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I posted earlier about my interest in whether higher oil prices would favor freight trains over trucks. Now, not only is the Trump administration driving up fuel prices, it’s also cutting truck drivers. “About 200,000 immigrant truck drivers - virtually all of them in the U.S. legally - will begin losing their commercial driver's licenses under a Trump administration rule taking effect Monday. “The rule, which will bar many noncitizens from getting new commercial licenses or renewing existing ones, creates challenges for the trucking industry, already struggling with high fuel costs and high driver turnover, according to The Washington Post. Existing licenses will continue to be valid until they expire. “Among those affected are asylum seekers, refugees and DACA recipients.” No, 200,000 manly-man White Americans aren’t going to suddenly materialize to drive these trucks. There’s a reason they were hiring immigrants. You know who gets hurt by this? Middle class and working-class con...

For the past couple of decades, whenever oil prices spiked, I wondered if this would be good news for railroads. Trains in Europe are still very much a thing, and I’ve traveled by train in England, France, Germany and Spain. There are rail connections from Providence to Boston and to New York City. Of particular interest to me, though, is the economics freight rail vs semi tractor trailers. It seems to me that freight trains should be a more efficient use of petroleum, albeit trucks can travel to more places. Last fall, I noticed a bunch of trees that had been chopped down next to what I had assumed were disused railroad tracks near the Ten Mile River Bikeway where I walk every other day. A few days later, I saw a half dozen freight cars pulled by a Providence & Worcester locomotive pass by. This morning, I saw a short set of freight cars pulled Providence & Worcester engine headed Northeast, and thirty minutes later, the same train was traveling the other direction. I don’t kn...

Saint Louis University has a phased retirement program for tenured faculty with sufficient time in service. For up to five years, a qualifying faculty can drop to 70%, 50% or 33% effort, with a commensurate reduction in compensation. They can start at 70% or 50% and drop to a lower level, but they can’t go up to a higher level. Part of the contract is that by the end of the five-year period, the faculty fully retires. This isn’t institutional magnanimity. It’s a kind of buy-out. Indeed, the university has offered tenured faculty buy-outs now and then: quit now, and you walk away on day one with a full year of compensation. These are ways of off-loading tenured faculty who can’t otherwise be fired except for cause.  I took the phased retirement, mostly because I wasn’t emotionally ready to quit cold turkey. And I stayed at 70% of my last pre-phase compensation the entire time, which netted far more money than the buy-out. At the end of the five years, I was ready to be unemployed/re...

Monday evening, we went out to the East Providence library to hear a trio of folk musicians perform (mostly) Celtic music. The instruments included guitar, 5-string banjo, fiddle, harp and bodhran. The performers played both tunes and songs, balancing all the instruments well. The harp was a special highlight; my only beef was that as a Celtic band with a harp, they didn’t play anything by Turlough O’Carolan. In addition to Irish and Scottish melodies, they referenced music from Appalachia and Cape Breton. All three musicians have some Irish background, and the music was interspersed with stories. While the guitar player was re-tuning, the harpist told a couple jokes. This is the one I remember: Joe picks up the morning paper and finds his obituary in it. Shocked, he calls his friend Mick on the phone. “Mick, my obituary is in the paper this morning!” Mick says: “Yeah, I saw that. Where are you calling from? 

A major bulwark protecting the US economy has been that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Now, Trump’s “excursion” (don’t say “war”) is looking to change that. “ A senior Iranian official has told CNN that Tehran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz — but only if cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, not US dollars. The condition, if formalised, would represent the most significant challenge to the petrodollar system in its fifty-two-year history, striking at the financial architecture that underpins American global power rather than at US military assets.” *snip* “ What makes the Iranian proposal structurally significant is not simply that it challenges the dollar — de-dollarisation rhetoric has circulated for years without materialising into meaningful change. What is different here is the mechanism. Tehran is not merely proposing that some bilateral trade occur in yuan. It is proposing that access to the world’s most critical ener...

I registered for the draft as a high school senior during the Vietnam war. At the time, you registered at 18, your lottery number was assigned at 19, and you were drafted at 20 if your number was low enough. In the event (a) my number was high enough that I wouldn’t get drafted and (b) the draft ended by the time I turned 20. The Vietnam War was very much a shaping event for me. By the time I was a postdoc, I embarked on a project of learning history the history of war that began with Stanley Karnow’s book “Vietnam.” Eventually, I realized I couldn’t understand the Vietnam war without understanding the Cold War, I couldn’t understand the Cold War without understanding WWII, and I couldn’t understand WWII without understanding WWI. 40 years and over 200 histories and biographies later, I’m still filling in gaps in my understanding of history and how it informs the present. I just finished “McNamara at war: A new history” by  Philip and William Taubman. McNamara, as JFK’s and LBJ’s S...

Now, Trump is threatening to double down on his Iran disaster. “President Donald J. Trump   threatened Friday   to destroy Iran’s major oil terminal on Kharg Island if Tehran continued to obstruct shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump fancies himself as a deal-maker. Any deal-maker who can bankrupt a casino is a fool. This latest threat is foolish on stilts. Ca. 90% Iran’s oil ships out of Kharg. If that terminal is destroyed, it will effectively cut off all oil income to Iran. Trump apparently thinks either (a) Iran will cave at the threat or (b) he can in will carry out the threat and only Iran will pay the price. Trump has forgotten the Samson Option. “Iran, having been deprived of its livelihood at Kharg, will take down the oil facilities of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It has the drones and missiles to do so. Oil is, to say the least, flammable. So it can be done. As we saw in Kuwait after the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops set oil rig fires in Kuwait, they are...

I get it. As a parent, I had a claim to the supervision of my minor child. And I wouldn’t deprive any other parent of the rights I expect.   But your rights end where my nose begins.  If your parental rights mean dictating the public-school curriculum my child is taught, you need to find a private school. If your parental rights entail exposing my child to your unvaccinated child, you need to find a private school or home-school. If your parental rights mean recruiting the nanny state to teach your backward religion, you need to find a private school or home-school. You have rights, but so do I. I’m fortunate in that my daughter is an adult and a parent herself, so these issues no longer affect me personally. And I live in an enlightened state, where right-wing extremism masquerading as “parental rights” has no purchase. But as an American, I still care about how my tax money is spent, and I don’t want it spent to advance intolerance. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-nex...

The de facto closing of the Strait of Hormuz resulting from Trump’s little war impacts supply chains besides transportation. “ Farmers in the U.S. and Canada, who were already worried about prospects for another year of low profits or losses, now could have spring planting disrupted as they struggle to find fertilizer, ‌and prices for any available supplies have spiked more than a third since the war in Iran paralyzed global trade. “ The U.S., ‌which in some years imports half of its urea fertilizer, is about 25% short of the usual supplies that farmers buy for spring planting, according to The Fertilizer Institute, ​which represents the U.S. fertilizer supply chain. “Supplies could grow still scarcer if fertilizer destined for the U.S. gets rerouted to other places willing to pay more for it, an analyst said.” And with each passing week, Spring planting season looms closer. That’s not something you can just put off for a few months and then kick into gear. Most fertilizer needs to be ...

Vaccines have proven efficacy and public health value over billions of doses and, in many cases, decades of experience world-wide. And yet, the Secretary of HHS insists on calling into question vaccine safety. Yet under his nose, Americans are experimenting with unproven and potentially dangerous peptide injections. “Here’s a new trend that sounds unwise: buying unregulated substances from dealers in foreign countries and injecting them into your body.   “And yet, grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names like BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimizers.   “Across platforms like Discord and Telegram, users are   claiming   these peptides help with everything from injury recovery, athletic performance, weight loss, mental function, better sleep and younger-looking skin.” Look, semaglutides are peptides and, after considerable testing and experience have been sh...

There were few if any Chinese students in my college classes and none in my graduate program. There was only one Chinese postdoc in the lab where I did postdoctoral training, and no Chinese grad students. But two of the four grad students who started in my department when I started as a faculty in 1987 were Chinese. Ultimately, I trained three Chinese PhD students and two Chinese postdocs in my lab. There was one Chinese faculty at the time I started, although he was from Taiwan. Today, 3 of the 18 faculty are Chinese.  China has been sending some of their best and brightest students for decades, and they represent a major reservoir of US-trained scientific talent. But Trump’s attacks on science, federal research and research universities threatens this investment in human capital. On the other hand, China is expanding its commitment to scientific research. “The Chinese government is ramping up its support for science, announcing plans to boost two key budgets at the country’s bigg...

Much is being made of the probable consequences of Trump’s Iran war for the US economy and the midterm elections. And “it’s the economy, stupid” still describes the dominant consideration in the minds of American voters. But to the extent that foreign policy affects the ballot box, the fact that Trump’s invasion is a proxy war for the Netanyahu regime in Israel could also be a factor in November. Here, the distinction seems less along party lines than the willingness of candidates to apply the standard of national interest to military intervention. Both major parties in America have mostly stood by Israel, even as its policy of violent apartheid against Palestinians has intensified. As Democrats try to figure out how to exploit the disaster that the Trump GOP has become, they’ll need to come clean on the blank-check policy towards Israel. “ PARTY OFFICIALS TOLD ME they think Democratic voters will be motivated in the upcoming elections to back candidates who feel authentic—candidates w...

The justifications for the war on Iran were kind of a dog’s breakfast. Among those mentioned were regime change and unconditional surrender, which promised a long commitment and boots on the ground. Looks like the stock market and oil prices got through to Cadet Bone Spurs. “What this all comes down to is that the White House is running as fast as it can from regime change and even faster from its demand for “unconditional surrender”. Trump wants to be done because the conflict is getting too messy, Gulf allies are certainly privately asking WTAF Trump’s plan is and more than anything else Trump is realizing that he is triggering what has been the most reliable presidency killer in American politics for more than half a century: spiking gas prices.” https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-now-moonwalking-away-from-regime-change-as-fast-as-he-can

  If you don't want to get vaccinated and your don't want your kids to get vaccinated, that's on you. But don't be surprised if the rest of us don't want to suffer from your bad judgement. You have no right to inflict the consequences of your bad decisions on others. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1259384362680113

Within the first couple years of my joining the faculty of Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic University, my chairman asked me to attend a dinner sponsored by the Jesuits. The goal of the dinner was for the Jesuits to assess the Jesuit mission at the School of Medicine. After dinner, we were each asked to introduce ourselves. One after the other, the faculty said they had attended Jesuit universities and/or medical schools and asserted that that experience conferred a special concern for ethics and morality that they carried since. I was the only member of the party that, while having been raised Roman Catholic, only trained in secular universities. I told everyone that I felt my training also prepared me for a moral and ethical life, and I couldn’t discern anything unique about the morality of Saint Louis University faculty. After I went home, I pondered this idea and came up with an experimental test. Over the 40-year span of the Tuskegee syphilis study, there must have been h...

TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) was coined to describe Trump’s flip-flops on tariffs, but he’s flip-flopped on other notorious threats. “The Trump administration plans to abandon its defense of the president’s executive orders sanctioning several law firms, according to people familiar with the matter.   “The Justice Department as soon as Monday was expected to drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey.    “Trump issued a string of  executive orders last year  against several law firms and individual lawyers that would have stripped security clearances, restricted their access to federal buildings and directed agencies to end any federal contracts with the firms and their clients.   “The White House campaign sent a chill through the industry. Fear of the orders also prompted other large firms  to make deals with the presiden...

In the ancient world, people saw signs and portents in eclipses, weather and earthquakes. The God(s) must be trying to tell them something, they believed. By the beginning of the 20 th  century, educated people should have abandoned such primitivism. And most did. But reality, facts and evidence continue to confound evangelical Christians.   “Hagee’s blood moon prophecies have become enormously popular in evangelical circles. The Christian Broadcasting Network   cited   them this week in its coverage of the war. An “ analysis ” the network published on its website acknowledged that the blood moons might be a coincidence, but that “doesn’t mean there also wasn’t an intentional message that was pre-ordained from the time God set the sun, moon, and planets in motion in Genesis 1.” The blood moons, along with the war, could be a sign of the end-times.   “Hagee may be the godfather of Iran-related prophecies, but prophets echoing them have become commonplace.   ...

There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts around nearly every corner here in Rhode Island, or so it seems. And there’s a cemetery just a block away from our house. Coincidence? We report, you decide. But the mortality rate here doesn’t seem markedly higher than anywhere else I’ve lived. But RFK Jr is coming for your Dunkin’, Rhode Island! “We’re going to ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it,’” Kennedy told the applauding audience. “I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do it.” OK, not the donuts, just the sweetened coffee. But all sugar? Or just above a certain amount? Who pays for the sugar police? Pick up any bottle of prepared salad dressing, soda, soups or ketchup and read the ingredients. Many prepared foods on the grocery shelf have added sugar, either in the form of sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup. That’s not going away. And of course, there isn’t an atom of evidence that it...

During my 37 years on the faculty (I’m emeritus now) of Saint Louis University, I never expected to find my university included on a list of elite and Ivy League research universities. And yet, here we are: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is  cutting academic ties  between the Pentagon and 13 leading universities in a performative campaign against “wokeness” and alleged anti-Americanism. The disfavored schools, according to a Feb. 27  memo  from Hegseth’s office, currently educating are:   Harvard University Saint Louis University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Tufts University Georgetown University Carnegie Mellon University Brown University Columbia University Yale University Middlebury College Princeton University The George Washington University College of William and Mary   Kinda makes me proud. On the other hand, among the “favored” universities are my alma maters University of Tennessee and University ot North Carolina, a distinction they share...

There’s absolutely no evidence that Iran has, or has ever possessed, nuclear weapons. Indeed, the Obama Administration negotiated an agreement whereby Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons or even enrich uranium to the purity necessary to create a fission bomb. Trump tore up that agreement, but there’s no evidence that Iran made any progress toward an atom bomb since then. Still, last June Trump claimed to have obliterated Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program. Now he’s claiming that his attack on Iran was justified because their nuclear weapons posed an immanent existential threat. So is the Iranian atom bomb dead or alive? “Speaking from the East Room at the start of a ceremony to award the Medal of Honor to a trio of U.S. Army soldiers who’d served in the Second World War, the Vietnam War and Afghanistan, the president said Iran’s ballistic missile capability would have “soon” been able to reach beyond hitting American bases in the Middle East and Europe to hit “our beauti...

I just finished reading  Sitting Bull’s War: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fight for Buffalo and Freedom on the Plains  by Paul L. Hedren. Several years ago, I read “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S.C. Gwynne, which is a history of the Cheyenne people, so I was passingly familiar with the clash of the plains Indians and White settlers in all its violence, tragedy and inevitable outcome. Sitting Bull’s War is unusual in telling the history largely through the lens of the Indian experience. The time period is basically from 1870 to the mid 1880s, and largely involves the Hunkpapa Sioux, Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne, although many other smaller tribes appear. The clashes begin with the surveying of the northern buffalo country for the Northern Pacific railroad. Small skirmishes ensued as the Indians tried to drive off the White men, who then returned with military protection. In several battles, Indians noted the poor marksmanship of the soldiers. Gradually, the buildup of Am...

During the Vietnam war, we were told Americans were fighting and dying because of the domino theory—that if the dictatorship in South Vietnam fell, the communists would take over all of Southeast Asia and India. It was a lie. During the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq, we were told that Americans were fighting and dying because Saddam (a) was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and (b) had WMDs that threatened the United States. It was a lie. Now, the US has, with Israel, embarked on what appears to be a sustained war in Iran, justified by a need for regime change, something Trump came to office repudiating. Is this war necessary? Is it worth the loss of lives and the suffering it will necessarily cause? Here’s Timothy Snyder: “A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be ...