Africans Face Steepest Decline in Immigrant Visas under Biden
David J. BierThe State Department has slowly reopened most consulates under President Biden, and it is now cumulatively issuing about as many immigrant visas for prospective legal permanent residents across all consulates as it was issuing before the pandemic. Nonetheless, the reopening has not happened equally across the world. Immigrants from North America and South America are issuing enough visas to reduce their backlogs of applicants, while immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania are still seeing large declines in immigrant visa issuances. Africans have seen the largest decline.As Figure 1 shows, the State...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 5, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: David J. Bier Source Type: blogs
Follow up on Deep Thoughts
Paul Campos explains why ignorance and stupidity have become a feature, not a bug, for conservatives, in a post titledThe Cult of Stupidity. This is pretty much what I was trying to say in my previous post, but he spells out the details more clearly. I hope he won ' t mind quoting at length:(1) Hatred of intellectuals in general, and academics in particular. Anti-intellectualism in American life is as old as the Republic, but has certainly gotten more overtly intense in the Trump era. In fact in mainstream American cultural discourse, let alone on the explicit right wing, the very word “intellectual” is more than fain...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Deep thoughts
To creatures that evolved on the African savanna, contemporary physicists ' understanding of the world is preposterous. Physicists believe a whole lot of stuff that is pointless and ridiculous. I can ' t say that I understand it very well myself but after a lifetime of subscribing to Scientific American, and reading a few books along the way, I think I have a reasonable intuitive understanding of most of it, and how they got to their conclusions, enough to convince me that they ' re understanding is progressive." Progressive " is the most credit I can give because they will be the first to tell you that there is a whole lo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 2, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Correcting the Record on the Trans ‐Pacific Partnership
Clark PackardCiting a supposed groundswell of support for rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), former U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Robert Lighthizer recentlyargued that it would be a mistake for the United States to reenter the trade pact. The promising agreement with 11 other Pacific Rim countries was negotiated by the Obama Administration as the economic centerpiece of its “pivot to Asia” but then was unfortunatelyjettisoned by the Trump Administration as one of its first official acts in January 2017. The remaining TPP members moved forward with the agreement and renamed it the Comprehensive and Pr...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Clark Packard Source Type: blogs
April Fools … .Data Driven Analysis
By MATTHEW HOLT
I have always thought that THCB almost always had an April fools post. I mean never on the Epic scale–today they’re merging with the other Epic, the Fornite gang–but most years I’d have said we had one. So in an effort to avoid the work I should be doing I went back to to archives to look and find the truth.
THCB started in August 2003 and in April 2005 the “tradition” started with this very worthy & not very clever April Fool about how George W Bush had signed national health care into law. The nothing more April Foolish until 2009 when then TCHB editor John Ir...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 1, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Nucking Futz
Andrew Prokop points out what is obvious, but seems generally to be ignored. The text messages between Virginia Thomas and Mark Meadows reveal not only that the wife of a Supreme Court justice conspired with the White House chief of staff to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, they also reveal that Ms. Thomas apparentlyactually believedDump ' s lies about it, but a whole lot of Q-Anon level insanity as well. Furthermore, we should have noticed by now that a whole lot of prominent conservative activists, politicians and other elected officials do as well.It isn ' t just a lot of uneducated yokels ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 26, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
ARPHA-H Needs to Think Bigger
BY KIM BELLARD
Everyone loves DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that is credited with such hits as the internet and GPS, but is also responsible for things like the Boston Dynamics back-flipping robots and even Siri. DARPA’s mission is to make “pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” but, as the previous examples illustrate, we can’t always tell how those breakthrough technologies are going to get used.
Healthcare is, at long last, getting its own DARPA, with ARPA-H (Advanced Research Project Agency for Health). It’s been discussed for y...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 22, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Public Health ARPA-H DARPA NIH Source Type: blogs
Members of Congress Urge President to Rule by Decree
David BoazWith President Biden ’s legislative agenda bogging down in Congress, left‐leaning members of Congress are urging him to enact much of his program through executive orders. That is, members of Congress are asking the president to usurp their legislative authority.The Constitution delegates “all legislative powers herein granted” to Congress. But over the past few decades, presidents have increasingly legislated through executive orders, and courts have been insufficiently attentive to that abuse of power.Marianna Sotomayorreports in the Washington Post:The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), which r...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 21, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs
Cato Scholars on the Electoral Count Act
Walter OlsonIn light of the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, in which some urged Congress and the Vice President to set aside the electoral vote slates certified by various states, Congress has been looking into revamping the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which lays out procedures for how the count is to be conducted before a joint session of Congress. Cato scholars have participated actively in the resulting public discussion. Here is a selection of their output:Robert A. Levy, “Presidential Elections: A Primer ” (Dec. 18, 2020)Thomas A. Berry, “GOP Senators’ Electoral College Stunt Is a&...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 21, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Walter Olson Source Type: blogs
Like I said
Because of the NYT paywall, I ' ll give youDigby ' s repost of a Krugman column, which is not fair use but I suppose they can sue her if they want to. Anyway, the price of gasoline and diesel fuel is determined almost entirely by the cost of crude oil. Crude oil is sold on a global market, and guess what? The price of crude oil and fuels derived therefrom has increased the world over, by the same amount. This has happened in the UK, in Germany, and in every other country in the world where Joe Biden is not president. As Krugman explains:[R]ising gas prices in America are part of a global story that has nothing t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 12, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Should Electoral Count Act Reform Cut Congress Out Altogether?
Andy CraigIn a recentWall Street Journal op ‐ed, two well ‐respected conservative legal scholars, J. Michael Luttig and David B. Rivkin, outlined a radical argument about Electoral Count Act reform: that the entire premise of having such a law is unconstitutional. Instead, they contend, Congress should have no discretionary role at all in certifying the results of a presidential election. TheJournal’seditorial board made a similar argument. This prompted a replyletter to the editor from my Cato colleague Thomas Berry, building on hisBriefing Paper explaining why there is indeed a&n...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 9, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Andy Craig Source Type: blogs
Russia Shows the Limits of Propaganda
Will DuffieldDespite widespread concerns about the influence of English ‐language Russian state media such as Russia Today and Sputnik, Russian claims about its invasion of Ukraine have not taken hold abroad. This failure seems puzzling.Journalists andpoliticians have alleged that potent Russian information operations tipped the 2016 American election to Trump, and the Brexit vote to “leave”. We need not assess those claims here. Instead, a closer look at the differences between 2016 and now point toward a better understanding of misinformation online, an understanding favoring “more speech” rather t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 8, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Will Duffield Source Type: blogs
Matthew ’s health care tidbits: The Stupidity Vaccine
Each week I’ve been adding a brief tidbits section to the THCB Reader, our weekly newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB that week (Sign up here!). Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt
For my health care tidbits this week, I think we need a new vaccine. We need one that prevents stupidity.Look I get that some people don’t think the flu vaccine is effective and don’t think the effects are too bad, so they don’t get one every year. Many people don’t get a vaccine for shingles. But as someone who had shingles long before the recommended ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 5, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Matthew Holt vaccines Source Type: blogs
Trump ’s Truth Social Rejects Free Speech, For Good Reason
Matthew Feeney andWill DuffieldTruth Social, a new social media platform built by Trump Media& Technology Group,made its debut on Apple ’s app store earlier this week. Its launch shows the inherent difficulty of operating a social media platform and undercuts arguments for requiring social media to host all legal speech. Although pitched as a solution to “Big Tech” censorship, Truth Social reveals that Big Tech companies are hardly monopolies and that “censorship‐free” social media is not what consumers ultimately want.Ever since former President Trump was booted from Twitter and susp...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 23, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Matthew Feeney, Will Duffield Source Type: blogs
How the U.S. Created Cuban and Haitian Illegal Migration
David J. BierIn October 2016, nearly 7,500 asylum seekers from Haiti and Cuba crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States. Just 6 did so illegally. Not 6percent: six totalindividuals, meaning that 99.9 percent of all crossings from these two countrieshappenedlegally through lawful ports of entry. In October 2021, nearly 7,000 crossed, and 99.7 percentdid soillegally. Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden all played a role in making this unbelievable (and tragic) turnaround possible: they created illegal immigration where none had existed, and the current administration could just as easily make it disappear.Cuban an...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - February 15, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: David J. Bier Source Type: blogs
