I find this quite troubling. The government shouldn’t be in the business of prohibiting speech, including by pressuring private parties to do so. The case law is a bit mixed, but I’d love to see this issue tested in court.

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.

…

DHS’s mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the evolution of more active measures by DHS.

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

An excellent read. I’m not quite as confident as he is, but I think he’s closer to the truth than a lot of the media would suggest.

In his speech this week, Biden mentioned various issues being contested and then added, “But there’s something else at stake, democracy itself. I’m not the only one who sees it. Recent polls have shown an overwhelming majority of Americans believe our democracy is at risk, that our democracy is under threat.”

This is one of the great misinterpretations of public opinion in my lifetime. A recent New York Times poll found that 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 71 percent of independents believe that “democracy is currently under threat.”

But Americans are all over the place on what poses the actual threat. Voter fraud, voter suppression, corruption, misinformation, polarization, Trump, Biden, nationalism, extremism, and the media all made the list.

For Biden, the topline number suggests everyone should vote for Democrats because Democrats are the only party committed to “democracy.” But that’s nonsense. The mere fact that a majority of Americans are worried that democracy is under threat suggests that Americans like democracy and want to keep it around. Heck, I’m pretty sure that the quarter of Americans who don’t think democracy is under threat like democracy, too.

Sure, Americans like to complain about democracy, but they don’t want to get rid of it. Indeed, besides a handful of fringe dorks and radical fantasists, there is literally no significant constituency on the American right or left for getting rid of democracy. There are significant constituencies for bending the rules, working the refs, even rigging the system, and these constituencies should be fought relentlessly. But while often in error, most of these people believe they are on the side of democracy. The people who wildly exaggerate both voter suppression and voter fraud believe what they’re saying. They’re just wrong.

Democracy Is Not on the Ballot

I’d say I’m 80% confident at this point that covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan biolabs. I applaud ProPublica for doing this investigation, especially since the lab leak theory has gotten coded Republican and so ProPublica had to go against their default political assumptions.

Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab

Interesting and succinct critique from Tyler Cowen:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html

Seems compelling to me, although I’m very easily convinced by economists and should not be trusted.

In summer of 2020, you predicted that inflation was coming back and that we were looking at a prolonged period of financial repression. We currently experience 8+% inflation in Europe and the US. What’s your assessment today?

My forecast is unchanged: This is structural in nature, not cyclical. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the inner workings of most Western economies. In the past four decades, we have become used to the idea that our economies are guided by free markets. But we are in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore. Mind you, I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. The French would call this system «dirigiste». This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history.

Why is this shift happening?

The main reason is that our debt levels have simply grown too high. Total private and public sector debt in the US is at 290% of GDP. It’s at a whopping 371% in France and above 250% in many other Western economies, including Japan. The Great Recession of 2008 has already made clear to us that this level of debt was way too high.

…

What has triggered this process now?

Back in 2008, the world economy came to the brink of a deflationary debt liquidation, where the entire system was at risk crashing down. We’ve known that for years. We can’t stand normal, necessary recessions anymore without fearing a collapse of the system. So the level of debt – private and public – to GDP has to come down, and the easiest way to do that is by increasing the growth rate of nominal GDP. That was the way it was done in the decades after World War II.

My structural argument is that the power to control the creation of money has moved from central banks to governments. By issuing state guarantees on bank credit during the Covid crisis, governments have effectively taken over the levers to control the creation of money. Of course, the pushback to my prediction was that this was only a temporary emergency measure to combat the effects of the pandemic. But now we have another emergency, with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that comes with it.

You mean there is always going to be another emergency?

Exactly, which means governments won’t retreat from these policies. 

https://themarket.ch/interview/russell-napier-the-world-will-experience-a-capex-boom-ld.7606

This is an awesome little short story about one way that life might be post-uploading.

https://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/chaser6.shtml?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Today I discovered that Samuel Becket made this short film (21 minutes) in 1965, nearly silent, starring Buster Keaton at 70, the year before his death. A summary of it seems right out of the infamous filmography footnote to Infinite Jest.

FILM (1965) : Samuel Becket : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Interesting short piece on whether the world is facing an extended period of greater economic difficulty:

Just how we got to this point was laid out to the world’s central bankers at their annual retreat in Wyoming last month by Agustin Carstens, head of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) which effectively serves as the central banks’ banker.

According to Carstens, much of the world economy from the 1990s enjoyed three decades of solid, low-inflation growth due to benign tailwinds including stable geopolitics, technological advances, a spurt in globalisation and an ample pool of labour.

[…]

The 2008/09 financial crisis, pandemic and Ukraine war have revealed how fragile this growth fueled by cheap debt and just-in-time supply chains was. Now, the greater fear is that those tailwinds keeping it all up in the air are turning to headwinds.

Analysis: This might hurt: tectonic plates of global economy shift | Reuters

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2022/08/michael-mapes-collage-portraits/

Zvi Mowshowitz makes a pretty strong case that the new student loan forgiveness and program changes are net bad for everyone except universities, especially including future students. Nice for people who just had loans forgiven, of course, and I can’t blame them for liking it! But all the incentives here are for universities to raise tuition higher until students aren’t benefiting, and future taxpayers are taking a big loss. And of course transferring money to college graduates helps poor people much less than those who are (or will likely become) middle-to-upper-class.

Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, law graduates that go on to work in the public sector, which is a lot of them as the public sector employs many lawyers, only have to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 10 years in order to have their debt forgiven.

Law schools figured out many years ago that, for a student who is planning to enroll in PSLF upon graduation, prices and debt loads don’t matter. Ten percent of your discretionary income is ten percent of your discretionary income regardless of what the law school charges you and how much debt you nominally have to take on.

Law schools also realized that they could make the deal even sweeter by setting up LRAPs [repayment programs, AT] that give graduates money to cover the modest repayments required by the PSLF.

The LRAP schemes work as follows:

The school increases their tuition.

The student takes out federal loans to cover the tuition increase.

The school squirrels away the debt-financed tuition increase into an LRAP fund.

The school disburses money from the LRAP fund to cover PSLF repayments.

Summarized:

Did you get that? Here’s a stylized example. Suppose a student will make 150k per year for 10 years working in the public sector. If they have 200k in debt they pay 15k every year to the government for 10 years and then 50k is “forgiven.” But now the law school comes to the student and says ‘heh, I have a deal which will make both of us better off. We are going to raise the price of law school to 400k but don’t worry not only won’t that cost you a penny more than the 15k a year you are already obligated to pay it will actually cost you much less because we will pay your payments of 15k per year!’ This indeed is a great deal for the student who pays nothing and it’s a great deal for the law school which gets 200k more revenue immediately in return for 150k of payments paid out over the following 10 years. Win-win! Except for the taxpayer of course.

Grand Theft Education | Don’t Worry About the Vase