The editors of the Wall Street Journal catalogue the ways in which the Biden Administration’s COVID-19 relief bill has nothing to do with COVID-19:

All told, this generous definition of Covid-related provisions tallies some $825 billion. The rest of the bill—more than $1 trillion—is a combination of bailouts for Democratic constituencies, expansions of progressive programs, pork, and unrelated policy changes.

Those include:

• Slush funds for state and local governments, whether their revenues have been hurt by COVID-19 or not
• Funds to bail out the PBGC. In theory the PBGC is supposed to be self-funding. The $86 billion involved is essentially a handout to unions and corporations.
• $129 billion boost for schools—not expected to be spent until the pandemic has long been over.
• $39 billion for child care, $50 billion for FEMA, $30 billion for public transit and billions more for a variety of other bailouts, handouts, and subsidies.
• The $15/hour minimum wage.
• Porkbarrel spending

I can’t see any yardstick by which that’s not excessive.

In her Washington Post column this morning Megan McArdle muses about the marriage of convenience between the Democratic Party and public employees’ unions:

Progressive professionals might not like every single thing the teachers unions or the transit workers did, but they could live with it — and if services became really intolerably bad, they moved someplace where the unions were less intransigent, even while insisting that they were very supportive of public services, and of a well-paid government workforce represented by government unions.

The death of George Floyd, however, made it a little bit harder to voice full-throated support for government unions. Progressives raged at each new revelation of how insulated police officers had been from any sort of accountability for abusing their power. They had a whole bevy of union-negotiated special protections that made it hard to convict bad cops, and just as hard to separate them from the force.

When progressives pointed out, correctly, that this was an outrageous abuse of the public trust, the responses from the police unions tended to fall between unrepentant and obnoxious. For the first time, one heard good lefties discussing abolishing a public-sector union, or at least sharply curtailing its bargaining rights so that public safety would be the priority, rather than guaranteeing police jobs.

When conservatives pointed out, somewhat acerbically, that they’d been calling for the abolition of government unions for decades, those progressives explained that police unions were a unique case, and they still wholeheartedly supported good government unions like teachers unions, which would never put the welfare of their members above the good of the children. Democratic coalition saved.

Then blue-state school districts tried to reopen. The teachers unions balked, or rather made demands so extensive that they could not possibly be accommodated in any reasonable time frame. In districts where the schools are run by school boards, elected in low-turnout, union-dominated elections, the schools stayed closed. And one started to hear a lot of people saying, “Of course I support teachers unions, but….”

Yet even those critics couldn’t quite bring themselves to acknowledge what was happening: Unions were advocating for policies that might lower what was already a small risk to their members even though this effectively meant millions of children would fall even further behind in their schooling while parents struggled to work. They were doing this not because they had irrational fears that could be explained away, but because they cared more about small risks to themselves than large risks to others, and had made a clear-eyed calculation that they could get away with it.

That’s also what the police unions had done; it is what unions do. If what is best for the employees happens to be good for employers or customers, great, but if it makes them worse off, that’s not the union’s problem. This doesn’t magically change because the “customers” are adorable children and the employers are angry taxpayers.

I’ve made my views clear in the past. The difference between a professional and any other workers is not compensation level but the presumption that professional work in the public good. In my view that is incompatible with being represented by a union.

Additionally, public employees’ unions contributing to political campaigns is an inherently corrupt arrangement, recycling tax dollars to public employee wages to political contributions. The only way to clean it up is to ban such contributions outright—including in-kind contributions.

Finally, I agree with Calvin Coolidge:

There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time

and Franklin Roosevelt:

The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service

Even if you accept public employees’ unions their staging strikes is heinous. What teachers’ unions are presently doing is demanding special privileges, holding children and the economy hostage in the process. This must stop.

I think the editors of the Washington Post are correct in drawing attention to the contradictions in the Biden Administration’s immigration policy:

The Biden administration is engaged in a high-wire act at the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to dismantle what it rightly regards as former president Donald Trump’s inhumane immigration policies and simultaneously to avoid signaling to desperate migrants that the doors to the United States have swung open amid a pandemic. The stance is inherently contradictory — little wonder it began springing leaks days after the new president took office.

Even as the White House issued stern admonitions that migrants should not attempt to enter the country, authorities admitted more than 1,000 unauthorized border-crossers into the country, generally to join relatives here, on criteria that have not been made clear publicly. News of those admissions has spread virally among migrants and asylum seekers, undercutting the official warnings meant to dissuade illegal entry. Meanwhile, thousands more illegal border-crossers continue to be summarily expelled under a public health emergency order issued last spring by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the same time, officials on Friday began processing and admitting registered asylum seekers — a procedure the Trump administration effectively froze — at three ports of entry in Texas and California. Priority goes to those who have waited longest to have their cases adjudicated while living in squalid, dangerous border camps in Mexico. Eligibility also depends on coronavirus testing performed in Mexico.

indeed, in its foreign policy more generally. However, as a friend of mine once observed, don’t tell me your priorities. Tell me your relative priorities.

I’d certainly like to know how the Biden Administration would rank the following priorities:

• Instituting a more humane policy in dealing with lawbreakers at our border with Mexico
• Avoiding the encouragement of more migration from Mexico and Central America
• Getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control in the U. S.
• Reuniting families
• Admitting those seeking asylum
• Enforcing our laws—the only item in this list it is actually obligated to do

It should be obvious that doing all of them simultaneously is impossible. It would also be nice to know the explicit criteria by which people are being admitted or expelled and what in their eyes constitutes a legitimate request for asylum.

On my walk with Kara yesterday afternoon, I noticed the icicles depending from the gutters of the houses in my neighborhood, some of them massive and eight or even twelve feet long. One of my neighbors had hired a team of roofers to use a steamer to remove the ice dam from their gutters. I had used a broom to remove icicles in areas I could reach to reduce the load and improve safety for those walking below.

As we walked along I mused over the differences in icicle formation. I’m not really sure why some houses have many more and larger icicles than others. I suspect it’s multi-factorial with reasons including:

• Houses with large expanses of roof with southern exposures tend to have more and larger icicles.
• Some roofing materials are more conducive to icicle formation than others. Based on my observation from least conducive to most: tile, slate, light-colored asphalt shingles, dark-colored asphalt shingles.
• Attic insulation. My impression is that more effective attic insulation is less conducive to the formation of ice dams and icicles.
• The temperature maintained inside the house. I’m not entirely sure about this one but I think that it may have some effect.

I’d be interested in hearing from someone with more knowledge than I on the subject.

I encourage you to read Andrew Sullivan’s latest offering. In it he muses on, using his diction “why is wokeness winning?” I would phrase it a bit differently which is the source of the title of this post. Here’s a snippet:

It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

It’s everywhere. Across the country, schools and colleges are dumping SATs so they can engineer racial equity, and abolish the idea of merit. The Smithsonian backed the idea that working hard, showing up on time and perfecting a task are functions of “whiteness”. In California, there’s a ballot initiative to legalize government discrimination on the basis of race; and a new mandate that company boards add members from under-represented communities. Corporations who haven’t publicly committed themselves to the full woke project are being hounded by their employees into doing so, meaning hiring and firing on the basis of race, or forcing employees into re-education sessions, guided by DiAngelo and Kendi. The NBA, for Pete’s sake, is now a festival of wokeness, even as viewership collapses. CRT propaganda like the NYT’s 1619 Project can be exposed as untrue and unethical, but the paper can both debunk it in its own pages and still hail it as a triumph. And the pièce de resistance: 21 percent of liberal students in the Ivy League favor some level of violence to stop campus speech they disapprove of.

He considers five reasons:

• Emotional
  

  The reason so many people marched this summer was because of a righteous revulsion at the visceral image of a black man being murdered slowly on the street by a bad, white cop.

• It’s super-easy
  

  Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free.

• Tribalism
  

  What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue.

• Social aspiration
  

  The etiquette of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society. They mark you as someone high up in the American social hierarchy.

• Religion
  

  Many moderns want the experience of religion without God. With CRT [ed. critical race theory], as in the past with communism, they can have it.

to which I would add one more: there’s good money to be made from wokeness. From my perspective the tragic aspect is that “wokeness” is plain old racism, very much akin to the sort that prevailed in the South prior to 1965. And none of what is making making “wokeism” successful is new. It was all described in detail fifty years ago by Tom Wolfe in two pieces, “Radical Chic” and “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”. Not to mention in Dostoevsky.

I think that the phenomena described by Mr. Wolfe were the reaction of progressive white people to black nationalism and black nationalism, sadly, was one of the reasons that the advancement of the fortunes of ordinary black people in the U. S., the descendants of slaves, came to an abrupt end in the 1970s.

I wanted to share with you the conclusion of Lance Morrow’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on our present national mood:

Right now, Americans are in a bad mood. They have good reason. They are divided. But for much of its career, the country has been two nations. Binaries are the real American way: North and South, slave holder and abolitionist, frontier and Ellis Island, East and West, urban and rural, labor and management, strikers and Pinkertons, gold and silver, wet and dry, hawk and dove, black and white, Indian and paleface. Trump and woke.

One big difference in 2021 is the screens. In the old America, there were far fewer versions of the country’s story available to choose from. But the 21st century’s never-sleeping screens churn forth myriad narratives. Information is democratized and weaponized. In the floating world of the internet, only the old hierarchies of myth are suspect. Special-interest “identities” come forward with urgent claims as to race and gender and social justice and equity. There are doubts as to whether America is a good country, as it once believed itself to be, or a wicked one that must be overturned and replaced—and, indeed, whether schools can be named after Abraham Lincoln any longer because he was, contrary to everything you previously believed, a “white supremacist.”

In this environment, the country’s old master narrative is on track to be first disreputable, then forgotten: canceled. Americans can’t stand to think themselves immoral. Irreconcilable, each side claims, in a sort of theological way, to be the right and righteous one. No wonder the nation’s mood is poisonous.

In addition to “the screens” there are other differences between today and the Great Depression. For one thing at that time we had a president genuinely committed to uniting the country and who used the latest technology to do so. Maybe I’m misreading the situation but I don’t see that commitment today.

For another the percentage of immigrant population at that time was lower than it is now, was declining, and would continue to decline for 40 years. The immigrants of 80 years ago were quite different from those of today. They had left their old countries behind and by and large wanted to be seen as 100% Americans. Today technology means they reach out to family and friends in the old country on a daily basis if they care to and their ties to the U. S. are not nearly as strong.

For yet another 80 years ago we had an educational system and mass media dedicated to promoting our “old master narrative”. That is not the case to day to say the least.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal, no foes of expanding immigration, call on the Biden Administration to compromise with Republicans and pass immigration reform dammit:

The better political path is to look for small wins such as modernizing the farm guest-worker program and legalizing Dreamers, both of which have drawn GOP support. This week Mr. Biden said he’s open to piecemeal bills, which is recognizing political reality.

America needs more human talent to remain a vibrant economy as the population ages and China rises. Bowing to the left will play into the hands of restrictionists who want to define Democrats as the open borders party. Immigration offers Mr. Biden an opportunity to claim a political victory that has eluded his predecessors. But he’s going to have to work with Republicans and risk disappointing the left to get it.

The fly in that ointment is that immigration activists are pushing to complete amnesty and reduced enforcement while “restrictionists”, as the WSJ call them, not only do not want more immigrants but want to deport those who are here illegally. Hence the present impasse.

I’m rather skeptical of this claim by the editors:

America needs more workers in agriculture, construction and technical fields.

If that were the case wouldn’t you expect wages to rise in those fields? To the best of my ability to determine over the last 30 years the precise opposite is the case. Based on what I learned on the first day of Econ 101 that doesn’t suggest increased demand. It does suggest, as Jared Bernstein put it, whenever wages for anybody start to rise the “immigration spigot” is turned on.

Just to remind readers I support immigration reform:

• I think we need an expanded guest worker program, specifically tailored for Mexican workers.
• I support some form of DACA. Whatever requirements are established by law should be enforced in an even-handed manner.
• I oppose a general amnesty.
• I support strict workplace enforcement of our immigration laws in much the same way as is the case in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
• I think the “diversity lottery” should be abolished.
• I think that sponsorship should either be abolished or severely curtailed and enforced.
• I could be persuaded of the wisdom of automatically granting “green cards” to non-citizens who graduate from American universities with doctorates in science, technology, and engineering.

That wouldn’t make anybody happy except most workers in the United States regardless of where they were born.

I started to write this post fully intending to support the editors of the New York Times’s plea, spurred by the impetus of the disaster unfolding in Texas, that our national power grid is in serious, proximate need of expansion and rendering it capable of handling tomorrow’s challenges. Unfortunately, as I dug into the editorial I found it such a mess of throat-clearing, political posturing, and questionable claims I couldn’t do that.

Blaming George W. Bush’s stint as governor for Texas’s present problems? Was global warming really responsible for California’s wildfires? How about too many people living surrounded by poorly managed scrub? How do they explain California wildfires before electricity was in use and before human-induced global warming was conceivably a cause? And is it only the South that builds natural gas power generation with the structure used in Texas? Or are such plants in California, Arizona, and New Mexico built in a similar manner?

I will merely point out that we are likely to be increasingly dependent on abundant, reliable electricity rather than less. That is especially true if the Biden Administration’s visions of a U. S. less dependent on coal and oil is to be achieved. Private providers are unlikely to provide the necessary resiliency and redundancy. The economics just weighs against it.

When most think of “infrastructure” they mean our transportation grid but that is not the only infrastructure grid in the United States. There are also the telecommunications grid, the sewer systems, and the power grid. Increasingly, when we say “infrastructure” we should mean the power grid.

I was very confused by David Ignatius’s latest Washington Post column. In it he argues for U. S. forces to remain in Afghanistan for an indefinite period, presumably to prevent a chaotic withdrawal and engage in counter-terrorism operations:

ISLAMABAD — As President Biden nears a decision about withdrawing the 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he doesn’t have a “best” option — only the one that’s least bad for the United States and its allies. That’s probably keeping the troops in place a while longer to avoid a chaotic departure.

quoting Gen. Dunford approvingly:

But other senior officials in Washington have told me that military leaders agree with a recommendation this month from retired Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said the United States should maintain its 2,500 troops, alongside about 5,000 NATO allies, and hunker down for a long support mission.

and mentioning these as alternatives:

Biden’s military and intelligence advisers have presented him with three unpleasant alternatives: leave May 1 as previously agreed, even though this would probably mean the fall of the Kabul government and a return to civil war; stay for a limited period, perhaps negotiated with the Taliban, which would delay its eventual takeover; or stay for an undefined period, which could mean a long continuation of what’s already the United States’ longest war.

adding another which he clearly views as impractical—being prepared for counter-terrorism operations from outside Afghanistan:

Maintaining a counterterrorism presence outside Afghanistan may sound like an attractive option. But experts caution that it may not be feasible militarily. A robust counterterrorism force would require drones over Afghanistan, but neighboring countries probably wouldn’t provide bases, meaning the drones might have to fly from the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia, hours away.

I found it confusing because I found it a jumble of different things. The present mission of U. S. forces in Afghanistan is neither counter-insurgency nor counter-terrorism. Dubbed “Resolute Support Mission”, it is to provide training and support for the forces of the Afghan government:

Resolute Support is a NATO-led, non-combat mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). It was launched on 1 January 2015, following the conclusion of the previous NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission, and the assumption of full security responsibility by the ANDSF. The Resolute Support Mission works closely with different elements of the Afghan Army, Police and Air Force.

Unless that mission changes it will remain a support mission. There is little evidence that the Afghan military is capable of either successful counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism on its own or will become capable of doing either in the foreseeable future. Afghanistan doesn’t actually have the means to support a modern military, the only kind we’re capable of training.

Additionally, I learned long ago that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary structure. I grew up not far from a university at which quonset huts, erected during World War II, were still in use as classrooms 50 years later. Without empirical, measurable, achievable goals any temporary force will remain in Afghanistan forever.

From the very beginning I have maintained that, although counter-terrorism would have been a legitimate objective, counter-insurgency was not and simply unachievable in Afghanistan to boot. The closest thing Afghanistan has ever had to a national government was the monarchy. I can’t see the monarchy returning or the Taliban giving up. Nothing has changed.

So, Mr. Ignatius seems to be supporting an infinite unachievable mission to avoid a chaotic withdrawal. He is apparently unfamiliar with the concept of sunk costs.