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On Saturday I was up in LA on a variety of errands. My last stop was the Westlake/MacArthur station near MacArthur Park, where I wanted to check out the blaring classical music being played to keep the bums out. Was it really loud enough to count as torture?

Two caveats. First, MTA might have turned down the volume since the LA Times ran its story last Tuesday. I have no way to know. Second, I recorded my visit on my phone, which doesn't do a very good job of recording ambient noise. Or, more accurately, it does too good a job of recording ambient noise. Metro stations are fairly loud places, with air conditioning and machinery noises echoing through a cavernous space, but it's not as loud as the video makes it sound. That said, the music wasn't really especially annoying. In fact, it was hard enough to hear that I couldn't tell you what it was. Now, however, you may judge for yourself.

UPDATE: Yep, the volume has been turned down.

Over the weekend I observed that conservatives have been notably silent about the flaky legal reasoning behind Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's nationwide ban of the abortion pill mifepristone. Today, National Review's Michael New takes a different approach: instead of trying to defend Kacsmaryk's ruling on legal grounds, he claims that mifeprestone is, in fact, more dangerous than you think:

On April 1, the New York Times published a thorough analysis of the research on chemical-abortion drugs. They conclude that a vast majority of the academic studies show that chemical abortion drugs do not pose a significant health risk to women.

OK then! So what's the problem?

However, much of the research on the Times article is not relevant to current risks of chemical abortions obtained in the United States. That is because, on multiple occasions, the FDA has instituted policy changes that likely increased the health risks involved with the chemical-abortion-pill regimen.

....A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology....They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.

That sounds like a lot. Let's go straight to the data:

I assume that New's use of 2002 was a typo since data goes back to 2001. During the period of the study, the number of ER visits for chemical abortions increased 532% while the number for surgical abortions increased 488%.

Is that a "much smaller" margin? You can be the judge of that.¹ However, the number of ER visits in 2015 stood at 35.5% for chemical abortions vs. 35.8% for surgical abortions.

This all comes from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a group dedicated to electing anti-abortion candidates. Even so, I guess this is the best they could do on mifepristone. I'd say that its reputation as a dependable pharmaceutical is safe for now.

¹For what it's worth, the entire difference is due to a single ER visit in 2001. If, instead of one ER visit that year following a chemical abortion, there had been two, the increase in ER visits through 2015 would have been 266% compared to 488% for surgical abortions. This is a demonstration of the power of cherry picking increases from tiny starting numbers.

Here's the latest from Texas. During the summer of 2020 an Army sergeant named Daniel Perry was upset about a nearby BLM protest. He wrote to a friend on social media that he might “kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.”

The friend, naturally, asked, “Can you legally do so?” Perry said he could: “If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.”

Perry proceeded to put this plan into action. He drove his car into the BLM march and a group of protesters approached him. One of them was in front of the car carrying a rifle, and Perry told police: "I believe he was going to aim it at me....I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me, you know." So he shot the guy five times with a revolver and then drove away.

On Friday a jury convicted him of murder.

On Saturday Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he would pardon Perry just as soon as he possibly could:

In summary, in Texas you can (a) announce that you'd like to gun down a BLM protester, (b) set out to deliberately provoke a confrontation with a BLM protester by driving into a crowd, (c) gun down a BLM protester, and (d) get pardoned by the governor, who says the killing was self-defense.

The BLM protester who got gunned down and is now being used as a political prop by Gov. Abbott is named Garrett Foster. He was a frequent participant in BLM protests.

On this 990th Easter Sunday, let us take to heart Christ's teaching on poverty and wealth. His messages, often veiled in the form of parables, are crystal clear on this subject:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God....But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
Luke 6:20, 24

This week, mammon responded with a similar homily:

One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by annual income. To compute an estimate of the net benefits of a regulation using this approach, you first compute the traditional net benefits for each subgroup. You can then compute a weighted sum of the subgroup-specific net benefits: the weight for each subgroup is the median income for that subgroup divided by the U.S. median income, raised to the power of the elasticity of marginal utility times negative one. OMB has determined that 1.4 is a reasonable estimate of the income elasticity of marginal utility for use in regulatory analyses.

Fucking government. They have to bollox everything up into some kind of incomprehensible gibberish, don't they? But I'm here to help. This is part of a new proposal from the OMB, charmingly named Circular A-4, about how to do cost-benefit calculations. The old system was pretty simple: if a new proposal benefited you a dollar but cost me a dollar, the cost-benefit was zero. In the new proposal:

  • OMB recommends that we account for diminishing marginal utility. This is the fact that the more money you have, the less each dollar means to you.
  • To account for that, divide your income (and mine) by the median income.
  • Then raise those numbers to the power of -1.4.

Still confused? Here's a handy chart showing how much a dollar means to you depending on your income:

The median household earns $70,000, so it gets a weighting of 1.

But if you're working class and earn, say, $30,000, an extra dollar is worth $3.27 to you. Conversely, if you're upper middle class and earn $200,000, an extra dollar is worth only 23¢.

So if I'm evaluating a new government program and it improves the life of a working class person by $10, that's a benefit of $32.70. If I take away $10 from an upper middle class person to pay for it, the cost is $2.30. Instead of a cost-benefit of zero, I have a whopping positive cost-benefit of $30.40.

This is via Noah Kaufman, who has (apparently) read the entire 91 pages of Circular A-4 and says:

This new guidance on capturing distributional concerns is the show stopper. Because this isn't just an assumption tweak. It's an entirely different approach to cost-benefit analysis.

Releasing this new guidance on a holiday weekend has kept it under the radar so far, but that won't last long. Needless to say, the usual suspects will have something to say before long. I predict that they will be very pissed off.

I've seen a flurry of Democratic governors assuring their residents that mifepristone will by God continue to be available in their states. I appreciate the sentiment and applaud their public support.

However, there's a wee gotcha here: mifepristone will continue to be available only if its manufacturers continue to ship it, and they will do this only if their legal position is crystal clear. But if the Kacsmaryk decision takes effect next week,¹ that puts manufacturers and distributors under a legal cloud. These kinds of companies don't want to get involved in potentially expensive culture war battles, so there's a good chance they would halt shipments of mifepristone out of an abundance of caution. Ditto for pharmacies around the country.

In other words, even blue states are at risk here. Because of this, an emergency stay from the Supreme Court is imperative.

¹That is, if it's not stayed by a higher court before its start date of next Friday.

Two Democratic members of the Tennessee legislature, Justin Pearson of Memphis and Justin Jones of Nashville, have been expelled by Republicans who control a supermajority in the state House of Representatives. The given reason was "lack of decorum."

So now Memphis and Nashville have two empty seats to fill. Who are they going to pick? First up is Nashville:

At least 29 members of Nashville’s 40-seat Metro Council said they plan to reappoint expelled former Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, and send him back to the Tennessee House of Representatives. That would give him more than the simple majority he would need to reclaim his seat.

Okey dokey. Now for Memphis:

The Shelby County Commission could consider reappointing Justin Pearson to his seat in the Tennessee statehouse, Chairman Mickell Lowery said Thursday....In Shelby County, the commission has a nine-member Democratic supermajority.

Jones is a lock to be reappointed, and Pearson has five public supporters out of the seven he needs. He's probably a lock too. So how are Republicans responding?

FOX13 also learned that Memphis could lose funding for some major projects if Pearson is re-appointed. According to Shelby County Commissioner Erika Sugarmon, leaders in Nashville threatened to withhold millions of dollars in state funding for projects in the Memphis area if commissioners were to reappoint Pearson.

"We are also being threatened by the state to take away funding, needed funding to run our schools, to run our municipalities," Sugarmon told FOX13. "You know, and so, for example, FedExForum, the promised $350 million, they're talking about snatching that away. So, again, you know this about bullying people into submission."

Our story so far: Tennessee Republicans expel a couple of Black Democrats for obviously specious reasons. They are likely to be reappointed quickly by outraged constituents. In response, Republicans are threatening to pull funding for local projects.

That's today's Trumpified Republican Party for you. It's all about governing by revenge.

We have recently run an excellent natural experiment about the rule of law:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump was indicted on 34 counts of business fraud. Response was partisan, of course. Republicans unanimously blasted the legal basis for the case as both trivial and wrongheaded. Democrats . . . were split. Some defended the legal reasoning but others agreed the case was iffy.

On Friday, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the FDA had wrongly approved the abortion pill mifepristone two decades ago and ordered it taken off the market. Again, response was partisan. Democrats unanimously blasted the judge's legal reasoning as specious and biased. Republicans . . . unanimously supported the judge.

By any sensible standard, the mifepristone ruling was farcical. The judge plainly struggled to invent a plausible argument that would allow him to make abortion pills illegal, and in the end he failed. So he just went with what he had.

And so far, Republicans are 100% behind him. He accomplished the right goal, and nothing else matters.

Well, the idiot judge in Texas did it:

A federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary ruling invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, an unprecedented order that — if it stands through court challenges — could make it harder for patients to get abortions in states where abortion is legal, not just in those trying to restrict it.

But wait!

Less than an hour after Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, another federal judge, in Washington State, issued a ruling that directly contradicted the Texas decision, ordering the F.D.A. to make no changes to the availability of mifepristone.

This should be fun. Both rulings will be appealed, so perhaps we'll have a standoff between the 5th and 9th Circuits, duking it out over whose judge gets to make temporary national policy.

In the meantime, has the FDA started up a re-approval process for mifepristone just in case it eventually loses in the Supreme Court? I haven't seen any reports of this, but it sure seems like a good idea.

UPDATE: The Washington ruling is not nationwide. It affects only the 17 states that are parties to the lawsuit in front of the judge.

What are they staring at? A bird? A dog? An Amazon delivery driver? My recollection is that I looked out the window and, as usual, saw nothing. But then, I don't have five-dimensional cat eyes, do I?

New York City mayor Eric Adams announced a new contract with the police union yesterday. There hasn't been one for many years, so it was retroactive to 2017. Here's how they did:

I estimated inflation of 4% in 2023 and 3% in 2024. Bottom line: in real terms, the NYPD will be making less by the end of the contract than they did at the start of 2017.

This is just base pay. There may be perks and benefits that bulk it up a bit.