Jennifer Hernandez decries California’s climate hypocrisy. Two slices:
California’s new carbon-neutrality plan proudly promises to change “every aspect” of how people “live, work, play, and travel.” Blessed by what its authors call their “collective leadership and commitment to break away from ideas that no longer represent Californians’ values,” the plan conjures a future of new technology in pursuit of a greenhouse-gas-free future. Yet the plan offers not a single remedy for its own projections that climate policies will enrich the wealthy and hurt the state’s less affluent, heavily minority households.
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In keeping with this pattern, California policymakers have opted to pursue a far-reaching, multidecade climate blueprint for the state—one they admit will disproportionately harm people whom they deem disadvantaged. In text added just before the final plan’s adoption, bureaucrats disclosed that “households in lower income groups”—which includes all households earning $100,000 or less per year—will “see negative impacts, while households in higher income groups are anticipated to see positive impacts” from plan implementation. Even worse, the plan projects that since “more than 60% of households in the race/ethnicity categories of Hispanic, Black, and other minority communities are less affluent, these groups will “experience reduced income,” compared with mainly “White and Asian households” in higher income groups.
George Will explains “how government casually violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment.” Two slices:
As long as the awful law exists, concerning which the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Monday, be careful what you say to, or write about, unauthorized immigrants. Congress, in one of the federal government’s increasingly frequent offenses against the First Amendment, makes it a crime if one “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in” this nation in violation of federal law. Let the formulation of hypotheticals begin in order to illustrate the law’s unconstitutional vagueness and overbreadth.
Suppose a pediatrician says an unauthorized immigrant’s child needs medical care that is available here but not in the country from which the immigrant came. Has a crime been committed?
According to the Migration Policy Institute, approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants have been here for almost two decades. They are a declining portion of the growing U.S. population — 30 percent in 2007, 23 percent in 2018. And there is no reason to believe that Americans in their decency would tolerate the police measures that would be necessary to substantially reduce that number. Now, suppose you factually tell an unauthorized immigrant that his or her chance of being deported is small. Did you criminally “induce” that immigrant to “reside” here?
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The law in question provides enhanced penalties for people who encourage or induce illegal immigration “for financial gain.” Damon Root, who writes about legal matters for Reason magazine, published by the libertarian Reason Foundation, posits: Suppose an advocate of open borders writes a book arguing that restrictions on immigration are unjust and calling for unauthorized immigrants to remain, hopes for better policies, and fights for their rights. Selling such a book, Root writes, “would seem to violate the plain text” of the law at issue in Monday’s oral arguments in the case concerning Helaman Hansen.
Speaking of George Will, Jay Nordlinger recently spoke with him.
Financial regulators have ignored their post-2008 rule book to contain the latest banking panic. And on Tuesday Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tore it up by announcing a de facto guarantee of all $17.6 trillion in U.S. bank deposits. Regional bank stocks rallied, but it’s important to understand what this moment means: the end of market discipline in U.S. banking.
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A stable financial system requires clear and transparent capital standards, sound regulation, and above all market discipline to punish reckless behavior. The current panic has shown that none of those exist in the U.S.
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The Administration is presenting its intervention as a one-off. But once regulators do something, they create the market expectation that they will do it again. And if they don’t, the ensuing market panic will invariably impel them. Biden officials are crossing a Rubicon here, and they’re doing it essentially by fiat without approval by Congress.
“The trouble with ‘elite’ law schools.”
Jacob Sullum warns of the “crusade against ‘malinformation.'” Two slices:
Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.”
According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the “censorship-industrial complex,” I had committed the offense of “malinformation.” Unlike “disinformation,” which is intentionally misleading, or “misinformation,” which is erroneous, “malinformation” is true but inconvenient.
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In a federal lawsuit filed last year, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, joined by scientists who ran afoul of the ever-expanding crusade against disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation, argue that such pressure violates the First Amendment. This week, Terry A. Doughty, a federal judge in Louisiana, allowed that lawsuit to proceed, saying the plaintiffs had adequately alleged “significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social-media platforms into state action.”
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan defend the conclusions of the Cochrane study on masking. A slice:
There is no evidence from current randomised trials that masks make any difference. The only so called evidence ones from low quality studies which have been extensively used to prop up decisions already made or appease campaigners.
Writing at Slate, Jeff Wise reports on the truth about long covid. A slice:
The best available figures, then, suggest two things: first, that a significant number of patients do experience significant and potentially burdensome symptoms for several months after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, most of which resolve in less than a year; and second, that a very small percentage experience symptoms that last longer. I want to be clear about this: Long COVID is a real illness that has dramatically affected many people’s lives. But its prevalence does seem significantly less worrisome than originally thought.
Kulvinder Kaur tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Lockdowns kill. Censorship kills.
