Wednesday Potpourri

First, if you were wondering why the mainstream media has lost its credibility, consider this, via C3:

96% of media coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is positive. 96% of media coverage of Elon Musk is negative. One man was an illegal gang member and the other man is exposing government theft. So telling…

Second, a few words from Justice Robert Jackson, written in 1941:

"The Constitution affords federal courts considerable power, but it does not establish 'government by lawsuit.'" R. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy 286–287 (1941).

Third, you know by now that China can produce nothing but cheap junk, as in iPhones. Oops. And they use slave labor, and so on.

No matter, in this great civilizational conflict, we are all rooting for the home team. Rah! Rah!

Anyway, Arye Lipman offers a little perspective.

Highway 1 in Big Sur has been closed for 838 days. In that time China has built 3500 miles of high speed rail, and California hasn't been able to fix a quarter mile of highway.

Sobering….

Fourth, a few words about one of our favorite themes-- the simple fact that college students today are barely literate.

Karen Vaites offers some perspective:

“A Princeton historian said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.”

Not even on a sonnet….

Fifth, on the transmania front, a few sobering and terrifying thoughts, from M. J. Austen:

… in my mother group back in 2018 we had begun to talk about gender issues, shocked and murmuring with each other and then one by one it happened. Two of the women now have sons who are trans. One has a niece with top surgery. The other four of us have daughters who are hardcore TRAs. It’s impossible to speak about it.

Should we call this girl power in action?

Meanwhile, the information points us toward bad mothers. It’s one thing to say that the physicians and counselors who try to turn children trans should be in jail. But, could they do it without the active participation of mothers?

Sixth, and then there is the case of a seriously overweight nepo baby and failing governor of Illinois. That would be J. B. Pritzker. Doubtless you know that said governor went on a tirade against Republicans last week, declaring that they should be threatened and intimidated. He declared that they should not have a moment of peace.

This tells us that the governor knows nothing about deliberative democracy, that he believes that he can show how tough and manly he is by threatening his opposition.

As though that were not enough, J. B. has a sister, who sits on the board of governors of Harvard University. According to hedge fund tycoon and Harvard grad Bill Ackman, Harvard’s failure to manage its finances and its failure to negotiate with the Trump administration is the fault of Penny Pritzker.

The New York Post reports:

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman is again taking aim at Harvard University — this time demanding the removal of Penny Pritzker, a former Obama official and leading Democratic donor, from the school’s top leadership over its handling of a high-stakes conflict with President Donald Trump.

Ackman, … told CNBC on Monday the university should have negotiated with the Trump administration rather than filing a lawsuit over its threatened loss of federal funding.

He specifically blamed Pritzker, who is currently senior fellow at Harvard Corporation, calling her stewardship of the university’s finances and broader mission a failure.

The story continues:

As senior fellow, Pritzker oversees the corporation’s key responsibilities, including managing Harvard’s endowment, guiding long-term strategy and leading presidential search efforts.

And also,

Harvard sued the federal government last month, accusing it of unlawfully suspending more than $2 billion in funding after the university declined to comply with a series of demands that the Trump administration says were aimed at curbing antisemitism on campus.

The lawsuit argued that the government’s requests — related to diversity initiatives, faculty hiring, student discipline, and governance structures — were unconstitutional and amounted to political interference in academic freedom.

Ackman, however, suggested Harvard’s response was combative and counterproductive.

“They should have acknowledged that Trump made some good points,” he said. “And looked to strike a deal with the president.”

If you were wondering why Harvard dropped out of all negotiations with the administration and filed a lawsuit, Ackman sees the fingerprints of Penny Pritzker on the policy.

Seventh, do you drool uncontrollably at the prospect of free health care? That is, of nationalized health care, provided for free to every citizen?

Well, be careful what you wish for. In Canada, which many take to be a role model for free health care, you pay for it, one way or another. In Canada, health care is free, but it is also rationed.

The following comes from Vincent Geloso at the American Institute for Economic Research:

Canada’s publicly provided health care system actually requires rationing in order to contain costs. Because services are offered at no monetary price, demand exceeds the available supply of doctors, equipment, and facilities. If the different provinces (which operate most health care services) wanted to meet the full demand, each would have to raise taxes significantly to fund services. To keep expenditures down (managing the imbalance from public provision) and thus taxes as well, the system relies on rationing through wait times rather than prices.

The rationing keeps many patients away from care facilities or encourages them to avoid dealing with minor but nevertheless problematic ailments. These costs are not visible in taxes paid for health care, but they are true costs that matter to people.

And also,

To illustrate the magnitude of rationing (and the trend), one can examine the evolution of the median number of weeks between referral by a general practitioner and receipt of treatment from 1993 to 2024. In most provinces (except one), the median wait time in 1993 was less than 12 weeks. Today, all provinces are close or exceed 30 weeks. In two provinces, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the median wait times exceed 69 weeks. For some procedures, such as neurosurgery, the wait time (for all provinces) exceeds 46 weeks.

Eighth, on the global warming front, the polar icecaps are not melting. I thought you would want to know. Roger Pielke, Jr. explains it in the New York Post:

When it comes to climate change, to invoke one of Al Gore’s favorite sayings, the biggest challenge is not what we don’t know, but what we know for sure but just isn’t so.

Two new studies show that the Earth’s climate is far more complex than often acknowledged, reminding us of the importance of pragmatic energy and climate policies.

One of them, led by researchers at China’s Tongji University, finds that after years of ice sheet decline, Antarctica has seen a “surprising shift”: a record-breaking accumulation of ice.

And also,

A second new paper, a preprint now going through peer review, finds a similar change at the opposite end of the planet.

“The loss of Arctic sea ice cover has undergone a pronounced slowdown over the past two decades, across all months of the year,” the paper’s US and UK authors write.

They suggest that the “pause” in Arctic sea ice decline could persist for several more decades.

Finally, I have several open consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.