discovered that younger people were put off by hysterical coverage of petty crimes—or of crimes happening far away.

I think the piece expresses a number of misconception, e.g.:

If American audiences are losing their taste for reductive “he said, she said” coverage, and for litanies of problems and risks without solutions, that would be a good development.

Did American audiences ever have taste for that? Or was it what reporters and editors thought was appealing and presented the way they should it should be presented? “Point-of-view” reporting, the present highly agonistic style, is what’s taught in the J-schools these days. Maybe it has nothing to do with what consumers want and a lot to do with what reporters and editors want.

I also was forced to consider several different, contrasting definitions of the word “fix”. There are fix as in repair, fix as in make steady, fix meaning rig, falsify, and fix as in neutering an animal. I think the news is already fixed. Just not in the way Ms. Ripley probably means.

In an op-ed in the New York Times after pointing out that due to the present COVID-19 crisis unfolding in India the country, which manufactures a lot of the vaccines used in the poorer countries of the world, had shifted from being an exporter of vaccines to an importer, health care policy analyst Prashant Yadav gives his prescription:

First, we need to develop a way to map global vaccine-manufacturing capacity rigorously, routinely and transparently.

Doing this is not as straightforward as it may seem. It requires understanding the type of equipment available at a manufacturing site, adapting it to the steps required to produce a specific vaccine, calibrating it for dosing and expected yield. Some of that information might be commercially sensitive, and vaccine manufacturers may be reluctant to share it publicly.

This obstacle can be overcome, however. Safeguards can be put in place to protect proprietary information, for example by sharing only aggregate data about manufacturing capacity, without revealing the specific configuration of the equipment or sources of supplies.

Second, production sites must be multiplied and diversified.

As the current moment illustrates, the world is vulnerable for relying so much on vaccines manufactured in India because India itself may have a great need for the vaccines it produces. To minimize the risk that domestic demand will scuttle exports and global distribution, vaccine production hubs should be set up in countries with small populations.

Prospective hub countries will also need to be well-connected, to ensure both the arrival of raw materials and the speedy export of vaccines. They should have reliable infrastructure and a competent work force skilled in manufacturing biologics (complex proteins made from living cells). Based on these criteria, Singapore, Luxembourg, Belgium, Panama, Senegal and Rwanda are candidates worth exploring.

I think that Mr. Yadav has identified an actual issue but it’s not the one he thinks it is. What are the actual impediments to the vaccine-producing “hubs” he imagines? I would submit that capital investment to create them is limited, largely due to China’s and India’s being too focused on the export trade and not enough production for their domestic markets. Another factor might be undependable governments (Panama, Senegal, and Rwanda).

How low can she go? Yesterday Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, continuing in her campaign to be the unsurpassedly worst mayor in Chicago history (no mean feat), announced that she would only grant interviews on the occasion of her second anniversary as mayor to “journalists of color”. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday defended her decision to grant interviews on her two-year anniversary in office only to journalists of color, saying it was intended as an effort to confront the issue of what she described as a mostly white and male City Hall press corps.

But the move, revealed Tuesday by her office, was greeted skeptically by some in the Chicago media and beyond, with questions about whether excluding white reporters is a discriminatory act from a mayor who has had an often contentious relationship with reporters of all backgrounds.

The mayor’s claim that no “women of color” assigned to the City Hall beat is a lie. For example, of the three reporters assigned by WBEZ to City Hall, two are women—one Hispanic and the other Asian.

Some reporters cancelled their scheduled interviews in protest over the mayor’s decision:

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt was among those disagreeing with the policy.

“I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today,” Pratt tweeted. “However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them.”

It’s unclear to me what the mayor is trying to accomplish at all. Every Chicago network affiliate has multiple black, Hispanic, and Asian anchors (in some cases a majority). Every Chicago network affiliate has multiple black, Hispanic, and Asian reporters. IMO veteran Chicago reporter Carol Marin reacted best:

Carol Marin, co-director of the Center for Journalism Integrity and Excellence at DePaul University in Chicago, also attacked the policy.

“It’s a very good lesson for our journalism students to learn,” Marin tweeted. “Public officials don’t get to pick their reporters. And reporters need to stand up for fellow reporters.”