“Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma passed a bill on Thursday that would ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, typically around six weeks into pregnancy and before many even know they are pregnant.
The Oklahoma Heartbeat Act will take immediate effect as soon as Gov. Kevin Stitt signs the bill, which is expected as early as Friday. Stitt has committed to signing any anti-abortion legislation that comes across his desk and has previously described himself as America’s “most pro-life governor.”
Earlier this month, Oklahoma enacted a different bill that nearly totally bans abortion except in cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Under that bill, anyone who performs an abortion would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines. It will take effect in August unless barred by the courts.
The new bill, which was passed without debate or any questions allowed, is modeled after a Texas law that went into effect last year. It has exceptions for cases where the pregnant person’s life is endangered, but not for cases of rape, incest, or fetal conditions that make life unsustainable after birth. It also imposes additional reporting requirements on physicians and allows private individuals to seek civil penalties, including at least $10,000 in damages, against anyone who aids in or performs an abortion after the six-week term. That’s designed to circumvent current legal limitations on the government’s ability to go after abortion providers.
“It’s identical to the bill that was enacted by the Texas Legislature last year, and that bill has passed muster with the United States Supreme Court,” Tony Lauinger, the chairman of Oklahomans for Life, told the AP. (The Supreme Court, however, never held a full hearing on the bill and merely dismissed a case challenging the bill in a brief order without explaining its reasoning.)”
“After a month of intense civilian-led protests over Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to appoint a new council on Friday to lead the formation of an interim government. The resolution would create a coalition made up of all parties in Parliament and would remove the grip of the Rajapaksa family dynasty currently ruling the country. At issue is the country’s economic future, which is in shambles after defaulting on payments on its mountain of foreign loans — estimated to be worth $50 billion — for the first time since the country gained independence from the British in 1948.
Signs of Sri Lanka’s impending economic crisis became increasingly apparent over the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic as food prices soared and power blackouts increased in frequency. Sri Lanka currently has about $7 billion in total debt due this year.
Many attribute Sri Lanka’s economic crisis to the mishandling of its finances by successive governments through mounting foreign debt and continued infrastructure investments. The Rajapaksa administration also implemented sweeping tax cuts in 2019, slashing the value-added tax (VAT) rate — the tax applied to imports and domestic supplies — from 15 percent to 8 percent, which contributed to a decrease in the country’s revenue.”
“The implication of Philippon’s paper is as simple as it is disturbing: We should expect economic growth to slow down in the long run, and the big leaps forward of the last couple centuries may be an aberration.
This conclusion is far from certain, and it goes against decades of assumptions on how to model economic growth. But Philippon brings a lot of data to bear on his thesis, which makes some intuitive sense, and even the possibility of it being true should alarm us.”
…
“What Philippon does is attempt to assess whether TFP actually does, in practice, grow exponentially. He first looks at two datasets covering TFP in the US and finds, instead, linear growth since World War II: TFP does not increase by a set percentage each year, but a set amount (0.0245 points, if you’re curious) each year. It doesn’t compound; it just gradually, steadily grows. You’re getting $2 a year, not 2 percent of an ever-increasing pile.
Extending the data back to 1890, he finds linear growth, but with a break: slower growth from 1890 to 1933, and faster after 1933, but steady and non-exponential in each period. He then extends the analysis to 23 relatively wealthy countries, from Japan to Germany to Spain. A linear model fits better here, too.”
…
“The US and other rich countries have experienced a well-documented decline in productivity growth, especially TFP growth, since 2004 or so. Philippon’s findings could help explain why that is. The slowdown is only there if you assume TFP should be growing exponentially. If you assume mere linear growth, it’s not that things have gotten worse in recent decades. It’s just that they were never that good.
That’s an alarming conclusion, mostly because from the standpoint of human history, the past few centuries have been very good. Before the 17th to 18th century or so, human economies grew extremely slowly. Agriculture showed little productivity growth, meaning there was a fixed population that farming societies could support. Living standards varied mostly based on how many people were around; when the population suddenly shrank (as in the Black Death in Europe) people grew richer on a per capita basis, and when the population swelled the opposite occurred. This is known as the “Malthusian trap.”
“Until about 1800, the vast bulk of people on this planet were poor,” Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern, once noted. “And when I say poor, I mean they were on the brink of physical starvation for most of their lives.”
That pattern started to break down in the 17th through 19th centuries, a process sometimes shorthanded as the “Industrial Revolution,” but including a wide variety of cultural, scientific, technological, and economic changes. Long story short: productivity sustainably grew for the first time in human history. And it grew, by historical standards, quite rapidly, such that a far lower share of people alive in 2022 are on the brink of starvation than were in 1800, even though the population needing food has never been greater.”
“Making chips is an intricate process, but building a factory that can do this type of manufacturing is even more complicated. For one thing, fabs can’t go just anywhere. They need to be close to a reliable source of electricity, since they can use as much energy as 50,000 homes in a single year (they release a lot of carbon emissions, too). These factories also need to be near a large body of water, which they use to clean and cool down their equipment, which, in turn, produces wastewater that needs to be treated. And it’s better if they’re not particularly close to any airports or geological fault lines; seismic activity can disrupt the incredibly precise machinery they use.
Then there’s the matter of the supply chain. Beyond the fab, making a chip can involve 70 different border crossings and more than 1,000 steps, and a single disruption in one country or during a particular step can throw the entire process off course. That’s because there are usually very few, if any, other options for supplies when something goes wrong. For example, just one company in the Netherlands, ASML, makes the specialized, $200 million lithography tools that many advanced chip fabs rely on. And just two firms, both based in Ukraine, supply about half of the specialized neon gas that fabs throughout the world use to control these lasers. Of course, securing all this equipment has gotten even more difficult during the pandemic.”
…
“concern is based, in part, on fears that China may invade Taiwan at some point and attempt to take control of its chip-manufacturing capacity. But there are other reasons to be worried about the state of US semiconductors. The US doesn’t currently make very many of the most basic, or legacy, chips, which are typically produced where they can be made for less. These are the chips that became unavailable during the pandemic, and that made lots of technology hard to find and drove up car prices. The US will also need to manufacture more chips to maintain its hold on the auto industry, since EVs will likely need at least twice as many chips as their gas-powered counterparts do.”
“The argument here is not about whether nurses should be held accountable for their errors; everyone I spoke with about Vaught’s case agrees she bears responsibility for her actions and should face consequences. The real issue is that criminalizing a nurse’s error lets hospitals off the hook for the systemic changes that would improve patient safety.
“Almost no mistakes happen in a hospital by just one person,” said Gatter. Systems exist to prevent medical errors, he said. If those systems don’t work or exist only on paper, errors will happen.
In this case, the system failures were clear: During an unannounced visit to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in late 2018, federal investigators found multiple deficiencies, some of which placed patients at “serious and immediate threat,” according to the 105-page memo documenting the details. For example, hospital policies didn’t require that a second nurse sign off on the use of a highly dangerous medication like vecuronium, nor did it require that patients receiving sedatives be hooked up to a heart and lung monitor. Focusing the blame on one nurse’s error shifts the attention away from those deficiencies.
“I’m quite concerned that this nurse is getting thrown under the bus, and in the hubbub of giving her a jail sentence, that the system itself will escape close examination,” said Gatter.
Even if a nurse were solely responsible for a medical error resulting in patient harm, the way to prevent that nurse from causing further harm is to revoke their license, said Gatter. It’s much harder to explain how punishing a nurse with jail time further prevents them from endangering others.
However, it’s easy to see how that type of punishment can itself create and compound safety risks, he said.
That’s because severely punishing individuals for systemic problems has a chilling effect on others’ willingness to report mistakes.”
…
“Less transparency in error reporting also means hospitals have fewer opportunities to correct big problems. That means faulty systems stay in place, which translates into more vulnerability and stress for health care providers and less safety for patients.”
…
“The consequences for professional malpractice should ideally deter wrongdoing without discouraging people from entering the profession altogether — but finding that balance is challenging.”
…
“American nursing was under enormous strain well before the pandemic. But with the US population aging, surging retirements among bedside nurses and nurse educators, and nurse staffing levels reduced ever lower to contain costs, the pandemic has tipped parts of the country into a full-on nursing shortage.
The last thing the profession needs is another reason for nurses to leave jobs providing direct patient care, but that’s exactly the effect the Vaught ruling is having”
“The Supreme Court, in an increasingly familiar development, handed a victory to a Christian conservative organization on Monday. The Court’s decision in Shurtleff v. Boston establishes that this organization, Camp Constitution, should have been allowed to fly a Christian-identified flag from a flagpole outside Boston’s city hall.
But Shurtleff is unlike several other high-profile victories for religious conservatives that the Court has handed down in recent years because the justices did not need to remake existing law in order to reach this result. The decision was unanimous (although the justices split somewhat regarding why the plaintiffs in this case should prevail), with liberal Justice Stephen Breyer writing the majority opinion.
The case involves three flagpoles standing outside of Boston’s city hall. The first flagpole displays the US flag, with a smaller flag honoring prisoners of war and missing service members below it. The second pole features the Massachusetts state flag. And the third typically — but not always — displays the city’s own flag.
This third flagpole, and the city’s practice of sometimes allowing outside groups to display a flag of their choice from it, is the centerpiece of Shurtleff. Since at least 2005, the city has permitted outside groups to hold flag-raising ceremonies on the plaza during which they can raise a flag of their choosing on the third flagpole.
At various times, the third flagpole has displayed the flags of many nations, including Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Italy, Mexico, and Turkey. It has displayed the rainbow LGBTQ pride flag, a flag commemorating the Battle of Bunker Hill, and a flag honoring Malcolm X.
But when Harold Shurtleff, head of an organization called Camp Constitution, asked to fly a flag associated with the Christian faith, the city refused — claiming that displaying such a flag could be interpreted as “an endorsement by the city of a particular religion,” in violation of “separation of church and state or the [C]onstitution.”
Justice Breyer’s majority opinion concludes that the city erred. Relying on a bevy of cases establishing that the government typically cannot discriminate against a particular viewpoint, Breyer notes that “Boston concedes that it denied Shurtleff’s request solely because the Christian flag he asked to raise ‘promot[ed] a specific religion.’” Under the facts of this case, that’s a form of viewpoint discrimination and it’s not allowed.
While it’s notable that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh each wrote separate opinions indicating that they are eager to let government get cozy with religion, and they have two opportunities to do so this term, this case is a straightforward decision that follows current law — in short, nothing remarkable.”
…
“The general rule in free speech cases is that the government may not discriminate against any particular viewpoint. Boston could not, for example, have a rule that Democrats are allowed to gather in the city hall plaza but not Republicans. Or that people who support restrictive immigration policies may do so, but not people who oppose them.
But there’s an exception to this general rule when the government speaks in its own voice. That is, the government is allowed to express its own opinion on a subject without also providing a forum for dissenting voices. If a public school principal tells her students to “say no to drugs,” she’s not required to give equal time to the grungy guy in the junior class who sells weed out of his 1997 Subaru Legacy.
The primary question in Shurtleff is whether, when Boston’s city government permitted a wide range of private groups — but not Camp Constitution — to display a flag of their choice outside of city hall, these flags represented the city’s speech or the private groups’ speech. Again, if the flags were a form of government speech, then Boston is allowed to exclude viewpoints it does not share.
But the Court concluded that the city did not use the third flagpole to express its own views, and that it effectively created “a forum for the expression of private speakers’ views.” As Breyer notes, Boston does not appear to have made any effort whatsoever to control which flags are displayed from this flagpole until it denied Shurtleff’s request to fly a Christian flag.”
“Amid the many extraordinary revelations at the January 6 committee’s first primetime hearing Thursday, one stood out for its sheer depravity: that during the assault, when rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” in the halls of the Capitol, President Donald Trump suggested that the mob really ought to execute his vice president.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he said, per a committee source. “[Mike Pence] deserves it.”
Endorsing violence is hardly new for Trump; it’s something he’s done repeatedly, often in an allegedly joking tone. But the reported comment from January 6 is qualitatively worse given the context: coming both amid an actual violent attack he helped stoke and one he did little to halt. The committee found that the president took no steps to defend the Capitol building, failing to call in the National Guard, or even speak to his secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security.
While he was de facto permitting the mob’s rampage, he was privately cheering the most violent stated objective of people he acknowledged as “our supporters.””
…
“when a leader whips up a mob to attack democracy with the goal of maintaining his grip on power in defiance of democratic order, then privately refuses to stop them while endorsing the murderous aims of people he claims as his own supporters, it’s hard to see him as anything but a leader of a violent anti-democratic movement with important parallels to interwar fascism.
This doesn’t prove that fascism is, in all respects, a perfect analogy for the Trump presidency. Yet when it comes to analyzing January 6, both Trump’s behavior and the broader GOP response to the event, [the] hearing proved that the analogy can be not only apt but illuminating.”
…
“Events like the 1922 March on Rome or 1923 Beer Hall Putsch help us understand the way in which attempts to forcefully seize power — even failed ones like the Putsch — can play a role in the rise of radical far-right movements. They help us understand the clarifying and organizing power of violence, the way in which banding together to hurt others can help solidify dangerous political tendencies.
And it helps us understand the potential for violence to recur, especially given the mainstream Republican Party’s continued whitewashing of January 6.
One of the defining elements of the interwar fascist ascendancy is the complicity of conservative elites — their belief that they could manipulate fascist movements for their own ends, empowering these movements while remaining in the driver’s seat. This is precisely how the mainstream Republican Party has approached Trump, even after a violent attempt to seize power exposed just how far he’s willing to go to hold power.”