Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“Said to be around the size of three buses, the balloon flew over Canada and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands before being spotted in the continental United States. It then made its way eastward, being spotted across the country before it was shot down on the East Coast on Saturday afternoon.”
“Colorado set a new precedent for drug policy reform in November, when its voters approved a ballot initiative that decriminalizes a wide range of conduct related to consuming five natural psychedelics.
Proposition 122 also authorizes state-licensed “healing centers” where adults 21 or older can obtain and use psychedelics. It represents the broadest loosening of legal restrictions on psychedelics the United States has ever seen.”
“The Biden administration’s rush to engage in more centrally planned industrial policy, particularly when it comes to the production of semiconductor chips and other high-tech manufacturing, has always been framed as an attempt to counter China.”
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“To defeat China, the argument goes, the U.S. must adopt the tactics of the Chinese Communist Party, at least when it comes to high-end manufacturing.
How’s that going on the far side of the Pacific? Not so great, actually.
“China is pausing massive investments aimed at building a chip industry to compete with the U.S.,” Bloomberg reported last week. “Top officials are discussing ways to move away from costly subsidies that have so far borne little fruit and encouraged both graft and American sanctions, people familiar with the matter said.””
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“China might be relatively new to this game, but industrial policy has a long, mostly ugly history in other parts of the world—including right here in the U.S.—and there’s little reason to think that this time will be different.
China’s shift away from industrial policy seems to be driven, according to Bloomberg, by the strain that COVID-19 has put on the country’s economy and fiscal policies rather than by any sudden rediscovery of the benefits of free markets. Even so, there’s a certain irony to the Chinese government changing course just months after U.S. policy makers decided that we had to copy China in order to compete with it.”
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“The Bloomberg report says Xi is becoming frustrated about how tens of billions of dollars dumped into the semiconductor industry in recent years haven’t produced major breakthroughs that allow the country’s domestic chipmakers, like the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, to compete with the world’s top producers.
America’s foray into high-tech industrial policy seems to be on the same trajectory. The New York Times, for example, reported last week that “new chip factories would take years to build and might not be able to offer the industry’s most advanced manufacturing technology when they begin operations.” Meanwhile, everything from federal permitting requirements to America’s broken immigration system is creating huge hurdles for the semiconductor manufacturers that are planning to expand their capacity in the United States.”
“New York has some of the most restrictive local zoning regimes in the country, resulting in rock-bottom rates of housing construction and sky-high prices.
Now, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul is proposing to fix this sad status quo by allowing developers to bypass city and town zoning codes altogether and get their housing projects approved directly by a fast-tracked state process.
“Through zoning, local communities hold enormous power to block growth,” said Hochul in her annual State of the State address yesterday. “People want to live here, but local decisions to limit growth mean they cannot. Local governments can and should make different choices.””
“Some people live together by choice. Others share space out of necessity. Lack of affordable housing forces many families to adjust, but the zoning police remain rigid in Cobb County, Georgia.
Even during a nationwide housing crisis, code enforcers northwest of Atlanta continue to enforce a narrow vision of suburbia. One rule limits overnight parking based on property size. Families can have one car for every 390 square feet of living space, which effectively prevents more than two vehicle owners from living together in a 1,000-square-foot unit.
Teen drivers are out of luck. So are adult children, college students, mothers-in-law, and any guest who stays longer than one week. The city does not concern itself with individual circumstances, nor does it care if vehicles remain in good condition with current tags. It counts newer models and clunkers the same.”
“Republicans have long insisted that not only did Hunter use his father’s name to secure foreign business deals for himself but that Joe Biden was in on the game. There is evidence for the former, and not for the latter. Regardless, the first people lawmakers might want to question are those intimately involved with Hunter Biden’s business dealings, right?
Apparently not. First up, per a Politico report, are three former Twitter employees.
Comer has invited former Twitter Deputy General Counsel James Baker, former Global Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, and former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde to the hearing to testify about Twitter’s decision to temporarily block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden in 2020.
That decision was recently dissected at length in the Twitter Files, a series of reports based on internal documents that Twitter CEO Elon Musk has shared with a small group of journalists. The documents reveal Twitter executives engaged in ample deliberation and debate about how to handle the story, primed by warnings from the (Trump-era) Justice Department about the possibility of fake news being spread by foreign adversaries.
It’s pretty clear that Twitter’s decision to suppress the story—ultimately a wrong decision, albeit also a very short-lived one—was very much a product of people trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016. Authorities were on high alert—perhaps to the point of paranoia—about foreign propaganda that might influence the 2020 electorate. And tech companies, having just lived through years of being excoriated for letting foreign propaganda spread in 2016, were extra sensitive to allegations that they might let it happen again.
But Republicans seem to desperately want there to be more to this story. For it to serve as a smoking gun against Joe Biden, tech companies, or both. For it to be a tidy explanation as to why Biden won in 2020.”
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“Twitter made the wrong call with the story, yes. But it did so temporarily, with much deliberation, influenced by authorities in the Trump administration, and to the effect that the Hunter Biden story got even more attention. The idea that Joe Biden would have lost the election had this not happened is crazy. And the idea that Biden himself helped cover it up because he’s hiding something about his own business dealings lacks any evidence.
But these narratives are also very beneficial to Biden’s enemies. And Republicans seem determined to wring every last bit of political capital possible out of them.
Once again we’re reminded that the people in power—no matter which side that is—are more focused on making excuses for their own shortcomings and slinging mud at the other side than actually doing the hard work of becoming a faction more Americans can get behind.”
“As part of the new rules package approved by House Republicans this week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) will now be required to score legislation on projected macroeconomic effects—including inflation.
That’s a welcome change that will provide more information to lawmakers and the general public about the impact of spending bills.”
“Two-party political systems on their best days are pendulums—we vote for zig when the other side zags too far, often without getting too hung up on the details. This is indeed what brought us George Santos: Voters in the suburbs of New York City were fed up with crime, inflation, and education policy and sought to punish the locally dominant Democrats. That desire overwhelmed any motivation to learn about let alone act upon the preelection reporting from the local North Shore Leader newspaper that Santos was lying about his real estate holdings and much besides, to the point where the paper editorialized that “he’s most likely just a fabulist—a fake.”
That pendulum-swing inattention becomes actively corrupted every time an election is cast as a potentially apocalyptic showdown against forces that threaten to bring down the entire country. Who’s got time for political niceties (like not making crazy things up) when the very future of the republic is at stake? That logic helped bring us one of the wildest liars in U.S. political history, Donald Trump. And it also brought us his serially fabulist successor, Joe Biden.”
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“Whataboutism does have the honest-to-goodness virtue of pointing out hypocritical imbalances of treatment, especially by allegedly neutral institutions, of political actors based on their partisan or ideological status rather than on the behavior being critiqued. But for people locked into a must-win electoral mindset, it defaults to pure deflection. How can you criticize our guy when you didn’t criticize their guy? How can you bust Biden’s chops on repeatedly saying untrue things without immediately producing a scorecard showing that his predecessor was worse?
At the risk of overstating the obvious, this is not a recipe for reducing the amount of venal and possibly even criminal dishonesty among elected officials. Whataboutism could be used in a partisan way for good—like, “Hey, that bad behavior on the other side; is anyone on our side doing something similar? If so, we should knock it off.” But there’s no reason to expect politicians to take that path until the rest of us show them the door.”
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“But we also need to solve the problems of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which means not excusing or minimizing their lies just because the other guy is worse, and maintaining the citizen self-respect not to succumb to political trench warfare. Not only do your political hatreds pay for an entire unproductive economic sector, they also enable awful people to get away with their past malfeasance in the improbable name of saving America. Want politicians to stop lying to you? Stop letting them.”
“Border crossings by Cuban migrants have reached an all-time high: Over 220,000 Cubans attempted to cross the southern border illegally from December 2021 to December 2022, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Migrants are also making their way to the U.S. by sea. Since October, the Coast Guard has intercepted 3,700 Cubans at sea, already more than half than were intercepted in the previous 11 months.
For over six years, Cubans on the island could not apply for asylum or exit visas at the U.S. embassy in Havana after the Trump administration closed the embassy’s visa operations. This forced Cubans to travel to Guyana, one of the few countries Cubans are allowed to visit, to apply for asylum, an expensive and inaccessible process for many on the island. Cubans would no longer be automatically allowed to stay and pursue residency if they reached U.S. territory, as was the case before the Obama administration ended the “Wet-Foot, Dry-Foot” policy in 2017. So the suspension of visa services in Havana drove many to risk the voyage across the Straits of Florida or through Central America to the southern border, usually with the help of smugglers.
An increased number of Haitians have also fled their country, attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border amid ongoing gang violence, disease outbreaks, and political instability that has worsened in recent months. The limited opportunities for requesting asylum beyond the border and new restrictions on Haitian immigration in countries like Brazil and Chile have prompted many to take the risks as well.”
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“In response to this recent increase in migrant arrivals, Biden announced..that Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans would no longer be exempted from expulsion under Title 42. Up to 30,000 unauthorized migrants from these countries will be sent back to Mexico every month once the policy takes effect. Asylum claims at the southern border will also be limited.
The administration also announced new pathways for asylum, allowing Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants to apply for asylum if they promise to work for two years and have a U.S.-based sponsor who can support them during that period, claiming it will provide for “orderly migration” for migrants seeking to come to the United States. The State Department has reopened visa services in Havana to help facilitate this new asylum process.”
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“Regardless of the changes and the dangers that accompany the treacherous journey, many of the migrants remain undeterred in their mission to reach the United States.
“I would prefer to die to reach my dream and help my family,” Jeiler del Toro Diaz, a Cuban migrant who came ashore in Key Largo on Tuesday, told The Miami Herald. “The situation in Cuba is not very good.””
“Previously, all drugs in development were required to undergo animal studies before being tested in human trials. Now, drug companies will still have the option to start testing experimental drugs on animals, but they won’t have to.
This doesn’t mean that drug companies will start going straight to testing drug toxicity on humans, but that they may rely on alternative methods to animal testing. Language in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act now states that tests may “include animal tests, or non-animal or human biology-based tests methods, such as cell-based assays, micro physiological systems, or bioprinted or computer models.”
These days, “there are a slew of other methods that drugmakers employ to assess new medications and treatments, such as computer modeling and ‘organs on a chip,’ thumb-sized microchips that can mimic how organs’ function are affected by pharmaceuticals,” notes NPR.”