I think it’s fair to say that the United Nations Human Rights Council has definitely jumped the shark. In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Aaron Rhodes remarks:

China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Uzbekistan—all notorious for abusing human rights—were among the 14 states elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council on Oct. 13, bringing the proportion of nondemocratic states on the world’s top human rights-promoting body to 60%. Cuba received 170 votes, or 88%, in the secret-ballot General Assembly vote.

But the Human Rights Council’s problem isn’t simply the presence of bad actors. The real issue is the intrinsic moral relativism embedded in any all-inclusive, multilateral human-rights system.

Correct me if I’m wrong. Has Russia ever signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I don’t believe it has. Its predecessor, the Soviet Union, definitely did not. How in the world can the Council possibly accomplish anything when there is no basis for agreement.

That, by the way, is my problem with world government. For world government to succeed there must be some level of consensus and that simply does not exist.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal express great concern that Joe Biden will win the election and is actually serious about his plans for taxes, spending, and reregulation:

The issue is whether Mr. Biden’s policies will nurture this strong recovery, or slow it down as Barack Obama’s policies did after the 2009 recession. This is where the Hoover study comes in, as it examines the Democrat’s proposals on health insurance, taxes, energy and regulation. The authors are economists Timothy Fitzgerald, Kevin Hassett, Cody Kallen and Casey Mulligan. Messrs. Hassett and Mulligan were members of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump White House, but then the boosters of Bidenomics are veterans of the Clinton-Obama Administrations.

Mr. Hassett has done pioneering work on the impact of corporate taxation and Mr. Mulligan of the University of Chicago on the impact of government subsidies that raise the marginal tax-rate barriers as workers try to climb the economic ladder. The 50-page Hoover study is valuable because it examines policies for their incentive and supply-side effects, rather than merely macroeconomic demand-side spending.

Overall, the authors estimate that the Biden agenda, if fully implemented, would reduce full-time equivalent employment per person by about 3%, the capital stock per person by some 15%, and real GDP per capita by more than 8%. Compared to Congressional Budget Office estimates for these variables in 2030, this means there would be 4.9 million fewer working Americans, $2.6 trillion less in GDP, and $6,500 less in median household income.

The analytical details are especially helpful on energy costs and the “labor wedge” against hiring that have received little attention. Mr. Biden denies he supports the Green New Deal, but his plans to promote electric vehicles and phase out fossil fuels go far beyond anything Mr. Obama proposed.

To take only one example, the electrification of most passenger cars would increase the per capita demand for electric power by 25% even as more than 70% of baseline electric power from fossil fuels would go offline. Bridging this supply-demand gulf would require enormous subsidies and far more investment and labor to achieve the same energy output. Mr. Biden’s energy plans would cut total factor productivity by 1%-2% across the entire economy.

I don’t know whether VP Biden will be elected, whether he is serious about what he has said, or what impact all of his new taxes and spending would have but for the umpteenth time Keynesianism does not mean that government spending always stimulates the economy. What Keynes actually wrote is that an increase in deficit-financed government spending can make up for a shortfall in aggregate product. But you can’t simultaneously increase aggregate demand and cap aggregate product and expect to stimulate the economy yet that is what we are doing. To take a single example we cap the number of physicians and hospitals. We do that in dozens of ways. When those resources are at 100% of capacity additional health care spending will not increase the amount of care. It will have the perverse effect of increasing the price of care.

The editors’ electric power example illustrates the same principle. Increasing demand while reducing supply will have perverse consequences.

In my view what we need is much more basic and secondary production in the United States but that has become heretical both for progressives and conservatives. As long as that’s the case I think it’s quite unlikely we’ll see the sort of economic growth we need so much.

However, I feel confident in making this prediction. If Joe Biden is elected president and the economy tanks in 2021, it will be blamed on Trump.

It being October and Halloween being just around the corner, TCM has been running old horror movies practically non-stop and I expect other channels will be doing the same. So, what are the scariest movies? A good place to start might be with a list of the movies that director Martin Scorsese considers the scariest, published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago:

• The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963)
• Isle of the Dead (Val Lewton, 1945)
• The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)
• The Entity (Frank de Felitta, 1983)
• Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer, 1945)
• The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
• The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
• The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
• Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957)
• The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961)
• Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

I’ve highlighted those on which I’m in agreement with Mr. Scorsese. I’ll comment on the others and propose some additions.

Isle of the Dead is a good movie and I recommend it. IMO among Val Lewton movies The 7th Victim and I Walked With a Zombie are scarier. All are recommended. My cousin had the lead in another Val Lewton horror movie, The Leopard Man.

I love The Uninvited. It’s one of my favorite movies and I’ve mentioned it before but I would characterize it more as eerie than as scary. I think that’s true of Dead of Night, too.

The Entity? I can’t find anything starring Seagull scary. Not crazy about The Changeling. Didn’t find The Innocents scary.

Among Hitchcock movies I actually found Shadow of a Doubt scarier than Psycho. YMMV.

Some movies not in his list that I think are pretty scary are:

• The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)
• The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona, 1964)
• Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987)

I find most of today’s horror movies gruesome or just plain disgusting without being particularly scary.

In his Washington Post column David Ignatius announces that the changes in the behavior of Americans will continue after the pandemic is over. He discusses the following ways in which things have changed, probably for good.

Working from home

A report this month by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that companies had shifted to remote work more than 40 times faster than they expected possible. Interactions with customers for North American companies are now 65 percent digital, compared to 41 percent pre-crisis. Changes made to cope with the pandemic — like moving to cloud computing or online purchasing — are “likely to stick in the long term.”

Changes in consumption

The shock of the pandemic quickly altered some consumer habits. A July report from McKinsey found that Americans were spending more on groceries, household supplies and home entertainment and less on almost everything else. Seventy-five percent said they had changed their shopping behavior, and most said they planned to continue.

Changes in health care

A July study by Accenture of 2,700 patients in the United States and other industrial countries found that 70 percent had canceled or deferred in-person treatment, but that 9 out of 10 thought their care was as good or better than before and 44 percent were using new devices or apps to manage conditions.

Demands for a “stronger safety net” will increase

A September report by the Pew Research Center found that 63 percent of Americans agreed it is the “government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage,” compared with 59 percent a year ago.

And, ending on an optimistic note

Greater support for diversity

A Pew Research Center study found a significant increase since 2016 in the percentage of millennials who believe it’s good that America will soon have a majority of Black, Latino and Asian citizens. The millennial generation is also passionate about the threat of climate change: 92 percent of Biden’s millennial or younger supporters say it’s important; so do 49 percent of Trump’s supporters in that group.

I will limit my remarks on that last to these. The difference between the “Greatest Generation” and the present is that my parents and their peers faced their challenges with courage and determination. Today people are complaining that their needs aren’t being taken care of. Notice the difference? Also, guess what? Not only will America have a majority of black, Latino, and Asian citizens, we’ll have a majority of white, Latino, and Asian citizens. As I’ve been saying for decades, just as “white” meant something different in 1820 than it did in 1870 than it does today, it will mean something different in the years to come than it does now. Most Hispanics will consider themselves and will be white. Just as the Irish, Jews, and Italians do.

Every factor he lists to my eye appears to be an acceleration of pre-existing trends. I’m also curious about what he thinks 30-50% of the population will do if we don’t need waiters, busboys, dishwashers, and laborers. And how we will avoid moral hazard if we increase the strength of the “safety net” and there’s nothing for a large percentage of the population to do. They’re not all going to be Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers. Those jobs will be automated.

At the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Williams and Dave Trabert propose that the solution to New York State’s and Illinois’s fiscal problems is to cut those state’s per capita spending to that of Texas, second only to Florida as the lowest spending of any state. Here’s the conclusion of their op-ed:

Taking the scalpel to state agency budgets will create angst for governors, lawmakers and the lobbyists hired to defend unnecessary spending. But policy makers have a responsibility to make the most effective use of taxpayer money. Congress, likewise, should understand that bailing out profligate state and local governments will only ensure more of this bad behavior in the future.

I wish they gave some hints about how they think that might be accomplished. In Illinois’s case do they propose cutting public pensions? That would take a constitutional amendment that lawmakers are extremely reluctant to introduce. Do they propose not making interest payments on Illinois’s public debt? Cutting education spending? Illinois already has one of the lowest state contributions to education of any state. Most education spending is by local governments. Cutting back on highway spending? Any truck driver who’s ever driven in Illinois will tell you that Illinois’s roads are a mess. That’s completely obvious when you drive from Illinois to Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, or Missouri. You don’t need signs to tell you you’ve Illinois. You can tell by the condition of the roads. They would need to do most of those things to meet the targets the authors of the op-ed are setting.

I’m not defending Illinois’s situation and I certainly don’t believe Illinois or New York should receive a federal bailout without paying a steep price, going into some sort of receivership. Which, of course, won’t happen. I’m just pointing out the realities. Decades of mismanagement by Illinois’s elected officials have dug a hole from which it is probably no longer possible for the state to escape. It’s far more likely that Illinois’s condition will continue to deteriorate than that the steps to remedy the situation will be taken.

I’ll close this post with a couple of stories I’ve told in the past. One is the remark of a German foreign minister about the NATO allies’ free riding on their obligations. The politicians know what needs to be done. They just don’t know how to keep their jobs if they do it.

The second is an old joke about a tourist lost in backwoods Maine who drives up to a general store in the middle of nowhere and asks for directions. After a bit of chewing the Mainester says, “You cahn’t get they-ah from he-ah”.

That’s our problem. There is no pain-free or likely path to fiscal soundness for Illinois. We can’t get there from here.

Right now we’re being deluged with TV spots for and against Gov. Pritzker’s so-called “Fair Tax” amendment. I don’t know whether it will pass but I do know that the case the governor is making is specious. The spots in favor of the amendment make the point is it fair for the rest of us to be paying the same tax rate as billionaires. 17 billionaires live in Illinois. 17! I wouldn’t be a bit surprise, should the amendment pass, that the number would decline to one: J. B. Pritzker, who would abandon the state as soon as his term of office ends.

The thesis of Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column is stated in her opening paragraph:

Everyone’s insane now. I mean everyone in Washington. The great challenge of the era is to maintain your intellectual poise under pressure. Washington this week looked like a vast system fail.

She’s only just noticed this? I think that Washington has been a “vast system fail” at least since 9/11 and possibly for long before that. I don’t have direct memories of its entire history but maybe it’s been a failure since the beginning.

The balance of her column is devoted to two examples. The first is an interview of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by Wolf Blitzer. Here’s a snippet:

Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on CNN, let it be known she won’t countenance pushback. At issue was the stalled stimulus deal. Anchor Wolf Blitzer noted that millions have lost their jobs, can’t pay the rent. Members of the speaker’s own caucus want a deal—why not accept the president’s $1.8 trillion offer?

Mrs. Pelosi went from zero to 60 in a nanosecond: “What I say to you is I don’t know why you’re always an apologist, and many of your colleagues, apologists for the Republican position.” “Do you realize” the GOP bill is inadequate, she demanded. “Do you have any idea . . .?”

What about Democrats who want a deal? “They have no idea of the particulars. They have no idea of what the language is here. . . . You’re the apologist for Obama. Excuse me. God forbid. Thank God for Barack Obama.”

That’s a theme very common among progressives with which I am familiar. If you’re insufficiently and uncritically acquiescent to their views, you must be a closeted Republican. That is a fallacy known as the tertium non datur, characteristic of the shallow or the fanatical. Maybe that trope is equally common among conservatives and I just haven’t noticed it. I’m not so sure. That progressives are looking for heretics while conservatives are looking for converts rings true to me.

I think that Ms. Noonan calls this about right:

It was bonkers. To watch was to witness, uncomfortably, the defensive aggression of an official who goes through life each day not being challenged nearly enough.

The other example was from the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett:

The Barrett hearings were almost as strange. They were, as usual, not really about her and her views but the senators and theirs. But it seemed to me that slightly more than usual they treated her like a piece of furniture. There were bizarre questions. From Mazie Hirono of Hawaii: “Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature?” No, Judge Barrett said. Ms. Hirono says she asks this of all nominees, but it would have been nice if she’d said it with a hint of doubt.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse delivered a Rachel Maddow-style monologue on “dark money.” His data board linking “phony front groups” was wonderfully John Nash-like. The not-funny part, the sadness of it, actually, is that you could do a mirror-image chart of Democratic activism and money surrounding court nominees, and it would have been a public service if he had.

Whether those opposing her confirmation or those supporting it, they were unfailingly condescending. Once again, these are people who have received so much deference for so long they think they’re entitled to it. She concludes:

Guys, did you not notice the immediate recall with which she summoned, and the depth with which she analyzed, the history of American jurisprudence? Say thank you, God, and move on.

Leadership of all three branches of government is just full of malignant narcissists. God help us.

Here’s a development that caught my eye. Some researchers have announced that they have developed a material with superconductive properties at 59°F. That’s not exactly room temperature but it’s a lot closer than the supercold temperatures previously required. From Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech:

The search for a truly room-temperature superconducting material has been one of the great Holy Grails in engineering and physics. The ability to move electricity from Point A to B with zero resistance and hence no losses would be a game-changer for human civilization. Unfortunately, until today, every known superconductor still required very cold temperatures. Today, scientists announced they’ve achieved superconducting at 59 degrees Fahrenheit/15 Celsius. While this is still a bit chilly, you can hit 59F in a well air-conditioned building. This is a genuine breakthrough, but it doesn’t immediately clear the path towards easy deployment of the technology.

At extremely low temperatures, the behavior of electrons through a material changes. At temperatures approaching absolute zero, electrons passing through a material form what are known as Cooper pairs. Normally, single electrons essentially ping-pong through the ionic lattice of the material they are passing through. Each time an electron collides with an ion in the lattice, it loses a tiny amount of energy. This loss is what we call resistance. When cooled to a low enough temperature, electrons behave dramatically differently. Cooper pairs behave like a superfluid, meaning they can flow through material without any underlying energy loss. Tests have demonstrated that current stored inside a superconductor will remain there for as long as the material remains in a superconductive state with zero loss of energy.

There are a couple of glitches in this finding. For one thing the researchers don’t know why it works. The lack of a good explanation for it is a bit of an impediment.

The second is that it they only see the effect at 2.5M atmospheres of pressure. That’s a lot of pressure. Pressure that high prohibits practical deployment of the solution.

Nevertheless, this is an important discovery which may lead to the much-desired room temperature normal pressure superconductors. Those would make energy transmission and storage much more efficient, paving the way for making some green dreams possible.

I didn’t want to let Jason L. Riley’s Wall Street Journal column on Amazon’s reluctance to host Shelby Steele’s documentary on the death of Michael Brown (remember Ferguson?) get away without comment:

In an interview this week, Mr. Steele, who is based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explained the significance of Brown’s death and what it tells us about race relations today. “Michael Brown represented, even more so than Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and others, the distortion of truth, of reality,” he said. Mr. Steele added that when it comes to racial controversies, liberals have developed what he calls a “poetic truth,” which may be at complete odds with objective truth but nevertheless helps them advance a desirable narrative. In the case of Michael Brown, reality was turned on its head.

“It was almost absolute,” Mr. Steele said. “The language—he was ‘executed,’ he was ‘assassinated,’ ‘hands up, don’t shoot’—it was a stunning example of poetic truth, of the lies that a society can entertain in pursuit of power.” Despite ample forensic evidence, the grand-jury reports and the multiple Justice Department investigations clearing the police officer of any wrongdoing, “there are blacks today, right now in Ferguson, as I point out in the film, who still truly believe that Michael Brown was killed out of racial animus,” he said. “In a microcosm, that’s where race relations are today. The truth has no chance. It’s smothered by the politics of victimization.”

So, here’s my question. Is Amazon’s reluctance to stream the documentary on Amazon Prime because it is a lie, because it is the truth, or because Amazon’s management does not want the company to be laid open to negative commentary on social media? I think the answer is important.

I wish I were a optimistic as Dr. Steele:

Yet Mr. Steele sees a better future, and the interviews highlighted in “What Killed Michael Brown?” help to explain his optimism. One of the film’s strong suits is showcasing the words and deeds of everyday community leaders in places like Ferguson, St. Louis and Chicago. These people are far more focused on black self-development than on badgering whites or blaming society for problems in poor black communities. They understand and accept objective truth but mostly toil in obscurity while liberal billionaires cut million-dollar checks to subsidize Black Lives Matter activism and antiracism gibberish from “woke” academics.

“It’s easy to say, ‘The white man, the white man,’ and point the finger,” says a pastor in the film whose church is located in one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. “In reality, we have to take a very close look at ourselves.” His focus is on “the transformation of the person. And we’re telling them, hey, educationally, you gotta get it together. Economically, you gotta get it together. Family and spiritually, you gotta get it together. And you have to take responsibility.”

It’s a lot easier to get people’s votes by telling them that all of their problems are due to somebody or something else than by telling them that their problems can’t be solved without their changing their own behavior. And I suspect that the entirety of the objectives of “Critical Race Theory” are money and power and, even if we were to do everything that its advocates propose, it would not improve the lives of those who are being injured by “systemic racism” materially.

At The Nation Elie Mystal declaims that there is “only one solution to the Amy Coney Barrett”:

It’s essential to remember that the reason Republicans have long sought to control the courts is that they serve as an antidemocratic check on the liberal agenda—and not just for an election cycle but for a whole generation. There’s not a single Democratic law or program that a court controlled 6-3 by conservative justices cannot frustrate or block. A Republican-appointed court will smack down voting rights legislation, gun reform legislation, climate change protections, LGBTQ rights, and abortion rights. It will nullify the Affordable Care Act and block the merest whiff of a public option or Medicare for All. Republicans wanted the court as a hedge against their waning popular support, and now they have it.

The obvious—and only—solution to this Republican power grab is for Democrats to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Reflecting on the original purpose of the Supreme Court might help to illuminate the situation. It was deliberately constructed as the least democratic and least political of the three branches of government. It should be entirely technocratic in the sense that its job is to interpret the law, ensuring that lower courts have interpreted it properly or determine that the law doesn’t address the issue brought before it at all. That’s how it is in a common law system. The laws as written and interpreted historically sometimes just don’t apply. It’s the legislature’s job to “do justice”, to make laws, and to advance political policy.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is how to guarantee that a progressive minority can advance its agenda using the least democratic branch of government by politicizing it more to your liking, Mr. Mystal is quite right. But, if your objective is depoliticizing the SCOTUS, I think there are some other prospective solutions.

First and foremost, the Congress could start doing its own damned job or have its its members thrown out of office for avoiding that but I guess that’s too much to ask.

Another prospective solution is the Congress could act under its powers under Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution and limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Court. The controversial cases that have created the furor are all appeals to the best of my ability to determine.

The final solution to the problem is amending the Constitution to abolish the Supreme Court. If it is only an unelected and undemocratic legislature, it has no reason to exist.

Enlarging the Court will solve nothing. Permanent majorities are a fantasy. Having enlarged the Court once, it will be done again and again.