John Oliver had a great segment a while back on vaccine hesitancy, in which he shows Tucker Carlson asking absurdly loaded questions about the safety and efficacy of the covid vaccines.  You can see the clip here, the Tucker Carlson bit is around 6:15 to 7:45. I bring this up not to praise Oliver or […]

Via Boudreaux, over at Reason, we can read this – evidence, Boudreaux tells us, of “covid hysteria”: Amherst College in Massachusetts is welcoming students back to campus by implementing some of the most restrictive COVID-19 mitigation efforts anywhere in the country.  Administrators will now require students to wear two masks while indoors, get tested every other week, […]

I believe that politicians have some discretion to set policy, and that they should use that discretion to enact the substantively best policies they can, taking account of political and policy constraints.  Political constraints include the need to satisfy voters and win elections, the status-quo bias in public opinion, low levels of political trust, and […]

Are Former Professors As National Leaders More Prone To Black Swan Events That Overthrow Their Governments?  Probably not, but recent events in Afghanistan suggest an example.  This would be the sudden departure just over two weeks ago on Aug. 15 from Kabul of then Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, which triggered the sudden collapse of his […]

This is one of the great truths of politics, one that political actors exploit for advantage or ignore at their peril. Suppose that there is a moral norm against littering in your neighborhood.  You support the norm even when it is not convenient for you to do so.  When someone litters, you could be upset […]

Physician signing bonuses reach $240,000, ASCs promote long term ROI (beckersasc.com) While the median physician signing bonus was $29,656, physicians on the high end of the spectrum were offered $240,000 or more. While signing bonuses at the high end of the spectrum were around $140,000 more than they were in 2019-20, they were down from […]

Commenter and blogger, Prof. Joel Eissenberg, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology  In the unceasing effort by the Right to politicize and weaponize the COVID-19 pandemic, some politicians have seized on a recent paper from Israel claiming that natural infection provides better protection than two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Setting aside the orders of magnitude difference […]

MarketWatch 666: July’s retail sales, industrial production and new home construction; June’s business inventories, Commenter and Blogger RJS The July report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that the widely watched manual count of new housing units started in July was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,534,000, which was 7.0 percent […]

COVID Taking Center Stage, Rubio is Winning — DeSantis is Losing; “Political Interests,” The Listener Group In a recent poll of 1000 likely Florida voters, there has been a swing from previous polls 8 weeks earlier. With the new surge of Covid, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio ( R) is maintaining his lead against democratic challenger […]

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars calls it; “SCOTUS is throwing down the gauntlet that this president’s (Biden, in case you forgot) power derives not from the law, but from the conservative majority’s feelz about what a Democratic executive should or should not be allowed to do. Just a bit of history, this was not […]