RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/08/16/bill-de-blasio-and-the-decline-of-new-york-city/#slide-1

The next mayor will have to contend with a legacy of wreckage

New York City is shrinking. Or rather: It was shrinking. Quite a while ago. Then it started to grow. Then it grew dramatically. But after eight years of Bill de Blasio as mayor, it is contracting once again, as the economic and population surge that took the city from the slough of despond to new heights over the course of four decades has been reversed. This is not the result of COVID. It is the result of a disastrous mayoralty and the ideas, prejudices, and idiocies that have animated it. De Blasio’s legacy as he prepares to leave office is just that: a city in decline.

Bill de Blasio has governed with a potent mix of old and new — the bad old and the horrible new. He has pushed wretched new ideas that have blighted the education system and poisoned the streetscape. And he has revivified incompetent policies driven by ideological priors — ideas so long discredited that their failure had been forgotten and had to be experienced yet again by young New Yorkers who weren’t alive when the city was nearly destroyed by them and were therefore unable to heed the warnings of those of us who did live through their nightmarish implementation.

To tell the story of de Blasio’s New York, we need to go back to the city’s great devastation.

In 1970, 7.9 million people lived in New York City. Ten years later, that number had dropped by a staggering 800,000. Over the course of the ’70s, residents voted with their feet and got the hell out of Dodge — fleeing an increasingly lawless and chaotic municipality whose feckless authorities stood by and let the place fester and rot.

This unprecedented depopulation was the consequence of a budgetary free fall that led the city to the verge of bankruptcy in 1975 — a managerial catastrophe that wreaked havoc on garbage collection, public safety, schooling, even on the grass in its parks. Its leaders, Nathan Glazer once quipped, stopped doing the things they knew how to do (like picking up the garbage) and started trying to do things no one knows how to do (like ending poverty). The expansion of social-welfare programs came at the expense of the prosaic quotidian tasks necessary if any city is to be livable.

Here’s just one example. In his book The Fires, Joe Flood tells the story of how Mayor John V. Lindsay (whose time in office ran from 1966 to 1973) sought to redirect city money so that he could spend it on social programs. He hired the RAND Corporation to study the city’s fire department: “NYC-RAND’s goal was nothing less than a new way of administering cities: use the mathematical brilliance of the computer modelers and systems analysts who had revolutionized military strategy to turn Gotham’s corrupt, insular and unresponsive bureaucracy into a streamlined, non-partisan technocracy.”

Using RAND’s efficiency experts and their findings as fodder and justification, Lindsay’s people closed dozens of fire stations because of supposed redundancies. Meanwhile, the department’s inspectors stopped ensuring the good working order of the city’s hydrants. The result: Enormous swaths of the Bronx burned down in the 1970s because there were no nearby fire trucks to put out the fires and no water in the hydrants when they did show up.

The staggeringly dark popular-culture portrayals of New York in the 1970s — Death Wish, Taxi Driver — didn’t feel excessive. They felt like documentaries. In 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, subway hijackers demand $1 million for the safe return of their hostages. “This city doesn’t have a million dollars!” shouts the mayor. It was a joke, but it was no joke.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/anthony_fauci_peaked_in_medical_school.html

Since then, his career has been a downhill trajectory into bureaucratic mediocrity and bullying.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has an impressive resume but nothing in it meant that he was qualified to be the ultimate decision-maker for a contagious disease, especially one that his actions helped create. It’s high time his wings are clipped before more Americans die.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is brilliant. At least according to his fawning Wikipedia entry, which says he graduated number one in his medical school class at Cornell, and then did two years of internal medicine residency at their prestigious hospital, following which he was invited to train and work at the NIH (unfairly, in my opinion, called a yellow beret.)

Understanding Fauci’s career there requires some backstory. The U.S. Public Health Service (“USPHS”) evolved from the medical branch of the Coast Guard. Its head, called the Surgeon General of the United States, is technically a vice-admiral in the Coast Guard. Important people serving in various parts of the USPHS (NIH, CDC, FDA) are officers, for they are in one of eight “uniform services” of the US government. The NIH, one subsidiary, does specialized medical research and, in some cases, provides healthcare for patients who are of research interest.

Before 1973, all male physicians, regardless of age, served in one of the uniform services of the federal government. Most were drafted into the Army, with a smaller number into the other armed forces. However, physicians could fulfill their Selective Service obligations by joining the NIH. Understandably these positions were very highly sought after in the late 60s, during the Vietnam war. Only the top 1% were invited to join. A slot at the NIH ordinarily led to a career in research or in medical academia. Many, like Tony, trained and then stayed at NIH for their careers.

I treated gonorrhea in Vietnam for the U.S. Army. Tony did a fellowship in Immunology at the NIH. Immunology is a subspecialty of internal medicine dealing with autoimmune diseases like systemic lupus; allergic disorders like asthma; and in Tony’s case, vaccine development.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texas-governor-orders-review-of-whether-gender-transition-surgery-constitutes-child-abuse/

Texas governor Greg Abbott on Friday directed the state Department of Family Protective Services to issue a determination on whether gender-transition surgery on children constitutes child abuse.

“Subjecting a child to genital mutilation through reassignment surgery creates a ‘genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child,’” Abbott wrote in a letter to the department. “This broad definition of ‘abuse’ should cover a surgical procedure that will sterilize the child, such as orchiectomy or hysterectomy, or remove otherwise healthy body parts, such as penectomy or mastectomy. Indeed, Texas already outlaws female genital mutilation of a child, and presumably that also constitutes child abuse.”

Abbott’s directive comes after federal judges temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning gender-transition procedures for minors late last month.

The law, which was the first of its kind, forbids doctors from providing gender-transition hormone treatment, puberty blockers, or sex-reassignment surgery to minors. It was set to take effect on July 28.

However, U.S. District Judge Jay Moody ruled that the ACLU was likely to win its challenge against the law and that allowing the measure to take effect would hurt transgender youths currently undergoing the procedures.

The state argued that it has a legitimate interest in banning the procedures for minors; Republican attorneys general from 17 states urged the judge to uphold the ban.

Those who back the legislation say they aim to protect children from irreversible procedures they could later regret.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-joe-biden-has-done-should-be-too-much-even-for-john-roberts/

The best defense of John Roberts has always been that, rather than being weak or easily influenced, he comes from a judicial school of thought — popular among conservatives in the 1980s and before — that holds judicial restraint as its highest value. In recent years, many conservatives (including myself) have come to believe that the judicial branch has a strong role to play in enforcing the Constitution as written, as well as in policing the statutory limits that Congress has placed on the executive branch. But, before originalism took over (as it should have), this was not always the case. Indeed, insofar as conservatives were likely to criticize the Supreme Court during the middle of the last century, it was not for coming to the wrong decisions per se, but for being “activist” at the expense of the other branches. Viewed through a certain light, John Roberts’s jurisprudence can be seen as an expression of this older view. Yes, he’s sometimes willing to step in if the question is particularly obvious or the infraction particularly egregious. But, in general, he’d rather exhibit a light touch.

Until recently, it has been possible to square John Roberts’s approach to the eviction moratorium with his general approach to his job. But, as of this week, that is no longer the case. We don’t actually know what Roberts thinks of the statutory question underlying the CDC’s eviction moratorium, because he didn’t write anything explaining himself. Perhaps he thinks that the law allows for the CDC’s actions. Perhaps he thinks that it doesn’t, but that it’s not obvious enough to warrant intervention. Perhaps, like Kavanaugh, he thinks that the law does not allow for the CDC’s actions, but that the Court did not need to get involved immediately given that the order was about to expire. Whatever Roberts thinks, though, and however it intersects with his philosophy, his preference for restraint cannot survive the new position that President Biden has taken, which is to have flatly rejected the court’s opinion, and to have said publicly that, while it expects to lose, it is seeking “the ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month — at least — I hope longer.”

https://www.newsmax.com/sallypipes/healthcare-canada/2021/08/05/id/1031237/

Demonstrators in 50 cities across the country took the streets last month to demand a government takeover of America’s health system.

The Democrats who control Washington are trying to give those activists what they’re asking for, albeit in piecemeal fashion.

In recent weeks, they’ve proposed lowering Medicare’s eligibility age and adding dental, vision and hearing benefits to the entitlement. Democrats in Congress have also offered a plan to provide federally funded health coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have yet to adopt Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

This drive to put the government in charge of an ever-greater share of our healthcare system is misguided. For evidence, look no further than Canada, the country where I grew up and started my career.

Our northern neighbor’s government-run health insurance scheme saddles patients with long waits for low-quality care — when it doesn’t ration care outright.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, long delays for treatment were a fact of life for Canadians. In 2019, the median wait time for specialist care following referral from a general practitioner was nearly 21 weeks, according to the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think tank.

In 2020 — a year in which more than 1.2 million Canadians were waiting for care — the median wait for specialist care grew to 22.6 weeks. In 1993, the median wait was 9.3 weeks.

These long waits are costing lives. Between April 2019 and December 2020, more than 10,000 patients died while waiting for a specialist appointment, a procedure, a diagnostic test or a surgery, according to a recent report from the Canadian think tank SecondStreet.org. Given the dearth of government data, it’s likely that the death toll is higher still.

And there’s no way around the waits. Canada bars private health insurance for anything deemed “medically necessary” by the government. So people who want or need timelier care effectively have to leave the country.

Canadians pay dearly to wait in line. The country’s single-payer system is far from free. Fraser estimates that the average Canadian family of four pays more than C$14,400 (US$11,545) in taxes for their shoddy public insurance coverage.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/orthodox-jews-leaving-brooklyn-florida-taxes-lockdowns-school-choice-11628265034?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

What would motivate a Hasidic rabbi and his followers to leave a Brooklyn enclave where they’ve lived for generations and establish a quickly growing community in Wimauma, Fla., a semi-rural area near Tampa Bay?

The same reasons that have led to an unprecedented wave of Orthodox Jewish families moving to South Florida: education choice, low taxes and good governance. Most Orthodox families send their children to private Jewish schools because public school is simply not an option—religious instruction is as important to them as academics. But the tuition burden can be immense.

That’s why many young families up north are enticed by Florida’s robust menu of state-supported private-school scholarships, worth on average about $7,500 a year, as well as expanded benefits for children with a wide range of disabilities. These programs make private-school tuition far more affordable in Florida than in New York and New Jersey. Legislation recently signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis has made even more families eligible for these options, further fueling the migration.

Jews started moving south even before the pandemic. Figures from Florida’s Education Department show enrollment in Jewish day schools statewide grew in 2020 to 12,482 students from 10,623 in 2018. The number of such schools grew to 64 from 50 during that time. The pandemic supercharged demand for Jewish day schools in South Florida.

Rabbi Moshe Bernstein, chief financial officer of Yeshiva Toras Chaim Toras Emes in North Miami Beach, one of the largest South Florida Jewish schools with a current enrollment of more than 1,000 students, projects nearly 300 new students next year. The school will need to accelerate a planned expansion of its campus to accommodate them. Toras Emes has received so many out-of-state inquiries about admission that its website added an option in its admission drop-down menu labeled “Considering a Move To Florida?”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-much-for-fully-paid-for-congressional-budget-office-senate-infrastructure-bill-11628287619?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

One claim about the Senate’s infrastructure bill is that it would be, as the authors said, “fully paid for.” The Congressional Budget Office rudely blew apart that myth on Thursday, not that the authors seem to care.

CBO’s budget gnomes found that the $1 trillion spending bill will add $256 billion to the federal deficit over 10 years. But it’s worse than that. CBO also explained that the bill will increase the government’s contract authority by an additional $196 billion over the 2021 budget baseline. The estimate is complex, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates the mix of costs and savings will result in nearly $400 billion in deficit spending over a decade.

A couple of examples highlight the fiscal flim-flam. The bipartisan group of Senators tried to claim as “savings” some $53 billion in unemployment benefits that states won’t spend as anticipated. But CBO notes that the “lower outlays” had already been counted in its baseline and so don’t now amount to a “reduction in spending.”

CBO also didn’t credit $106 billion in supposedly unused Covid paid- and family-leave tax credits, and only a portion of what Senators claimed were $67 billion in savings from a Covid employer tax credit. Of the $210 billion of “unused” Covid funds Senators ultimately claimed they were “repurposing,” CBO gave them credit for about $21 billion.

CBO also didn’t buy the claim that spending in the bill will yield a magical return of 33% on investment, producing faster economic growth and additional tax revenue of $53 billion. Some infrastructure spending on particular projects might improve economic productivity. But $66 billion more for Amtrak and related rail projects? You’ve got to be kidding.

In a better age, the CBO numbers would have been big news and sent the Senators back for a rewrite. But in 2021, when deficits don’t matter because they’re monetized by the Federal Reserve, the report barely caused a ripple of media attention, never mind concern.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/06/americas-generals-lied-lost-wars-and-looted-the-people-they-pledged-to-serve/

Military leaders failed to properly account for their own efforts, misled the public, and then racked up cushy paychecks after the war. They deserve to be punished.

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in June that he wanted to understand “white rage,” why “thousands of people” tried “to assault this building and … overturn the Constitution of the United States of America.”

If Milley really wants to understand the “rage” of the American people he should start by asking why he and his fellow generals can’t win any wars. As a Marine Corps officer who served at the tail end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I saw firsthand the rapid ideological transformation pervading the military in the wake of these disasters in the Middle East.

Unable to win wars overseas, the military’s leaders went “woke.” Currying ideological favor is easier than trying to end insurgencies. It is also necessary if military leaders want to keep the gravy train of taxpayer funding. Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy and his devastating critique of George Bush and Barack Obama in the run-up to the 2016 election put the military-industrial complex on high alert. Trump was pushing the American right-wing away from the expensive and unending foreign interventions the military-industrial complex needed in order to justify its existence.

For too long, America’s generals have relied on a “stab in the back” thesis to justify their failure on the battlefield. The narrative set in after Vietnam and has calcified today. Former national security adviser and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster tweeted on July 8 in regards to the sweeping march of the Taliban that the “US media is finally reporting on the transformation of Afghanistan after their disinterest and defeatism helped set conditions for capitulation and a humanitarian catastrophe.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/06/our-use-of-nuclear-weapons-76-years-ago-was-a-moral-and-strategic-imperative/

Americans are no strangers to times that “try men’s souls,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Paine. By mid-1945, we had been at war for three-and-a-half years, enduring the draft, mounting numbers of casualties, and rationing, with no end in sight. Many Americans were weary, not unlike our feelings now, after a year-and-a-half a year of privations and anguish related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

That sense of anxiety got me thinking about how WWII was suddenly – and to many, unexpectedly – resolved. Today marks one of the United States’ most important anniversaries, memorable not only for what happened on this date in 1945 but for what did not happen.

What did happen was that the Enola Gay, an American B-29 Superfortress bomber, dropped Little Boy, a uranium-based atomic bomb, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. That historic act hastened the end of World War II, which concluded within a week, after the Aug. 9 detonation of Fat Man, a plutonium-based bomb, over Nagasaki. These were the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

I have two peripheral connections to those events. The first is that when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, my father, a sergeant in the U.S. Army infantry who had fought in the Italian campaigns of WWII, was on a troopship, expecting to be deployed to the Pacific theater of operations. Neither he nor his fellow soldiers relished the prospect of participating in the impending invasion of the Japanese main islands. When the Japanese surrendered (on Aug. 14), the ship headed, instead, for Virginia, where the division was disbanded. (I was born two years later.)

My second connection was that during the 1960s, three of my M.I.T. physics professors had participated several decades earlier in the Manhattan Project, the military research program which developed the atomic bombs during the war. In class, one of these professors recalled that, after the first test explosion (code-named Trinity), he was assigned to drive Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the project, to view the result. They arrived to find a crater 1,000 feet in diameter, and six feet deep, with the desert sand inside turned into glass by the intense heat. Groves’ response? “Is that all?”