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The Speaker's Morning Digest
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Current as of June 17, 2020 at 8:00 a.m.
COVID-19
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Access the Florida Department of Health COVID Dashboard


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COVID-19 News and Opinion


“This changes everything!”

That declaration should always be greeted with extreme skepticism. Your daily sheltering-in-place experiences are definitely different from what you previously thought of as your “normal” life. But what you should expect to experience post-pandemic will look remarkably similar to what it was like pre-lockdown — perhaps with more hand washing.

This will be especially true once there is a treatment and vaccine for Covid-19. The biggest change will be the rapid acceleration of trends that were already in place. The future is coming, just a little quicker than previously scheduled. Huge events can have that effect.

That does not stop the prophesies of doom. Radical expectations by futurists include:

Death of big cities;
Collapse of Colleges;
and public schools;
End of retail stores;
and Malls;
No more offices space;

Massive change is coming to:

Public transportation / Traffic / Commuting;
Music;
Sports;
Live concerts;
Fashion;
Broadway theater; and
even Online dating.

As you emerge blinking into the sunlight of the brave new world that awaits, you will hardly recognize anything you see! Nothing will be familiar in this post-pandemic world. For those of you who believe inconceivable changes await, I offer you for sale at a reasonable price, this bridge connecting lower Manhattan to Brooklyn.

My skepticism of radical change is based on three simple premises of human nature:

1. Past claims of “change” failed to pan out. The September 11th terrorist attacks1 and the 2008-09 financial crisis — both of which “changed everything,” mostly mean-reverted eventually back to prior life. The big changes were mostly modest adjustments.

2. Incremental change is more likely. What changed was the excess bank leverage ratios reverted back to where they were decades earlier. Larger financial institutions today maintain more capital and have better risk management tools. Even the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform bill was eventually whittled away by lobbyists, and many of its key provisions were eliminated or scaled back dramatically.2

3. We lack the imagination to recognize genuine change. We build internal models at great personal cost. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we are still loath to alter these models. When things that actually do change everything occur, we still overlook them: The Wright brothers’ maiden flight at Kitty Hawk was hardly even noticed by anyone.3 Powered human flight is one of those things that did change everything — and we completely missed it.

Post-pandemic, some pre-existing trends might be easier to spot. With 93% of Americans sheltering in place for months, some trends that are not novel or new will have been given a boost by circumstances. Consider these questionable forecasts:


n 2010, The Atlantic said that Dr. John Ioannidis “may be one of the most influential scientists alive.” 

The article, written by David H. Freedman, made it clear the Greek-American physician-scientist’s rising star stemmed in part from the fearlessness he demonstrated in challenging bad science in the medical research field. 

“[Ioannidis is] what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research,” Freedman wrote. “He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong.”

Today, Ioannidis is the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University. He has authored some of the most cited medical journal articles in history.

Ten years after his glowing profile in The Atlantic, however, Ioannidis finds himself in the crosshairs of media and medical professionals for doing what he’s always done: challenging science he believes is flawed. This time, however, Ioannidis is challenging medical findings of a virus that isn’t just deadly, but deeply controversial.  

Ioannidis has become perhaps the leading medical voice against COVID-19 alarmism and government lockdowns.

It began with a March 17 article in Stat that suggested governments around the world were taking sweeping and potentially harmful actions to limit the spread of COVID-19 without sufficient data. Then came a May 5 white paper he authored which suggested COVID-19 was not nearly as deadly as initially feared, a claim later supported by an NPR report that cited research from Johns Hopkins University showing a fatality risk as low as 0.5 percent. Ioannidis’s latest research on the COVID fatality rate pegs the median COVID-19 fatality risk at 0.25 percent, much lower than previous estimates but still about two and a half times higher than the seasonal flu.

Ioannidis’s credentials might be impeccable, but his findings have not been without controversy. 

In an impressive piece of medical journalism published at Undark.org, investigative journalist Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee of the Lown Institute detail the withering criticism Ioannidis has received from media and medical professionals alike. 

Ioannidis appears unfazed by the attacks, which include (very thin) accusations that his study suffered from an undisclosed conflict of interest.   

In the medical journal BMJ, Ioannidis recently explained why he believes government lockdowns should be lifted. (An opposing view is offered by Edward R. Melnick of the Yale Medical School.) 

What Spike? Hospitalization Data Show No Indication of a Second Wave
https://www.aier.org/article/what-spike-hospitalization-data-show-no-indication-of-a-second-wave/

re we on the verge of a second wave of coronavirus infections? Is there a spike in infections in states that reopened first?

The only way to answer that question is to watch as the data roll in. Arguably the best data to look at to see if a second wave is beginning are the hospitalization numbers. The media frequently reports the biggest and most dramatic numbers, often devoid of context. The number of cases has been reported regularly since the early days of the pandemic, and yet we know that the number of cases can be misleading.

As more people are tested and re-tested for the virus, more results will come back positive, with the current number of confirmed cases exceeding 2 million in the U.S. But if we know anything, it is that increases in the number of confirmed cases do not accurately convey how quickly and widely the virus is spreading. Antibody tests and even the examination of sewage in some cities suggest that the number of infections is likely much higher than the number of confirmed cases. 

But on the other side, some of the confirmed cases are double-counted in some states partly because both antibody and active virus tests are being counted separately but then combined in the total number of cases. While the antibody tests have been criticized for their false positive rate, another criticism has been that the antibody studies can underreport infection rates because they are not sensitive enough to detect a past mild infection.

Overall, because the bulk of testing is focused on people who are the sickest and who face the greatest exposure, it seems reasonable to conclude that the true number of U.S. infections is substantially higher than the reported figure. But an attempt to estimate the true number of infections would be little better than a guess.

And this presents a problem with the daily updates. To say that a particular state or city is seeing a “spike” in cases is to say that recently they have had an uptick in positive test results. That could be due to more testing and more ways of testing, or it could be a hint of growth in the infection rate.

Better Data are Available
Rather than focus on test results, i.e. “cases,” it would make more sense to focus on how the virus affects society and our institutions, particularly the strain the virus puts on health care facilities and health care providers. An obvious measure, tracked since the beginning of the pandemic, is the number of deaths. As I and others at AIER have noted, the number of deaths is hard to interpret without important context. 

The coronavirus is obviously deadly, but how deadly it is seems to depend greatly on how it enters a population and the characteristics of that population. The virus has been far deadlier in New York than it has been in California, and has been most deadly in U.S. long-term care facilities. Among children, the coronavirus is considerably less deadly than seasonal influenza.

Nonetheless, deaths tell us something important about the virus’s impact on society. They profoundly affect entire social networks and are rightly emphasized in pandemic reporting. 

When it comes to seeing how things are going now, whether the pandemic is growing worse or fading, deaths are a lagging indicator. They do not begin to spike until infections have already been accelerating rapidly for many days, and they do not decline until well after the virus’s spread has slowed. 

The chart below shows that overall, deaths are clearly declining, although there is a weekly cycle where Sundays seem to result in relatively low death counts and Tuesdays and Wednesdays usually have the highest reported numbers. Overall, the past two weeks have had lower death totals than have been seen in the two months prior. But if a second wave were coming soon, we would not see the deaths from it yet.


The recent surge of COVID-19 cases in states like Arizona and Texas are not indicative of a “second wave” of infections; they are part of the initial rolling waves of cases that had previously impacted hard-hit places like Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

As COVID-19 case counts continue to rise in some states that had previously reported few infections, there has been confusion about whether these upticks are part of a predicted second wave of infections. They are not.

“When you think about the wave in the ocean, it comes to shore and it recedes, then another wave comes in,” Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said by email. “By that way of thinking, we aren’t in the second wave now because we’re still in the first wave.”

Read: U.S. death toll tops 115,000 amid growing worry about uptick in cases in Florida, Texas among others

Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts have warned that viruses similar to the coronavirus often return more than once. The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDPAP), a health preparedness organization that is part of the University of Minnesota, in early May predicted three scenarios for COVID-19, all of which would see the return of the virus in 2020 and potentially again in 2021 in communities that had previously reported outbreaks.

There is no formal definition for a second wave. Some experts would describe an increase in cases separated by four to eight weeks of low numbers as a second wave; however, “cases that occur after a lockdown aren’t typically considered a second wave, they’d be considered part of the first wave,” Michael Osterholm, CIDRAP’s director, said in an email.

Many of the predictions for a second wave have anticipated that it would hit in the fall, if it does occur, either due to a change in the season or people spending more time indoors, where the virus is thought to be more easily transmitted. To correctly characterize a second wave in the future, there would need to be a rise in cases, a peak, a plateau, and then a decline now before a resurgence, according to Wen, who previously served as the health commissioner of Baltimore.

“We are seeing a notable uptick in identified cases in several states,” Raymond James analysts wrote in a June 15 note to investors. “We expected this uptick and anticipate other states will also see upticks as reopenings continue. This isn’t a second wave, this is another swell that is part of the ‘first wave’ of this virus.”

As states and local governments have eased stay-at-home restrictions over the last month, that may have led to the first significant wave of cases in regions that may not have already experienced large increases in case counts. “We’re now recognizing that we’re not going to see the summer break that we had hoped for,” Wen said.


Massive crowds are wonderful and healthful, if they’re woke. Otherwise, they’re life-threatening.
Earlier this week, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot had big news: The city is opening up its iconic Lakefront Trail after months of being closed off as part of a COVID-19 lockdown.

That Lightfoot kept the trail closed even after Chicago had experienced large-scale Black Lives Matter marches — thousands just last weekend during the “Drag March for Change” — is one small instance of the flagrant social-distancing hypocrisy across the country in recent weeks.

If it’s okay for throngs of people to pack the streets and shout and chant to protest the death of George Floyd, it ought to be permissible for someone to ride a bike along the lakeside while keeping to him- or herself. In fact, one involves sustained interaction with other people, and perhaps fights with the police, while the other is a solitary activity, or one undertaken with a friend or a spouse.

Yet, Mayor Lightfoot welcomed the protestors — “We want people to come and express their passion,” she said — and still kept the trail shuttered.

Many of the same officials who were most zealous in locking down their states and cities instantly made an exception for Black Lives Matter protests. Their rigidity became laxity in a blink of an eye. Their metric for reopening wasn’t the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines or any other public-health measure but the “wokeness” of the activity in question.


Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, an influential economic analysis from the University of Chicago concluded that the likely benefits of moderate social distancing would greatly exceed the resultant costs. The New York Times and the Washington Post recently cited that study as evidence that the use of strict lockdowns to control the virus’s spread has been justified, and that current efforts to “open up” social and economic activity around the U.S. are dangerous and irresponsible. That is seriously misleading; the Chicago study is already out of date. More recent research supports the idea that the lockdowns should end....
The Constitution, Law, and Order
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The Constitution - News and Opinion


NBC News reported today that two sites, ZeroHedge and the Federalist, had been banned from generating revenue through widely-used Google Ads. A Google spokesperson initially told NBC News that “took action after determining the websites violated its policies on content related to race.”

I don’t know much about ZeroHedge, but the contention that the Federalist (where I worked as a senior editor from 2013 to 2019) is “far-right,” as reporter Adele-Momoko Fraser claims twice in her piece, is utter nonsense. The Federalist publishes a wide variety of opinions. Some pieces are more provocative than others. Some are very provocative. So what? NBC News is trying to make the site sound like the Daily Stormer, when in fact it has contributions from well-known mainstream libertarians, social conservatives, and moderate Republicans. All of the content falls well within normal parameters of contemporary political discourse — which is exactly what outlets such as NBC News are trying to shut down.

Once upon a time, news outlets fought to protect the ideals of free expression. Now, they assign activists masquerading as journalists, and boost Orwellian-sounding outfits (what is the “NBC News Verification Unit”?), to try and smear and censor those who criticize them.

Neither NBC News nor Google offered a single example backing up their contention that the Federalist has peddled racist sentiments about Black Lives Matter. As far as I can ascertain, their problem is with one piece:

The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests, which were both included in the report sent to Google.

There is plenty of justification for the offending argument. Major networks have consistently downplayed the rioting and looting that have taken place over the past few weeks because such activity undermines the notion that Black Lives Matter is wholly peaceful. You may disagree with the characterization, but it’s certainly not bigoted. Black Lives Matter shouldn’t be shielded from criticism. No one should be.

Here, it would appear, is the piece in question, written by John Daniel Davidson. Not one word of it is racist.

As it turns out, a Google spokesperson told Ad Week that NBC News got the story wrong, and that Google only notified the Federalist they “could” be demonetized, and that it was the site’s comments section that was in violation. Then Google told Ad Week that the site would be demonetized, but that the Federalist could rectify the situation. Both comments contradict the initial statement made by the Google spokesperson, not to mention the entire NBC story.

Would Google really demonetize sites over their comment sections? Has such a standard ever been used for a political website?


The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to pass on nearly a dozen gun-rights-related cases is breathtaking, not in the denial of hearing any, but in the seeming admission that the conservative associate justices think Chief Justice John Roberts can’t be trusted to protect the Bill of Rights.

The nation’s top court denied writ of certiorari to 10 cases. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry trade association, submitted amicus curiae briefs in two of those cases.

Those cases, Worman v. Healey and Mance v. Barr, centered on fundamental rights to acquire firearms to exercise the right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court’s denial lets stand Massachusetts’ ban on modern sporting rifles and a ban on the sale of handguns across state lines. The court also denied Pena v. Horan, a challenge to California’s Unsafe Handgun Act, which bans handguns in common use for lawful purposes.

The denial of writ of certiorari tells court-watchers the conservative associate justices don’t trust Roberts to uphold the liberties as written in the Bill of Rights.

Enough to Call a Case, But They Don’t
The Supreme Court requires just four of the nine justices to agree to hear an appeal for the nation’s highest court to take the case. Those watching gun cases were hoping for good reason that finally, after a decade of silence from the court, the four votes were now there.

Four justices, including Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, have all recently expressed frustration with the court’s unwillingness to address infringements on Second Amendment rights. Thomas previously noted, “[T]he Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this Court.”
History
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The battles of Lexington and Concord—which kicked off the clash between Great Britain and the colonies—were historically and politically important, but relatively small in scale. The battle of Bunker Hill, however, was another story: Fought on June 17, 1775, it had a sky-high body count. Though the colonies were defeated, American forces performed so impressively and inflicted so many casualties on their powerful opponent that most rebels took it as a moral victory. Here’s your guide to the Bay State’s most storied battle.

1. ITS NAME IS A MISNOMER.
Massachusetts's Charlestown Peninsula, located just north of Boston, was a strip of land with great strategic value. In June 1775—less than two months after the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord—word was circulating that the British aimed to seize the peninsula, a move that would strengthen their naval presence in the area. To prevent this, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety (a patriot-run shadow government organization) ordered Colonel William Prescott to build a fort on Bunker Hill, near the peninsula’s northern shore.

On the night of June 16, Prescott marched 1000 men south of Charlestown Peninsula. Whether because he was intentionally disobeying orders or simply couldn’t find the right hill in the dark, he had his men fortify Breed's Hill rather than Bunker Hill. Toiling through the night, the militia men dug a wide trench surrounded by 6-foot dirt walls. In retaliation, the Brits attacked the next day. Following a barrage of cannonballs launched by His Majesty’s ships, hundreds of Redcoats landed on the peninsula and repeatedly charged the makeshift fortress.

The vast majority of this action took place on or around Breed’s Hill, but the name “Battle of Bunker Hill” remains in use. In the 1800s, Richard Frothingham theorized that the 110-foot Bunker Hill was a “well-known public place,” while the smaller Breed’s Hill was a less recognizable landmark, which might be the reason for the confrontation’s misleading moniker.

2. ONE PARTICIPANT WAS THE FATHER OF A FUTURE U.S. PRESIDENT.
America’s fourteenth Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Pierce, is primarily remembered for signing the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act during his one-term White House stint. Pierce’s father, Benjamin, fought on the rebellion’s side at Bunker Hill and later became Governor of New Hampshire. Another noteworthy veteran of that battle was Daniel Shays, after whom Shays’ Rebellion is named.

3. THAT FAMOUS ORDER “DON’T FIRE UNTIL YOU SEE THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES!” MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN SAID.
According to legend, this iconic order was either given by Prescott or Major General Israel Putnam when the British regulars first charged Breed’s Hill in the early afternoon. Because the rebels had a gunpowder shortage, their commanders instructed them to conserve their ammunition until the enemy troops were close enough to be easy targets.

But as author Nathaniel Philbrick pointed out in this interview, there’s no proof that anybody actually hollered “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” which has been quoted in countless history textbooks and was even riffed in one of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons. “We know that someone said ‘Hold your fire until you see the whites of their half-gaiters,' which [were] the splash guards on the regulars’ feet,” Philbrick said. “That doesn’t have the same ring to it.”

4. OVER 100 BLACK SOLDIERS TOOK PART.
An estimated 150 African-Americans, including both slaves and freemen, fought the British at Bunker Hill. Among them was Salem Poor, an ex-slave who bought his freedom in 1769 at the price of 27 pounds. During the battle, he fought so valiantly that many of his white peers later petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to reward Poor for his heroism [PDF]. Another black combatant, Peter Salem, is sometimes credited with shooting Major John Pitcairn, a British marine whose commanding role at Lexington had earned him notoriety in the colonies—though other sources cite Poor as the infamous redcoat’s killer. Salem himself had fought at Concord and would later see action in Saratoga and Stony Point.

5. WHEN THE PATRIOTS RAN OUT OF AMMUNITION, MANY RESORTED TO CHUCKING ROCKS.
The British's first march on Breed’s Hill quickly devolved into a bloody mess. Rather than spreading themselves out, the advancing infantry arrived in a tightly-packed cluster, making it easy for rebel gunmen to mow them down. The redcoats were also hindered by the rough terrain, which was riddled with rocks, holes, and fences. These factors forced the British into an inglorious retreat. After regrouping, the infantrymen marched on the hill once again—and, just as before, they were driven back.

The first two assaults had thoroughly depleted the colonists’ supply of ammunition, leaving them vulnerable. When the redcoats made their third ascent that day, the rebels had nearly run out of bullets. Struggling to arm themselves, some colonists improvised by loading their muskets with nails, scrap metal, and broken glass. As a last-ditch effort, several dropped their firearms and hurled rocks at the invaders. Such weapons proved insufficient and the Americans were finally made to abandon the hill.

6. THE REDCOATS SET FIRE TO NEARBY CHARLESTOWN.
Charlestown, now one of Boston’s most historic neighborhoods, was originally a separate village seated at the base of Breed’s Hill. Once a thriving community with 2000 to 3000 residents, the locals—afraid for their safety—started abandoning the area after that infamous “shot heard round the world” rang out at Lexington. By June 17, Charlestown had become a virtual ghost town. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, American snipers took to stationing themselves inside the empty village. So, to protect his own men, British General William Howe ordered that Charlestown be burned. The troops used superheated cannonballs and baskets filled with gunpowder to lay the town low.

The inferno didn’t spread to Breed’s Hill, but its effects were most definitely felt there. “A dense column of smoke rose to great height,” wrote an eyewitness, “and there being a gentle breeze from the south-west, it hung like a thunder cloud over the contending armies.”

Some 380 buildings went up in flame. Such destruction was without precedent: Although the British had torched some isolated homes at Lexington, this was the first occasion in which an entire village or town was deliberately set ablaze during the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, the colonies hadn’t seen the last of these large-scale burnings.

7. BRITAIN SUFFERED A DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES.
Though the redcoats prevailed, their victory was a Pyrrhic one. Nearly half of the estimated 2400 British troops who fought at Bunker Hill were killed or wounded. How many men did the Americans lose? Four hundred and fifty—out of an overall force of 1200. The rebels may have been bested, but they’d also put on an impressive showing against some of the most feared and well-trained troops on Earth. Bunker Hill thus became a morale boost for the patriots—and a cause for concern back in England.

One day after the showdown, a British officer lamented “We have indeed learned one melancholy truth, which is that the Americans, if they were equally well commanded, are full as good soldiers as ours, and as it is are very little inferior to us, even in discipline and steadiness of countenance.”

8. PAUL REVERE LATER CONDUCTED SOME FORENSIC DENTISTRY AT THE BATTLEGROUND.
Fun fact: On top of being a silversmith and perhaps the most famous messenger in American history, Paul Revere was a part-time dentist. He learned the trade under an Englishman named John Baker in the 1760s. Revere’s mentor taught him the art of forging replacement teeth out of ivory and other materials, and the future rebel eventually established himself as an in-demand Boston dentist. One of his clients was Dr. Joseph Warren, the man who would dispatch Revere—and fellow rider William Dawes—to warn some Massachusetts statesmen that British troops were headed towards Lexington and Concord on a fateful, much-mythologized night in April 1775.

During the Battle of Bunker Hill, Warren, a Major General, decided to fight right on the front line with patriot volunteers despite his rank and was killed. When the battle was over, Warren's body was dumped into a shallow grave with another slain American..

When the British pulled out of the area in 1776, Warren’s kin finally had the chance to give him a dignified burial. But there was a big problem: Several months had elapsed and the corpses were now rotted to the point of being indistinguishable from each other.

Enter Revere. The silversmith joined a party of Warren’s family and friends in searching for the General’s remains. They knew they'd found the right body when Revere identified a dental prosthetic that he had made for Warren years earlier.

9. THE MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE LAID DOWN THE CORNERSTONE OF THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT.
The Bunker Hill Monument Association wanted to create a grand memorial honoring those who’d given their lives in the Revolution’s first major battle—and on June 17, 1825, 50 years after Putnam and Warren’s men squared off against the British, the monument’s cornerstone was laid at Breed’s Hill. Putting the rock into place was the visiting Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the Revolution who was, as the musical Hamilton put it, “America’s favorite fighting Frenchman.” (For the record, though, he personally didn’t fight at the battle site he was commemorating that day.) Due to funding issues, this granite structure—a 221-foot obelisk—wasn’t finished until 1842. As for Lafayette, he was later buried in Paris beneath soil that had been taken from that most historic of battle sites, Bunker Hill.

10. “BUNKER HILL DAY” IS NOW A MAJOR HOLIDAY IN BOSTON.
In 1786, Bean Town began the tradition of throwing an annual parade in honor of the patriots who saw action on the Charlestown Peninsula. It takes place the Sunday on or before June 17—which itself is celebrated throughout Boston and its home county as “Bunker Hill Day.”


In retrospect, perhaps toasting the success of a new medication he helped invent with several shots of vodka in Moscow was not a good idea. However, it was too late to go back. English research scientist Stewart Adams was faced with the consequences of his actions: a serious hangover.

As he woke up that morning in 1971, Adams realized he needed to do something to relieve his throbbing headache, so he could coherently deliver an important speech at a pharmacological conference in a few hours. He reached for that new drug and swallowed a 600-milligram dose. Voila!

“He took a handful of ibuprofen and felt fine,” recalls his son David Adams. “No hangover!”

While the drug had been tested for pain in clinical trials, no one had yet tried it on an alcohol-induced headache. The older Adams would later say, “That was testing the drug in anger, if you like. But I hoped it really could work magic.”

Stewart Adams and his associate John Nicholson invented a pharmaceutical drug known as 2-(4-isobutylphenyl) propionic acid. It was later renamed ibuprofen and is now one of the world’s most popular nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) under the brand names of Brufen, Advil, Motrin, Nurofen and others. It is estimated that one package of the product is sold every three seconds in the United States.


Two years ago, the United Kingdom experienced an unusually hot summer. Roads melted, fires broke out and the typically verdant English countryside turned brown due to drought.

For archaeologists, the dry weather came with a silver lining: namely, circles, rectangles and other assorted shapes that started appearing in parched fields, their outlines sketched in straw yellows, withered browns and lush greens.

As Toby Driver, an aerial archaeologist with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW), explained to NPR’s Renee Montagne in July 2018, the ghostly contours emerging from the landscape were traces of Britain’s past.

“It’s a bit like an X-ray of the field is revealed,” he said.

Ancient structures such as roads, trenches and buildings left imprints that affect how soil drains today, creating uneven patterns of moisture that can keep a patch of grass green even as neighboring vegetation loses color.

During the scorching summer of 2018, Driver and his colleagues took to the skies to document as many of these crop markings as they could, taking around 5,700 photographs over seven weeks, reported BBC News at the time. Their efforts revealed more than 200 new archaeological sites across Wales.
Free Markets & The Economy
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Free Markets and the Economy - News and Opinion


U.S. retail sales jumped 17.7% from April to May, with spending partially rebounding after the coronavirus had shut down businesses, flattened the economy and paralyzed consumers during the previous two months.

The Commerce Department’s report Tuesday showed that retail sales have retraced some of the record-setting month-to-month plunges of March (8.3%) and April (14.7%) as businesses have increasingly reopened. Still, the pandemic’s damage to retail sales remains severe, with purchases still down 6.1% from a year ago.

The virus-induced recession has not only diminished spending in most sectors of the economy. It has also accelerated shifts in where people shop and what they buy.


Imagine, for a moment, that you work at a bank reviewing and approving loan applications. Let’s say — hypothetically — you’ve just finished a big push and gotten 4.5 million businesses access to over $500 billion in loans. Wow, you’re a very productive worker!

Now, imagine that your boss asks you for a list of those businesses, how much you’ve loaned them and on what terms. And you say, no. It’s confidential information, you tell your boss. It’s even proprietary.

Absurd, right? Your boss makes the rules, pays the bills and is in charge of making sure you’re doing your job. Why shouldn’t they know the details? And, what, they might wonder, is in those details that makes them so worth hiding?


A drive through West Virginia is a revelation when it comes to the power of politicians. Thanks to the late Senator Robert Byrd’s extraordinary influence in Washington, many, many billions of private sector U.S. production that Congress arrogated to itself was spent on “Federal” this and that and “Robert Byrd” this and that in West Virginia.

Byrd’s lamentable ability to capture so much U.S. production for his eternally impoverished state was and is an inconvenient truth for the 99.9% of credentialed economists who believe government spending powers economic growth. West Virginia is a reminder of how ridiculous such a belief is.

With government outlays, the growth already occurred; thus the spending. Government spending on the national level amounts to Congress consuming wealth that was already created. Readers might remember this the next time they’re told about soaring GDP growth. Largely a measure of consumption, the latter is a monument to double counting. Consumption is what happens after we’ve produced. GDP is a consequence of economic growth as opposed to a driver of it.

Looked at through the prism of West Virginia, one imagines that GDP in the Mountain State is greater than actual economic growth. Federal programs rarely die, mostly they grow, so it’s a safe bet that money continues to flow into a part of the U.S. that remains at or close to the bottom of the U.S. in terms of economic opportunity.

It’s a reminder that governments can consume the wealth of others with abandon, but they can’t force the wealth consumed to stay. Translated, investment is what drives economic progress. West Virginia is a poor state because investment rarely finds its way there relative to other U.S. states. Basically billions of federal spending occurs annually in the 35th state, only for the money spent to flow out of West Virginia in pursuit of better returns elsewhere.


Has America’s economic recovery begun? The US released retail sales and industrial production on Wednesday, and both rose for the first time since most of the country went into an institutionally induced coma in hopes of slowing COVID-19’s spread. 

Retail sales jumped a record-high 17.7% m/m, triggering oohs and ahhs from analysts.[i] Industrial production met far less fanfare after it rose just 1.4% m/m.[ii] We wouldn’t read much into the sizable difference in growth rates, as lockdowns hit retailers and heavy industry differently. Rather, each report offers some clues as to how the US economy is responding as states and counties begin reopening.
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Researchers in England say they have the first evidence that a drug can improve COVID-19 survival: A cheap, widely available steroid reduced deaths by up to one third in severely ill hospitalized patients.

The results were announced Tuesday and the British government immediately authorized the drug’s use across the United Kingdom for coronavirus patients like those who did well in the study. Researchers said they would publish results soon in a medical journal, and several independent experts said it’s important to see details to know how much of a difference the drug, dexamethasone, might make and for whom.

As many as six billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, according to new estimates
https://science.ubc.ca/news/many-six-billion-earth-planets-our-galaxy-according-new-estimates

There may be as many as one Earth-like planet for every five Sun-like stars in the Milky way Galaxy, according to new estimates by University of British Columbia astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission.

To be considered Earth-like, a planet must be rocky, roughly Earth-sized and orbiting Sun-like (G-type) stars. It also has to orbit in the habitable zones of its star—the range of distances from a star in which a rocky planet could host liquid water, and potentially life, on its surface.

"My calculations place an upper limit of 0.18 Earth-like planets per G-type star," says UBC researcher Michelle Kunimoto, co-author of the new study in The Astronomical Journal. "Estimating how common different kinds of planets are around different stars can provide important constraints on planet formation and evolution theories, and help optimize future missions dedicated to finding exoplanets."Estimating how common different kinds of planets are around different stars can provide important constraints on planet formation and evolution theories.

According to UBC astronomer Jaymie Matthews: "Our Milky Way has as many as 400 billion stars, with seven per cent of them being G-type. That means less than six billion stars may have Earth-like planets in our Galaxy."

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Harriet Tubman: Army Scout and Spy
Harriet Tubman is best known for helping more than 700 enslaved people gain their freedom after fleeing slavery herself. But her tactical skills also made her a vital Army asset during the Civil War.

Born into slavery in Maryland in 1822, Araminta Ross, who later married and changed her name, escaped in 1849. She would return South again and again to help other enslaved people escape and find safe passage to free states and what is now Canada.

At the outset of the Civil War, Tubman began working at U.S. Army camps designed to aid escapees, but it didn’t take long before she became a scout and a spy. Though she served in an unofficial capacity, she was commanded by Army officers and held her own.

Not only did Tubman provide information that proved vital to the army’s operations, but she went on to lead the armed assault of plantations across South Carolina’s Combahee River. The Combahee Ferry Raid—the first armed assault to be led by a woman during the Civil War—surprised Confederate troops. Led by Tubman, 150 black soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment overran Confederate plantations, and freed 700 people despite the efforts of slavers and Confederate troops to stop them.

After the war, Tubman devoted the rest of her life to helping formerly enslaved people get on their feet. But she struggled to get recognition for the service she rendered the United States. “Tubman received only $200 for her service in the military and did not begin to get a pension until the 1890s—and that was for her husband’s military service, not her own,” writes Alice George for Smithsonian. “Nevertheless, when she died in 1913 at about 91, she was buried with full military honors.”

Edith Nourse Rogers: Mother of WAC
Like thousands of women who came before her, Edith Nourse Rogers went to war in an unofficial capacity, but through her own determination, became one of the Army’s most steadfast allies and innovators. During World War I, the newlywed served as a field hospital inspector and Red Cross volunteer nurse in France. “No one could see the wounded and dying as I saw them and not be moved to do all in his or her power to help,” she wrote later. Rogers returned from the front dedicated to veterans’ causes, and her nursing at Walter Reed General Hospital earned her the nickname “the angel of Walter Reed.”

When her husband, a congressman from Massachusetts, husband died, Rogers took his seat and embarked on an 18-term career in the House of Representatives—a legislative career that would see her involvement in a variety of laws affecting veterans and servicemembers. She sponsored the creation of veterans’ hospitals and got pensions for women Army nurses. She voted for the Selective Service Act, which established the draft during World War II. She sponsored of the GI Bill of Rights, which helped returning white veterans access education and low-interest loans, and suggested that the federal government establish a Department of Veterans Affairs.

Rogers paved the way for women to participate in the Armed Forces, too. She remembered the plight of women volunteers in World War I, who had gone overseas on their own dime and were given no medical care, food, housing or disability benefits despite the essential services they rendered. In 1941, she proposed that the Army create a paid program in which American women could enlist and serve their country in non-combat roles.

The Women Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) brought women into the war—and a year later, Rogers brought them into the military, too, with a bill that created the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and granted them military status. Over 150,000 women served as WACs, the first to serve the Army in non-nurse roles, and the legislation set the stage for other branches of the military to admit women, too. Though no military installation is named after Rogers, a veterans’ hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, bears her name.

Charity Adams Earley: First African American Woman Army Officer
When Charity Adams enlisted in the WAAC during World War II, her race meant she was forced to serve in a segregated unit. She did so with distinction: Not only did the psychologist and educator become the first African American woman to serve as an Army officer, but in 1944 she led the only group of black WACs to serve overseas.

Born in North Carolina, Adams trained as a math teacher. But when the WAAC was formed, she was intrigued by the opportunity, and her initiative and drive soon made her the highest-ranking black woman in the U.S. military at the time. She worked her way up to an officer position supervising training of her fellow WACs, then oversaw the herculean effort to get undelivered mail to servicemen fighting in Europe.

Her unit completed its goal three months ahead of schedule, managing about 65,000 pieces of correspondence each day amidst the chaos of war. While overseas, she defied segregation and discrimination, refusing to buckle when a white general threatened to send a white officer to run her unit in her stead and rebelling against orders to stay in segregated quarters and relax at a segregated recreation center. Eventually, she was promoted to lieutenant colonel, the highest rank a woman could achieve in the WAC. After the war, she married, worked as an educator and administrator, and became a bastion of civic service in Ohio.

Mary E. Clarke: The Army’s Longest-Serving Woman
Mary Clarke enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps just before World War II ended, so it looked like her days serving her country would be short. But by the time she retired in 1981, she had worked her way up from private to major general and served for 36 years—a record for a woman.

Clarke’s service was diverse: She assisted with the Berlin Airlift of 1948-9, oversaw training and eventually became the WAC’s final director before its dissolution in 1978 and incorporation into the U.S. Army. “This action today in no way detracts from the service of WACs who have been pioneers—in fact, it honors them,” she said during the WAC’s disestablishment ceremony. She called the action “the culmination of everything the members of the Women's Army Corps have been striving for for 36 years….the Army’s public commitment to the total integration of women in the United States Army as equal partners.”

The WAC was no more, but Clarke’s Army career was still in high gear. The first woman to serve as major general, she commanded the U.S. Army Military Police School and Chemical Schools and was the first woman to command a major Army installation, Fort McClellan, named in honor of the general-in-chief of the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

Lori Piestewa: First Native American Woman to Die in Combat
Lori Piestewa didn’t have a chance to work her way up the Army ranks—when she died, she was a private first class. In 2003, her convoy was ambushed in southern Iraq and the 23-year-old soldier became both the first woman in the U.S. Armed Forces to die in the Iraq War and the first Native American woman in the Armed Forces to die in combat.

Piestewa, a member of the Hopi Tribe, was the daughter of a Vietnam veteran and the granddaughter of a World War I veteran, both of whom served in the Army. The single mother of two small children, she was deployed to Iraq as part of the 507th Maintenance Company, which provided supplies and support for combat units.

On March 23, 2003, the Humvee she was driving was ambushed. “I had a peace—this calming feeling—because I was with Lori,” Jessica Lynch, who served alongside Piestewa, told History’s Adam Janos. “I knew that whatever we had to face, we were going to do it together. She drove us through flying bullets. At one point, I remember a bullet whizzing through the window…and she remained under control.” Moments later, Piestewa was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade, and Lynch and a fellow servicewoman, Shoshana Johnson, were taken prisoner.

In death, Piestewa was posthumously promoted to specialist and awarded a Purple Heart and a Prisoner of War Medal. Arizona officials renamed a mountain in the Phoenix Mountains Piestewa Peak, and the Lori Piestewa National Native American Games, which brings together athletes of all ages from 72 Native American tribes, still commemorates her each year. It is the largest competition of its kind.


This piece in the New York Times is worth reading for sheer entertainment value. By Ben Smith, formerly of Buzzfeed, it is headlined “Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses.” With this sub-head: “Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media.”

The “class division” is between those who can afford to decamp for the luxury of the Hamptons or the Hudson Valley, and those who have to stay in the city and be exposed to COVID-19. And also, I suppose, work. This is how the upper-media-class lives:

[E]xecutives face a summer without tiki-torch-lit pathways leading to raw bar spreads on the beach, catered for tens of thousands of dollars for a few dozen friends. Parents are growing desperate: “With no camps being open, they’re looking for things to do,” said Boomer Jousma, a yacht broker, who has met that need by selling twice as many yachts as usual, including four of the $1 million-plus Vanquish brand in the last two weeks.

There’s also not so much Instagram. Everyone saw what happened when their neighbor, David Geffen, who paid $70 million for his spread on Lily Pond Lane in 2016, posted a picture of a sunset over his $590 million superyacht in late March and shared that he was “isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” provoking a wave of public shaming. Out here, they’re being careful to avoid both the disease and the anger seething out of New York City, where much of the working media is both exhausted from covering the story of their lives and in open revolt.

I have a friend who has been asking for the last three months, as the Times has heaped coals on the COVID-hysteria fire, where “Pinch” Sulzburger, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd are holed up. Smith doesn’t answer the question as to Krugman and Dowd, but he confirms Pinch’s whereabouts, along with those of a number of other “news” personalities:

When the lockdown arrived, most who could get out of New York did so — to the Hamptons for the old elite, to the Hudson Valley for the second tier.

The CNN president, Jeff Zucker, who is also the chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports, is in East Hampton, where he is among the caddy-less golfers, as is the Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav. The president of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, is in Hampton Bays. (Fox News’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, is still going into the Sixth Avenue office.) At the embattled magazine company Condé Nast, Roger Lynch, the chief executive, has been in mountainous Lake Arrowhead, outside Los Angeles; the artistic director Anna Wintour is weathering the crisis in Mastic, just west of the Hamptons. Troy Young, the president of Hearst Magazines, is on Shelter Island. A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, is in the Hudson Valley; the executive editor, Dean Baquet, has remained in his Greenwich Village apartment.

Meanwhile, employees who are stuck in the city are fuming.

The big stories are being driven by frontline journalists who have been taking personal risks — and, sometimes, contracting the coronavirus, to cover the dual crises in American cities. So the clearest effect of the exodus has been to highlight internal class divisions, which are boiling over in private Slacks and Zoom chats largely invisible to executives.
***
Underlying much of this tension is a sense — in media as in the rest of American society — of just how deep the gaps can be. I felt that sting last week when I saw a tweet from Amber Jamieson raging about rich New Yorkers who fled the coronavirus, leaving behind spacious houses and apartments that would have made for a relatively easy quarantine. “Genuinely hope they feel deep shame their whole lives,” she wrote.

A typically tolerant liberal. #LoveWins!


They say that if you repeat a lie often enough, it will become the truth.

Several viral social media posts claim legislators have been draining education funding for years. A tweet from a high school football coach asserting that “they’ve been defunding education for years” has garnered over a half-million likes in just a few days.

The problem is that we haven’t actually defunded education. We’ve done the opposite.

On average, the United States currently spends over $15,000 per student each year, and inflation-adjusted K-12 education spending per student has increased by 280 percent since 1960. In California, where the previously mentioned football coach resides, inflation-adjusted spending on K-12 education has increased by 129 percent since 1970. Furthermore, data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that nearly a third of all state budget expenditures go toward education.

This is a particularly pernicious myth in the education debate because increased education spending generally isn’t associated with better results. Stanford University economist Eric Hanushek reviewed nearly 400 studies on the topic and concluded that “there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources.”

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Pouring more money into the same broken system won’t fix the deeper problem — government monopolies have weak incentives to cater to the needs of their customers by spending money wisely.

Why won’t this myth ever die? And why do defenders of the government schooling monopoly fight so hard against legitimate data showing that we’ve clearly increased education funding substantially over time?

Part of the problem might have to do with media outlets often getting the basic facts wrong. False claims around education spending often go uncorrected, and corrections are likely to go unnoticed, especially when outlets drag their feet or make stealth edits.


Each passing day without Major League Baseball stands as a stain on America’s national pastime and represents a sad failure to capitalize on a golden opportunity for the game and the country. Today, we should be distracted from our work, glued to our televisions, computers, or smartphones watching otherwise meaningless spring training games with greater interest than ever before, in anticipation of the return to normalcy of the daily drama of baseball.

At a minimum, our ailing nation could use the entertainment of skills competitions, or a reprised “home run derby” series. Baseball in any form, that most cherished spring-fall companion, would provide a needed respite from the mundane of the everyday grind that has only been accentuated by the effects of the Chinese coronavirus.

Instead, MLB’s folly is coming into clear view as June comes and goes. Players, owners, and the league remain unable to come to terms on an agreement to play ball while engaging in an ugly, short-sighted, and ultimately damaging public confrontation.

Historically, if you are a fan of virtually any team save for the New York Yankees or St. Louis Cardinals — and especially like me if you stay true to the New York Mets orange and blue — June marks the transition of a once-promising season to a long, hot summer of pain, suffering, and humiliation.

For this Mets fan, my mid-month birthday stands as a milestone of franchise futility — a reminder that it has been more than three decades since a summer in which a world championship club graced the meadows of Flushing, the remarkable exploits of which I never got to witness. Yet even if you are as jaded and tormented a fan as I am, I suspect you, like me, would give anything right now to once again have your hopes dashed, and heartbroken.

This year, even the most spoiled of fans, blessed with allegiances to the winningest of franchises, face agony. Through natural disasters, civil strife, economic calamity, and world wars, baseball has always marched on as a joyous diversion. No matter what was happening in your life or the world, you could always count on an unscripted three hours each night that would guarantee you something you had never seen before — one installment of 162, comprising the glorious narrative arc that is a Major League Baseball season.

Today, baseball stands still. It’s worse than no joy in Mudville. There’s no Mudville at all.


Twenty-six years ago, Morgan Stanley hired Marilyn Booker as their first diversity director, charged with overseeing corporate efforts from the firm’s New York City headquarters, a 685-foot, glass, Times Square skyscraper. Ten years ago, Booker left that post to work in their financial wealth management division. Seven months ago, Booker was fired.

But that was before video aired of George Floyd’s death, and spreading, national protests escalated into riots, violence, church burning, monument defacing, and occupations. How quickly things change. Now Booker is leading a group of black women in suing the company that employed her for a quarter-century, charging that the firm systematically discriminates against black employees.

The suit comes after a notably active week for the investment bank’s activism. Since Black Lives Matter blasted back into our Alzheimer’s-addled news cycle, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, James Gorman, committed $25 million to a new internal “diversity” effort, sent $5 million to the NAACP, promoted two black women, and sent an email about it all to staff. For his efforts, he was personally named in Booker’s lawsuit.

But Morgan Stanley is not uniquely stupid for empowering an activist whose sole job was to call them racists. For decades, corporate America has launched similar efforts in the vain hope that money, press releases, and choice divestments could virtue-signal them out of the mob’s cross-hairs and even hurt their competitors. None of it saves them. On the contrary, moves to embrace the mob have placed corporations more clearly in their sights than they were before.

At root is the reality that corporations are cowardly, and there’s a reason for that. While conservative consumers are adept at patronizing companies that support their worldview, a la Chick-fil-A, they rarely target private industry for blatant Democratic partisanship. Liberal consumers and their media enablers, on the other hand, will boycott a company for the slightest connection to the slightest transgression.

Over the past 30 years, this has taught corporations like Nike that attacking conservatives has no consequence, while pushing left-wing values has no detriment. Until now.

We’ve seen this sort of suicidal partnership before — and recently — with the secret alliance between environmental radicals and energy companies. First, the energy companies went after their competition in the coal industry, with firms like Chesapeake Natural Gas sending more than $25 million to the Sierra Club. Now this is the model, and at the moment, major oil companies like Exxon are funding a Republican-staffed carbon tax effort that would disproportionately hurt their smaller competitors.