URLs du Jour

2022-02-28

  • We're feckless. Totally without feck. Niall Ferguson does not mince words about the guy in charge of our foreign policy: Biden betrayed the Afghans to the Taliban. Now, he's thrown Ukraine to the wolves.

    Last year, Biden abandoned the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban. This year it is the turn of the people of Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves.

    There was never the remotest chance that the threat of sanctions would deter Putin from invading.

    It didn’t help when Biden seemed to suggest he wouldn’t necessarily penalise a ‘minor’ incursion.

    The only thing that would have made Putin think twice was the presence in Ukraine of significant military hardware, but the Biden administration slowed deliveries of arms to Kyiv.

    Last year, it removed sanctions on companies building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, designed by Russia and Germany to bypass Ukraine. What’s more, Biden discovered that China and Russia are hand in glove after he tried to get President Xi Jinping to dissuade Putin from invading Ukraine.

    The naivety would beggar belief if Biden was not manifestly in his second childhood.

    Well, at least we here in New Hampshire won't have to buy any Russian vodka. For a while.


  • Especially the Road to Serfdom. Christian Britschgi wonders (in print Reason): Who Will Pay for the Roads? Apparently not the people who use them.

    The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in November, shifts federal highway policy further away from the free market model of "user pays, user benefits" by requiring taxpayers to cough up more money for socialized roads.

    The infrastructure law, supported by legislators of both major parties, allocates about $54 billion a year to federally subsidized highways, which account for a quarter of all public roads in the U.S. That's an increase from the roughly $45 billion included in the last highway bill. All told, the law authorizes $110 billion in new spending on roads and bridges.

    Where will all that money come from? Not from road users, at least not directly.

    Britschgi notes that for an administration allegedly concerned with "equity", shoving costs onto general taxpayers for a specialized service is … well, inequitable.


  • She's not good, but what did you expeect? Kevin D. WIlliamson says why he's Against Judge Jackson. We have to skip down a bit (in an NRPlus article, sigh), but here it is:

    Judge Jackson is well qualified for the position, judged by her résumé and by the fact that she has spent eight years on the federal bench (though less than a year in her current position on the Court of Appeals) without exhibiting any obvious misbehavior — except in one thing: She does not believe in the rule of law.

    And that should be — should be — disqualifying.

    Judge Jackson isn’t any worse than the justice she is replacing and very likely would be better than whoever is next on Joe Biden’s list, but, as a matter of principle, she should be opposed.

    Justice [Clarnce] Thomas is often — and dishonestly — described as a conservative justice or a right-wing justice. But what Justice Thomas actually is, is a textualist justice, which is a fancy way of saying that he is someone who believes that we write our laws down for a reason and that judges — including the highest judges in the land — are obliged to follow what the law actually says, rather than what they wish it said, what they think it should say, or their own idiosyncratic sense of fairness or morality. We call them “justices,” but they are not in the justice business — they are in the law business. And if achieving justice requires a change in the law, then the people must elect new lawmakers to make that change.

    Court-packing is a lousy idea, but if it could be packed with Clarence Thomas clones…


  • Number one on the hit parade… Geek Press features Mathematical Objects which reproduces this Metafilter post.

    That "in order by popularity" list is kind of a hoot. I bet you can guess number one without looking. But I was surprised at the strong showing of Euler's constant.