Month: April 2021

“C’mon Man!”: Biden Again Misrepresents Georgia Election Law While Supporting State Boycott

“C’mon Man!”: Biden Again Misrepresents Georgia Election Law While Supporting State Boycott

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We recently discussed the false statement made repeatedly by President Joe Biden about the Georgia election law, which Biden has called “Jim Crow on steroids.” Biden falsely claims that the law closes polling places earlier, a claim that even the Washington Post decried as false. 

Biden has not only repeated his earlier false claim but added a new one in supporting a boycott of the state of Georgia by Major League Baseball.  It is a common false claim made about denying water under the law to people standing in line to vote. What is astonishing is that the media itself has fueled this false narrative and it is being used as a key claim in boycotting the state.

During an interview on ESPN, Biden again declared the law as “Jim Crow on steroids” and added:

“I think that today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that. People look to them, they’re leaders. Look at what’s happened with the NBA as well. Look at what’s happened across the board. The people who’ve been victimized the most are the people who are the leaders in these various sports and it’s just not right. Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote, can’t do that? C’mon! Or you’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock when working people just get off? This is all about keeping working folks and ordinary folks that I grew up with from being able to vote.”

Indeed, it is hard to “imagine” because it is not true and the White House knows that it is not true. 

If a president is going to accuse a state of passing a Jim Crow law (let alone supporting a boycott), there is an expectation of a modicum of accuracy and fairness. 

Otherwise, it degrades not just the movement for voting rights but the Office of the Presidency itself.

I will not repeat the clearly false claim about closing polling places early. 

As the Washington Post noted (and repeated after this latest interview), “the net effect [of the Georgia law] is … to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them.”  The use of the provision to suggest a reduction in voting hours was a knowing misrepresentation by those seeking to justify the federalization of election laws in Congress.  Despite being called out on the false statement, President Biden continues to repeat it.

The water claim is equally disingenuous and false.  The law does not prevent people from giving water to those standing in line. The law allows “self-service water from an unattended receptacle” for voters waiting in line. It also allows anyone to give water or food to any voters outside of limited area around the polling place.

It is common to bar any political campaigning or activities within a certain number of feet (often 150 feet — or a shorter distance from any line extending beyond that area).

Here is the provision:

“(a) No person shall solicit votes in any manner or by any means or method, nor shall any person distribute or display any campaign material, nor shall any person give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink, to an elector, nor shall any person solicit signatures for any petition, nor shall any person, other than election officials discharging their duties, establish or set up any tables or booths on any day in which ballots are being cast

(1) Within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is

(2) Within any polling place; or

(3) Within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.”

The bill then allows for “self-service water from an unattended receptacle to an elector waiting in line to vote.” It also does not limit any poll workers from supplying water to voters.

Georgia officials said that the impetus for the rule was that various political organizations in 2019 circumvented the no politicking rule by handing out food and water with actual food trucks set up for this purpose.  The rule is designed to close that loophole.  If campaigns or others are really concerned with just getting water to voters, they can still do so. They simply cannot take credit for it or directly engage voters in the limited area next to polling places.

Even Politifact (which as been criticized by conservatives for bias) has contested this water narrative in a column entitled “A Georgia law has not ‘criminalized giving people bottles of water.’ It pertains to political organizations.”

None of that has stopped the reckless rhetoric. Vanderbilt University Professor Michael Eric Dyson joined MSNBC’s host Joy Reid in pushing this false narrative in pushing for the federalization of election laws and added “These are the kind of people that would pass a law to keep Jesus from getting a cup of water while he’s dying on the cross.”  Actually, if Jesus was voting from the cross, he would have ample water availability under the law though it would seem a stronger case for absentee voting under Georgia law.

So why would there be such outrage if the interest is only the comfort of voters?  As long as you do not seek to have direct campaign contacts with voters at polling places, you can supply as much water as you want either just before the protected area or through apolitical open receptacles.

The level of misrepresentation of these provisions in the media has been chilling. The narrative has overwhelmed the news on the factual basis of these claims.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/01/2021 – 17:40

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China Issues Rare “Strong Warning” To Japan As Disputed Island Incidents Escalate

China Issues Rare “Strong Warning” To Japan As Disputed Island Incidents Escalate

Tensions have been on the rise in the past days between China and Japan, especially after China’s defense ministry issued a Tuesday night warning for Japan to “stop making provocative moves” and to immediately halt its rhetoric condemning Beijing’s claims to disputed uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

The statement said that “China’s defense department stressed the fact that the Diaoyu Islands and its affiliated islets are all China’s inherent territory,” according to spokesman Wu Qian. It asserted: “Japan should stop all provocative moves involving the Diaoyu problem” — which Japan calls the Senkakus.

Further according to a read-out of the message: “The Chinese side also expressed strong dissatisfaction and serious concern over its recent series of negative moves against China and asked Japan to abide by international relations criteria, stop smearing China and take practical actions to maintain China-Japan relations.”

China has spent years warning Tokyo over the islands which have been contested for over a century, and are also claimed by Taiwan. The United States officially recognizes Japan’s claims over the uninhabited islands, with Biden previously reiterating America’s commitment to protective them in accord with Article 5 of the US-Japan Security Treaty.

Beijing’s direct “strong warning” to Japan this week has been widely deemd a very “rare” move which is being interpreted more broadly as China’s maneuvering to prevent Japan from following Washington’s lead in strengthening ties with Taiwan. 

Senkakus, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands

Despite Japan laying claim to the islands since 1895 China began strongly reasserting claims especially in the 1970s, triggering a crisis which became more acute after in 2012 when Japan’s government purchased three of the disputed islands from a private owner. 

The area is considered potentially resource-rich, including likely oil and gas reserves, along with being considered excellent fishing grounds and close to key shipping lanes. 

Footage of prior encounters between the rival vessels…

There have been frequent hostile encounters and incidents between rival Japanese and Chinese vessels over the years with the latest involving the Japan Coast Guard warning off two Chinese government ships on Monday. Tokyo called it another “illegal intrusion by Beijing”.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/01/2021 – 17:20

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Derek Chauvin’s Belief That George Floyd Was Intoxicated Does Not Help His Case


George Floyd, Minneapolis Police Department

After paramedics removed George Floyd’s body from the scene of his fatal arrest on May 25, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin defended his use of force in a conversation with a bystander. “We got to control this guy, because he’s a sizable guy, and it looks like he’s probably on something,” Chauvin told Charles McMillian in a body camera video that was played for jurors in Chauvin’s murder trial yesterday.

McMillian testified that Chauvin was responding to his criticism of the way the officer had treated Floyd, who was handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement as Chauvin knelt on his neck. According to prosecutors, Chauvin maintained that position for more than nine minutes, despite Floyd’s repeated complaints that he was having trouble breathing. Chauvin kept his knee there even after concerned bystanders repeatedly warned that Floyd’s life was in danger, even after another officer repeatedly suggested that Floyd should be rolled onto his side in light of his “excited delirium,” even after Floyd was no longer responsive, even after Chauvin was repeatedly told that Floyd had no detectable pulse, and even after the ambulance arrived.

Chauvin said that use of force was justified because he and his colleagues were dealing with “a sizable guy” who seemed to be intoxicated. Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, who is charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin’s assault on Floyd and will be tried separately, shared that impression. “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids,” he jocularly told bystanders as Chauvin knelt on Floyd.

After Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng arrested him for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd panicked and struggled with them as they tried to place him in their squad car, saying he was claustrophobic, complaining that he could not breathe, and asking if he could ride in the front seat. Chauvin apparently thought Floyd was behaving that way because he was on drugs. But that consideration should have underlined the danger of the prone restraint he used.

The evidence indicates that Floyd had ingested black-market “Percocet” tablets that contained fentanyl and methamphetamine, and an autopsy report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office said both drugs were detected in his blood. The report still classified Floyd’s death as a homicide, saying it was caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, nevertheless argues that the drugs were partly responsible for Floyd’s death, which he attributes to “a cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl, and the adrenaline flowing through his body, all of which acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.”

Nelson says Floyd continued to resist even after he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by Chauvin, Lane, and Kueng. But judging from a bystander video of the encounter, Floyd’s resistance was limited to moving his head and right shoulder (consistent with his complaint that he could not breathe) and begging for mercy. In any case, Floyd’s apparent intoxication should have counted against the restraint technique that Chauvin used rather than in its favor.

In a 1998 case involving a man who died in police custody, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that the use of force can be excessive “when a drug-affected person in a state of excited delirium is hog-tied and placed face down in a prone position,” which “may present a substantial risk of death or serious bodily harm.” Although Floyd was not hog-tied, the obvious stress caused by the prone restraint plausibly contributed to the “adrenaline flowing through his body” and the “cardiac arrhythmia” described by Nelson—even if you rule out asphyxia, as Nelson does.

The prosecution, meanwhile, argues that Floyd’s breathing was obstructed, so much so that it caused “an anoxic seizure.” But either way, Chauvin’s actions can hardly be viewed as irrelevant to Floyd’s death, even if there were other contributing factors.

Chauvin is charged with unintentional second-degree murder, which applies to someone who “causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense”—in this case, third-degree assault. To prove causation, the prosecution need only persuade the jury that Floyd would not have died if Chauvin had not committed that assault.

Alternatively, the jury could convict Chauvin of third-degree murder. That charge accuses him of causing Floyd’s death by “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” Here, too, causation hinges on whether Floyd would have survived this encounter if Chauvin had acted differently.

Chauvin also faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter, which alleges that he caused Floyd’s death “by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm to another.” Again, that requires showing that Chauvin’s actions were the but-for cause of Floyd’s death.

The second-degree murder charge also requires proving that Chauvin intentionally committed an assault, while the third-degree murder and manslaughter charges require proving either that his actions were “eminently dangerous” and reflected “a depraved mind” or that he “consciously” created “an unreasonable risk” of “great bodily harm.” In these analyses—especially the latter two—Chauvin’s belief that Floyd was intoxicated does not help his case.

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The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America

The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via The Epoch Times,

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.

1) Money is a construct. 

It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.

Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits, but at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back. Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution.

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. 

Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law.

Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted, or shot, it can be understood to be as much the victim’s fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring, and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer.

3) Racialism is now acceptable. 

We are defined first by our ethnicity or religion, and only secondarily—if at all—by an American commonality. The explicit exclusion of whites from college dorms, safe spaces, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist.

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. 

The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules and social distancing, stay out of school and obey all the laws.

Yet those entering the United States illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more closely resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. 

They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves.

Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning.

6) Hypocrisy is passé. 

Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism, and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters.

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. 

It is more humane to let thousands of homeless people live, eat, defecate, and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill, and create sufficient public shelter areas.

8) McCarthyism is good. 

Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.

Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke.

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. 

Neither statue-toppling, nor name-changing, nor the 1619 Project require any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters.

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. 

Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels.

Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them. They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.

The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/01/2021 – 17:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3mcbccA Tyler Durden

Derek Chauvin’s Belief That George Floyd Was Intoxicated Does Not Help His Case


George Floyd, Minneapolis Police Department

After paramedics removed George Floyd’s body from the scene of his fatal arrest on May 25, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin defended his use of force in a conversation with a bystander. “We got to control this guy, because he’s a sizable guy, and it looks like he’s probably on something,” Chauvin told Charles McMillian in a body camera video that was played for jurors in Chauvin’s murder trial yesterday.

McMillian testified that Chauvin was responding to his criticism of the way the officer had treated Floyd, who was handcuffed and lying face down on the pavement as Chauvin knelt on his neck. According to prosecutors, Chauvin maintained that position for more than nine minutes, despite Floyd’s repeated complaints that he was having trouble breathing. Chauvin kept his knee there even after concerned bystanders repeatedly warned that Floyd’s life was in danger, even after another officer repeatedly suggested that Floyd should be rolled onto his side in light of his “excited delirium,” even after Floyd was no longer responsive, even after Chauvin was repeatedly told that Floyd had no detectable pulse, and even after the ambulance arrived.

Chauvin said that use of force was justified because he and his colleagues were dealing with “a sizable guy” who seemed to be intoxicated. Former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, who is charged with aiding and abetting Chauvin’s assault on Floyd and will be tried separately, shared that impression. “This is why you don’t do drugs, kids,” he jocularly told bystanders as Chauvin knelt on Floyd.

After Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng arrested him for buying cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd panicked and struggled with them as they tried to place him in their squad car, saying he was claustrophobic and asking if he could ride in the front seat. Chauvin apparently thought Floyd was behaving that way because he was on drugs. But that consideration should have underlined the danger of the prone restraint he used.

The evidence indicates that Floyd had ingested black-market “Percocet” tablets that contained fentanyl and methamphetamine, and an autopsy report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office said both drugs were detected in his blood. The report still classified Floyd’s death as a homicide, saying it was caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, nevertheless argues that the drugs were partly responsible for Floyd’s death, which he attributes to “a cardiac arrhythmia that occurred as a result of hypertension, his coronary disease, the ingestion of methamphetamine and fentanyl, and the adrenaline flowing through his body, all of which acted to further compromise an already compromised heart.”

Nelson says Floyd continued to resist even after he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by Chauvin, Lane, and Kueng. But judging from a bystander video of the encounter, Floyd’s resistance was limited to moving his head and right shoulder (consistent with his complaint that he could not breathe) and begging for mercy. In any case, Floyd’s apparent intoxication should have counted against the restraint technique that Chauvin used rather than in its favor.

In a 1998 case involving a man who died in police custody, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that the use of force can be excessive “when a drug-affected person in a state of excited delirium is hog-tied and placed face down in a prone position,” which “may present a substantial risk of death or serious bodily harm.” Although Floyd was not hog-tied, the obvious stress caused by the prone restraint plausibly contributed to the “adrenaline flowing through his body” and the “cardiac arrhythmia” described by Nelson—even if you rule out asphyxia, as Nelson does.

The prosecution, meanwhile, argues that Floyd’s breathing was obstructed, so much so that it caused “an anoxic seizure.” But either way, Chauvin’s actions can hardly be viewed as irrelevant to Floyd’s death, even if there were other contributing factors.

Chauvin is charged with unintentional second-degree murder, which applies to someone who “causes the death of a human being, without intent to effect the death of any person, while committing or attempting to commit a felony offense”—in this case, third-degree assault. To prove causation, the prosecution need only persuade the jury that Floyd would not have died if Chauvin had not committed that assault.

Alternatively, the jury could convict Chauvin of third-degree murder. That charge accuses him of causing Floyd’s death by “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.” Here, too, causation hinges on whether Floyd would have survived this encounter if Chauvin had acted differently.

Chauvin also faces a charge of second-degree manslaughter, which alleges that he caused Floyd’s death “by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously [taking] the chances of causing great bodily harm to another.” Again, that requires showing that Chauvin’s actions were the but-for cause of Floyd’s death.

The second-degree murder charge also requires proving that Chauvin intentionally committed an assault, while the third-degree murder and manslaughter charges require proving either that his actions were “eminently dangerous” and reflected “a depraved mind” or that he “consciously” created “an unreasonable risk” of “great bodily harm.” In these analyses—especially the latter two—Chauvin’s belief that Floyd was intoxicated does not help his case.

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How the Government Timidly Stood in the Way of COVID-Fighting Innovations


MedstopDreamstime

“Are We Much Too Timid in the Way We Fight Covid-19?” asks New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in today’s paper. When it comes to developing and distributing tests and vaccines, we have indeed been too timid—not by choice, but because bureaucrats forced us to be.

The first big bureaucratic failure occurred when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) insisted that state public health agencies use a COVID-19 diagnostic test it developed. For about two months, the government forbade biotech companies and academic laboratories from developing and deploying their own tests. But the CDC test was so flawed that it was useless, and the undetected virus spread widely. Contrast that with the public health authorities in South Korea, who worked with private companies to develop and deploy a COVID-19 diagnostic test within a week after the first 4 cases had been detected.

In March 2020, I urged that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing, which private companies were already developing that month. Instead, the agency ordered them to stop and to destroy the patient samples they had collected. It took the FDA until December to finally get around to approving a supposedly over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 antigen diagnostic test—and it’s still unavailable to consumers. And yesterday, that’s right, yesterday, the FDA approved two more over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Thanks to the unprecedentedly rapid roll out of various COVID-19 vaccines, the end of the pandemic is in sight, at least for rich countries like the United States. On the positive side, these clinical trials were developed in less than a year—compared to an average of 10.7 years for earlier vaccines. But the rollout could have been so much faster.

Moderna devised the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine in just two days, and the company injected it into the first volunteer on March 16, 2020. But FDA bureaucrats insisted that the vaccine makers follow the usual path of Phases 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials for testing safety and efficacy. It would have made much more sense to authorize human challenge trials, in which young volunteers are given either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and then exposed to the virus to see if the shot works. Instead of waiting around for the virus to find both vaccinated and unvaccinated folks in the wild, as researchers do in regular Phase 3 trials, this would speed things up by bringing the virus to the volunteers.

If this had been done, we could have known by last summer how amazingly effective the new vaccines are. Keep in mind that by September 1, 2020, some 6.4 million and 190,000 Americans had been diagnosed and died respectively of the disease. Now the disease has been diagnosed in some 31 million Americans and has killed 565,000.

On April 29, 2020 the Trump administration unveiled Operation Warp Speed, with a goal of making 300 million doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines available by January 2021. On May 4, George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok and colleagues proposed that the U.S. government “go big” and commit $70 billion to encourage pharmaceutical companies to build out facilities for manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines. Ultimately, the Trump administration allocated about $13 billion to Operation Warp Speed. That’s some of the best money that the U.S. government has ever spent.

But again Americans faced unnecessary limits. Back in December, the clinical trial results from the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines showed that they were about 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 after just one dose. Given those data, some of us asked, why use two doses when one dose works almost as well? By delaying the second doses for the vaccines, we could double the number of Americans protected from the severe COVID-19 infections.

So far, nearly 100 million Americans have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines and 56 million are fully vaccinated. Had the second doses been delayed, 156 million Americans could now have been vaccinated—nearly 50 percent of the population.

Even more Americans could have been vaccinated by now if the FDA would accept the safety and efficacy evaluations of brother bureaucracies such as the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Britain’s regulators approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine three months ago, on December 30. The U.S. is sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of that vaccine. Nevertheless, the FDA has yet to approve it, despite clinical trial results indicating that it is 76 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 and 100 percent effective against hospitalization and deaths.

So far, the pandemic has brought us tens of millions of infections, nearly a million hospitalizations, and 565,000 deaths. Economically, millions of jobs were lost, the economy shrank by 3.5 percent, and the U.S. government has wracked up trillions more in debt. Speedier rollouts of both testing and vaccines could have substantially ameliorated these losses. But timid bureaucrats stood in our way.

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How Great Was the Green Revolution?

How important was the “Green Revolution” to feeding people in developing countries and improving living conditions? A new paper in the Journal of Political Economy suggests it was quite substantial. The abstract for the paper, “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” by Douglas Gollin, Casper Worm Hansen, & Asger Wingende is as follows:

We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high yielding crop varieties (HYVs). We find that HYVs increased yields by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010 with further gains coming through reallocation of inputs. Higher yields increased income and reduced population growth. A ten-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17 percent of GDP/capita and added 223 million people to the developing world population. The cumulative GDP loss would have been US$83 trillion, corresponding to one year of current global GDP.

This is a lengthy and fascinating paper, high-lighting the importance of innovation (and agricultural biotechnology in particular) to improving human well-being.

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Border Patrol Releases Appalling Video Of Smugglers Dropping 2 Little Girls From High Border Fence

Border Patrol Releases Appalling Video Of Smugglers Dropping 2 Little Girls From High Border Fence

No crisis at the southern border?… On Wednesday US Border Patrol officials made public a deeply disturbing video showing human smugglers scaling a 14-foot border barrier in the New Mexico desert with small children in tow.

El Paso Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gloria Chavez released the video which shockingly shows two little girls being dropped from the full height of the fence onto to the hard surface below. 

The incident which happened Tuesday occurred during the middle of the night, and the Border Patrol statement indicted the dangerous fence-scaling involved a 5-year old and 3-year old girl who were essentially thrown over by two unknown adults. The children survived the terrifying ordeal and have since been identified as sisters from Ecuador.

“I’m appalled by the way these smugglers viciously dropped innocent children from a 14-foot border barrier last night. If not for the vigilance of our agents using mobile technology, these two tender-aged siblings would have been exposed to the harsh elements of desert environment for hours,” Chavez said in a statement.

“We are currently working with our law enforcement partners in Mexico and attempting to identify these ruthless human smugglers so as to hold them accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” she added.

The first little girl seen falling in the video appeared to struggle for a long time to get to her feet, and likely sustained an injury. While the extent of their possible injuries and trauma from the fall were later reported as minimal. They are now said to be safe after being completely abandoned by the smugglers in the middle of the desert.

Further details of the aftermath were reported as follows:

Other border agents were alerted of the incident and directed to the remote location near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, where they rescued the two unaccompanied migrant children — a 5-year-old girl and a 3-year-old girl. The pair are sisters from Ecuador and both were “alert” when agents found them, according to a press release from CBP.

They were then transferred to an area hospital for “precautionary reasons and further evaluation.” 

The smugglers are seen in the video fleeing on foot back on the Mexican side of the border after tossing what appear to be backpacks over for the children. Chavez indicated the pair were left “miles from the nearest residence” but were spotted only with the help of surveillance technology.

Based on current policy, after three days in their custody CBP will likely transfer the children to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, whose detention centers “specifically licensed to house young migrants” have been center of controversy of late – though one that has been very “inconvenient” for Democrats given it’s now Biden in the White House and not Trump.

Meanwhile and with no parking lot dramatics this time…

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/01/2021 – 16:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31F8QcY Tyler Durden

How the Government Timidly Stood in the Way of COVID-Fighting Innovations


MedstopDreamstime

“Are We Much Too Timid in the Way We Fight Covid-19?” asks New York Times columnist Ezra Klein in today’s paper. When it comes to developing and distributing tests and vaccines, we have indeed been too timid—not by choice, but because bureaucrats forced us to be.

The first big bureaucratic failure occurred when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) insisted that state public health agencies use a COVID-19 diagnostic test it developed. For about two months, the government forbade biotech companies and academic laboratories from developing and deploying their own tests. But the CDC test was so flawed that it was useless, and the undetected virus spread widely. Contrast that with the public health authorities in South Korea, who worked with private companies to develop and deploy a COVID-19 diagnostic test within a week after the first 4 cases had been detected.

In March 2020, I urged that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing, which private companies were already developing that month. Instead, the agency ordered them to stop and to destroy the patient samples they had collected. It took the FDA until December to finally get around to approving a supposedly over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 antigen diagnostic test—and it’s still unavailable to consumers. And yesterday, that’s right, yesterday, the FDA approved two more over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

Thanks to the unprecedentedly rapid roll out of various COVID-19 vaccines, the end of the pandemic is in sight, at least for rich countries like the United States. On the positive side, these clinical trials were developed in less than a year—compared to an average of 10.7 years for earlier vaccines. But the rollout could have been so much faster.

Moderna devised the recipe for its COVID-19 vaccine in just two days, and the company injected it into the first volunteer on March 16, 2020. But FDA bureaucrats insisted that the vaccine makers follow the usual path of Phases 1, 2, and 3 clinical trials for testing safety and efficacy. It would have made much more sense to authorize human challenge trials, in which young volunteers are given either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and then exposed to the virus to see if the shot works. Instead of waiting around for the virus to find both vaccinated and unvaccinated folks in the wild, as researchers do in regular Phase 3 trials, this would speed things up by bringing the virus to the volunteers.

If this had been done, we could have known by last summer how amazingly effective the new vaccines are. Keep in mind that by September 1, 2020, some 6.4 million and 190,000 Americans had been diagnosed and died respectively of the disease. Now the disease has been diagnosed in some 31 million Americans and has killed 565,000.

On April 29, 2020 the Trump administration unveiled Operation Warp Speed, with a goal of making 300 million doses of effective COVID-19 vaccines available by January 2021. On May 4, George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok and colleagues proposed that the U.S. government “go big” and commit $70 billion to encourage pharmaceutical companies to build out facilities for manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines. Ultimately, the Trump administration allocated about $13 billion to Operation Warp Speed. That’s some of the best money that the U.S. government has ever spent.

But again Americans faced unnecessary limits. Back in December, the clinical trial results from the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines showed that they were about 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 after just one dose. Given those data, some of us asked, why use two doses when one dose works almost as well? By delaying the second doses for the vaccines, we could double the number of Americans protected from the severe COVID-19 infections.

So far, nearly 100 million Americans have received at least one dose of the two-dose vaccines and 56 million are fully vaccinated. Had the second doses been delayed, 156 million Americans could now have been vaccinated—nearly 50 percent of the population.

Even more Americans could have been vaccinated by now if the FDA would accept the safety and efficacy evaluations of brother bureaucracies such as the United Kingdom’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. Britain’s regulators approved the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine three months ago, on December 30. The U.S. is sitting on a stockpile of around 30 million doses of that vaccine. Nevertheless, the FDA has yet to approve it, despite clinical trial results indicating that it is 76 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 and 100 percent effective against hospitalization and deaths.

So far, the pandemic has brought us tens of millions of infections, nearly a million hospitalizations, and 565,000 deaths. Economically, millions of jobs were lost, the economy shrank by 3.5 percent, and the U.S. government has wracked up trillions more in debt. Speedier rollouts of both testing and vaccines could have substantially ameliorated these losses. But timid bureaucrats stood in our way.

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How Great Was the Green Revolution?

How important was the “Green Revolution” to feeding people in developing countries and improving living conditions? A new paper in the Journal of Political Economy suggests it was quite substantial. The abstract for the paper, “Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution,” by Douglas Gollin, Casper Worm Hansen, & Asger Wingende is as follows:

We estimate the impact of the Green Revolution in the developing world by exploiting exogenous heterogeneity in the timing and extent of the benefits derived from high yielding crop varieties (HYVs). We find that HYVs increased yields by 44 percent between 1965 and 2010 with further gains coming through reallocation of inputs. Higher yields increased income and reduced population growth. A ten-year delay of the Green Revolution would in 2010 have cost 17 percent of GDP/capita and added 223 million people to the developing world population. The cumulative GDP loss would have been US$83 trillion, corresponding to one year of current global GDP.

This is a lengthy and fascinating paper, high-lighting the importance of innovation (and agricultural biotechnology in particular) to improving human well-being.

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