90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, April 26, 2020

COSTS OF THE SHUTDOWN, QUANTIFIED

Casey Mulligan is an economist at the University of Chicago. Per his web site, he has served as Chief Economist of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and as a visiting professor teaching public economics at Harvard and Clemson. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, and the Population Research Center. Mulligan has set up a web page where he estimates, on a daily basis, the cumulative costs of the COVID-19 epidemic. The analysis is based on his own paper dated April 16.

This is the current chart, updated through April 24.

By Mulligan’s calculation, cumulative costs approach $1 trillion. This total doesn’t necessarily include stock market losses, which mostly reflect anticipated future damages that are not part of the calculation.

On its face, Mulligan’s analysis implies that the cure (shutdowns) has been far worse than the disease (mortality), and the margin is growing. Of course, doing this calculation requires...

Two Chinese Firms Blocked From Australia’s Rare Earth Sector

Two Chinese firms have been blocked from investing in Australia’s valuable rare earth mineral sector in the past week.

It comes in the midst of tightening foreign investment rules during the virus outbreak and aligns with the federal government’s ongoing partnership with the United States to ensure rare earth supply chains are secure and not dominated by China.

On April 20, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg blocked a bid by Baogang Group Investment to invest $20 million (US$12.8 million) in Northern Minerals who operates a major rare earths project in Western Australia (WA).

The Chinese group is a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise Baogang (or Baotou) Group, which runs the Bayan Obo Mining District in Inner Mongolia—the largest rare earths deposit in the world.

Northern Minerals operates the Browns Range Project, which covers a vast 3,595 square kilometre area (1,388 square miles) in the East Kimberley region straddling the border of WA and the Northern Territory.

The site is rich in rare earths, particularly dysprosium—an element mainly used in magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Each F-35 Lightning II aircraft -- considered one of the world's most sophisticated, maneuverable and stealthy
fighter jets -- requires approximately 920 pounds of rare-earth materials

The company’s website touted Browns Range as the only non-Chinese producer of dysprosium.

On April 24, Yibin Tianyi Lithium Industry withdrew a proposed investment following advice it would be rejected by the federal government.

One of Yibin’s backers is China’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer Contemporary Amperex Technology.

Yibin was aiming to invest $14.1 million (US$9 million) in AVZ Minerals, which operates the Manono Project in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project is a major producer of lithium.

According to a statement from AVZ Minerals, the federal government advised Yibin that the investment would be “contrary to the national interest” and contrary to the...

#JoeHiden

HUGE: NEW COMPELING EVIDENCE SUPPORTING CREDIBILITY OF TARA READE’S ALLEGATION AGAINST JOE BIDEN EMERGES

NYT Removes Qualifying Language from Biden Sexual Assault Allegation Story

Joe Biden Has Yet to Face Single Question on Sexual Assault Allegations

WARNING GRAPHIC: Joe Biden’s Sexual Assault Accuser Breaks Silence With Graphic Allegations

Hypocritical #MeToo Founder Alyssa Milano SILENT as Joe Biden Accused of Sexual Assault

#DropOutBiden Trends, Fueled by Progressives and #MeToo Supporters

The hashtag #DropOutBiden trended on Twitter beginning early Saturday morning and throughout the day, fueled in part by progressives and #MeToo movement supporters calling on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2020 presidential race.

Although supporters of Biden tried to blame the hashtag on Russian bots, there were several prominent progressives who were using the hashtag, such as Peter Daou, a former Hillary Clinton adviser.

A number of those tweeting the hashtag seemingly included supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). As the day wore on, prominent conservative figures and pundits also began tweeting it.

The hashtag coincided with the emergence of an alleged video clip of Biden accuser Tara Reade’s mother.

The 1993 clip from Larry King Live featured a woman calling in to the show from San Luis Obispo, where Reade’s mother reportedly lived at the time. On the show, the woman said that her daughter had just worked for a “prominent senator” and had a story to tell but did not want to go to the press out of respect for the senator.

Reade has alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her when she worked in his office as a staffer in the early 1990s. The Biden campaign has denied it happened and declined to...

Ignaz Semmelweis was the first doctor to discover the importance for medical professionals of hand washing. In the 19th century, it was common for women to die from an illness contracted during or after childbirth, known as childbed fever. While working at an obstetric department in Vienna, Austria, Semmelweis noticed that women delivered by physicians and medical students had a much higher mortality rate than women delivered by midwives. He concluded that the problem was that physicians were handling corpses during autopsies before attending to pregnant women, and determined that hand washing would prevent them from passing on illness.

After Semmelweis initiated a mandatory hand-washing policy, the mortality rate for women delivered by doctors fell from 18 per cent to 2 per cent – the same as it was for midwives. When he began washing medical instruments, it fell to just 1 per cent.

Nevertheless, the senior staff at the hospital still did not accept that doctors were causing the women’s disease. They believed that infections were spread through the air by something called miasmas, and attributed the low death rate to a new ventilation system. Semmelweis got another job as head of obstetrics in Budapest, Hungary, where he again succeeded at reducing mortality by insisting that doctors wash their hands.

In 1861, he published a book on his findings about how to prevent childbed fever, but it was poorly received. He died in a public insane asylum five years later, at the age of 47.

Semmelweis must take some of the blame for his failure to win over his colleagues. Accounts describe him as arrogant and angry, with a tendency to insult and humiliate his opponents.

His work was only widely appreciated two decades later, after research by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Joseph Lister produced more evidence for germ theory and antiseptic techniques.