My last two weekly columns have been about reparations for slavery in the U.S. Please check the full columns out at the New York Sun ("Biden May Yet Eye Reparations for U.S. Slavery," and "With Reparations, Would Obama Get a Check—Or Write One?") and Newsmax ("Could Reparations Actually Find Bipartisan Support?" and "Reparations Will Reinforce Victimhood Not Heal It.")

From the New York Times's T magazine:

Indeed, there's a troubling historical connection between organic food and white ethnonationalism, drawing on the language of purity and a gauzy, idealized notion of a nativist relationship to the land, which must be kept unsullied by industrial pesticides or "foreign substances," in the words of the Nazi scientist Werner Kollath, who during the Second World War promoted the slogan "Lasst unsere Nahrung so natürlich wie möglich" — "Leave our food as natural as possible" — alongside forced sterilization and eugenics. At the beginning of January, one of the far-right insurgents arrested after the invasion of the United States Capitol was reported to have demanded organic food in jail, in order to keep from getting sick.

The business section of the New York Times carries a bizarre dispatch about a rebellion by the Schwarzman Scholars against their benefactor.

Under the online headline "After Capitol Riots, Billionaire's 'Scholars' Confront Their Benefactor," the Times reports that

some participants in the Schwarzman Scholars program — a master's course he established at Tsinghua University in Beijing to be a Chinese analogue to the Rhodes Scholarships — are speaking out against their benefactor.

They say Mr. Schwarzman is failing to live up to his own values and harming the program's reputation by not cutting off money to lawmakers who opposed certifying President Biden's electoral victory.

Also, "After Mr. Trump introduced a travel and immigration prohibition aimed at people from predominantly Muslim countries, Mr. Schwarzman received sharp questions from the scholars on a video chat, according to one attendee."

President Biden has yet to nominate a commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. The New York Times reports that one of two apparent front-runners for the job is Joshua Sharfstein, who was deputy commissioner during the Obama administration. I know Sharfstein from college and, while he's certainly to the left of me, he'd be a fabulous FDA commissioner—bright, thoughtful, independent-minded, public-spirited, caring, and an excellent communicator. Biden would be lucky to have him in the administration. Just reading about the possibility that he would end up as FDA commissioner made me feel like we moved that much closer to getting Covid-19 in the rear-view mirror. If Biden does choose Sharfstein, he deserves rapid Senate confirmation.

President Biden took some time Saturday afternoon in a low-key way to go visit his friend and former Senate colleague Bob Dole, the Republican Party's 1996 presidential candidate, who recently announced he has Stage 4 lung cancer.

What a gracious thing to do, and what a nice way to follow through on the promise to help unite America.

David Brooks writes in his New York Times column a letter to a young Republican: "You may have noticed that this week, Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton are teaming up on an effort to raise the minimum wage and enforce immigration laws, two plans to boost working class wages. That's what there needs to be more of."

The legislation is still being drafted. A Cotton tweet described the immigration enforcement provision as "requiring employers to verify the legal status of every worker so they can't undercut Americans on the black market."

In today's mail came the Winter 2021 issue—the second that has been published—of Liberties, the new journal edited by Leon Wieseltier of New Republic fame.

It is refreshingly different from what else is out there, not least in its online strategy, which seems to consist of not publishing the articles on the Internet, even behind a paywall, but requiring people instead to subscribe in print.

Here are two things I enjoyed in the current issue. From Nicholas Lemann, a suggestion to "decentralize power." He writes, "Like everybody else, experts live in their own enclosed worlds, and they often operate on distinctive, non-universal, and not fully conscious assumptions that nobody they encounter ever challenges. Technocracy is not a guarantee of truth or wisdom. No matter how smart and epistemologically sophisticated they are, experts miss things....in a democracy, experts must be prepared to respect and honor what the great majority of citizens who aren't experts think."

The talent flow to Florida that has been the topic of extensive earlier coverage here includes now also the Yale a capella singing group known as the Whiffenpoofs. The Yale Daily News reports that

while the group is not holding live performances this year, the Whiffenpoofs plan to rehearse, hold virtual performances and record music in Florida. Their trip this month is an outlier during the pandemic, since all other campus a cappella groups continue to refrain from traveling or rehearsing in person, in accordance with the Yale Singing Group Council's guidelines.

If anyone thinks that it is the sunshine and warm weather rather than policy choices that explain why Florida is such a pandemic success story, compare it to Los Angeles, which has been in much worse shape.

General Motors' announcement that it will, by 2035, stop selling cars and trucks with internal combustion engines is the topic of my most recent column. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun ("Why NYTimes Is Kvelling About The Free Market") and Newsmax ("GM's Move to Electric a Hat Tip to China, Not US Markets.")

The Foreign Agents Registration Act is the topic of my latest column. Please check out the full column at Reason ("Does America Really Need the Foreign Agents Registration Act?"), Newsmax ("Stop Making Criminals of Those Failing to Complete the Right Paperwork"), and the New York Sun ("Foreign Agents Law Is Looking in Need of Reform").

Lawrence Summers writes in the Washington Post:

while there are enormous uncertainties, there is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability. This will be manageable if monetary and fiscal policy can be rapidly adjusted to address the problem. But given the commitments the Fed has made, administration officials' dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply. Stimulus measures of the magnitude contemplated are steps into the unknown. For credibility, they need to be accompanied by clear statements that the consequences will be monitored closely and, if necessary, there will be the capacity and will to adjust policy quickly.

San Francisco hasn't even been able to open its public schools for teaching and learning amid the pandemic. Its school board's recent vote to rename 44 schools named after Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other figures has prompted a significant backlash. Among the schools slated for renaming is Dianne Feinstein elementary school; that prompted a memorable Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, "Cancelling Dianne Feinstein."

Left unremarked mostly is the question of who thought naming a school after a still-active politician was a good idea to begin with. Back in 2010, when Frank Lautenberg was still a senator, a trip through the Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station prompted me to suggest: "How about a law that says no federal money can be used to name anything for a politician until the politician is dead?"

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a press release announcing that she will join the Senate Finance Committee. From the release: "She also announced plans to introduce legislation implementing a wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million. The Finance Committee's jurisdiction covers taxation and revenue policy, including oversight of the Internal Revenue Service. The senator's legislation reflects her 2020 campaign proposal to impose a two cent tax on every dollar of individual wealth over $50 million, with an additional surtax on every dollar of wealth over $1 billion."

This Caltech video interview with Charlie Munger, investor and longtime Warren Buffett partner, is from December 2020, but a friend recently passed it along with a recommendation. Munger is 97 but was 96 when the interview was conducted.

Asked about climate science, Munger said "there's a lot of disagreement."

He said, "My attitude on that is, the worst that can happen in terms of global climate, can be coped with by the advanced civilizations. If you had to erect seawalls, to protect the entire present United States, that wouldn't take that much of GDP per capita for that many years and it could be done quite safely if we had to. So I don't see that as the worst tragedy that a man could get." (That's at about the 31 minute mark).

On higher education, Munger praised the Caltech physics department, but observed: "It's harder to be that smart in the liberal arts. Many liberal arts professors are so leftist. It's hard to be pretty smart if you are crazy leftist. You are going to have the world a lot wrong." (That's at about the 52 minute mark).

President Biden's borrowing binge is the topic of a recent column of mine. Please check out the full column at Newsmax: "Make No Mistake, Joe's on a Spending Rampage." Or at the New York Sun: "Biden's Borrowing: A Problem for President Harris."