John Stossel's latest column -- and video, which I'm embedding below -- are worth your time and are both incredible for two very different reasons.

Let's start with the positive side of the ledger. Stossel's six minute video will be an eye-opening demonstration (or reminder) of the potential for this new and rapidly evolving technology to improve our lives.

Even though the technology is relatively new, and many people remain unfamiliar with it, enough people are that market feedback has led to impressive improvements. People who grouse about propeller noise, for example, may be surprised at how quiet some of the newer models are, if they notice them at all.

On to the negative side of the ledger: As amazing as this technology is, the sheer obduracy of the regulatory state is giving it a run for the money. Stossel touches on this a couple of times:

Drone delivery was supposed to be common years ago. Jeff Bezos told 60 Minutes he expected Amazon to be sending out drone deliveries by 2017.

But most of us still don't have it. Why?

And later:

President Donald Trump hopes to speed that process. He signed an executive order telling the FAA to fast-track drone deliveries by allowing drones to fly beyond line of sight.

But he did that more than a year ago. Government is, as usual, so slow! The FAA didn't even respond to Trump's order for months.

If you think that's bad, this is on top of something I commented on nearly eight years ago:

The President who wanted to remove two old regulations for every new one recently signed into law the FAA Reauthorization Act, which repeals an old statutory exemption from FAA rules for model aircraft, such as drones. The new law will take some time to take effect...

What happened to that? is just about all I can say. Unlike today, that was one of the few times the President bothered to involve the legislature in an attempt to affect a policy. It would seem to have had absolutely no effect.

Considering this in very general terms, I'd say this may be a case of things being earlier than you think on a front for the battle for freedom. This President has no principles and never bothers to articulate why he wants to achieve anything. As a result, he has blown two opportunities to build momentum for a much-needed revision of a policy that is crippling a new sector of the economy. And that sector, as we are seeing in Ukraine and the Middle East -- and can thus easily imagine -- has national security implications.

And yes, China is already way out in front of us.

-- CAV

We agree with the claim but are surprised at the source:

In 2004 the New Economics Foundation (NEF) conducted a national survey of UK high streets, which were then still economically active. It found that real local shops had been replaced by swathes of identikit chain stores, making high streets up and down the country virtually indistinguishable from one another. It also came up with a new vocabulary for talking about urban areas.

In this terminology, a “home town” is a place that retains its individual character and is instantly recognisable and distinctive to the people who live there, as well as those who visit. A “clone town”, in contrast, is a place that has had the individuality of its high street shops replaced by a “monochrome strip of global and national chains”.

This is bad. It’s just that to have the New Economics Foundation, The Observer and John Naughton all telling us that central planning is bad is a bit of a surprise. In any other area of life - education, health care, even housing - we’d have them shrieking at us that variation over geography would be that dread postcode lottery.

Oh well, consistency is for the little people no doubt.

Tim Worstall

THE WHOLE ANTI-DATA CENTER THING IS A PSY OPS BY PEOPLE WHO DON’T MEAN US WELL:  I Made a Website to Monitor Data Center Effects on Electricity Prices.

I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the things that happened while I was campaigning, and I decided to jot down a short commentary on the handful of primary victories for candidates from the Democratic Socialists of America. My thoughts expanded a bit, and it turned into a longish commentary, so please bear with me.

But first, a few comments on some other recent news items.

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The Most Powerful Woman in the World

We’re getting a big lesson these days in what it’s like to live in a “personalist” regime, where the entire government is synonymous with one man and his personality and his particular quirks and preferences. This results in a kind of Imperial Court gathered around the one man where court favorites and flatterers gain outsized and undeserved influence.

Consider, for example, the case of Congressman Max Miller, who has been in the news recently because of credible accusations that he abused his ex-wife and daughter (who also happen to be the daughter and granddaughter of US Senator Bernie Moreno, leading to a little family drama within Congress).

How did a creep like this rise to the position of being in the US Congress? A profile of Miller describes him as a spoiled rich kid from a wealthy and well-connected family in Ohio. But what really launched his career was that he got a job as an aide to Donald Trump. And here was the specific skill he brought to that job.

Trump…acquired Miller in a package deal in 2016 when he poached Marco Rubio’s deputy finance director Eli Miller, who had recommended his cousin [Max] for a job driving the Florida senator around Chicago the previous year. But Trump quickly came to see Miller almost as a surrogate son, in large part due to his innate talent for knowing just what nostalgic show tune at what precise moment—“Memory” from Cats, for example—would succeed at talking Trump off the ledge of an incipient meltdown. In those days, senior White House staffers would summon Trump’s “Music Man” when the president became grouchy, “so [Miller] could check on the order of the songs.”

Impunity catapulted the Music Man to public office. When a handful of GOP congressmen voted to impeach Trump over January 6th, Miller was the first primary challenger he recruited to launch his 2022 vengeance tour, to challenge one of those impeachment voters, former Ohio State wide receiver Anthony Gonzalez, who represented a northeast Ohio district just east of where Miller had grown up.

I am not making this up, nor is the writer of this profile. Miller’s “Music Man” role has been reported at several other places. And it’s—well, it’s a weird way to run a serious job like being the president of the United States, isn’t it? It’s a very alarming way to do it.

That brings us to the latest court favorite, Natalie Harp. Who is Harp? If you follow politics very closely, you have probably heard of her before. She is a youngish woman—by the standard of politics, which is an old man’s game, 35 is considered young—who wormed her way into Trump’s inner circle by heaping ridiculously over-the-top adulation on him, which is just the sort of thing he likes and desperately needs. Just as Miller become known as the “Music Man,” Harp became known as the “human printer.”

The New York Times describes her as “the utmost gatekeeper to President Trump, a one-woman conduit of information operating entirely outside the usual chain of command.”

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

This has also made her into a highly influential gatekeeper of presidential influence.

She is the president’s constant companion on Marine One, at Mar-a-Lago, and at summits across the world, those familiar with her position told me. They added that the president has described her to them as “my Natalie.” She’s also been nicknamed the “human printer” because she totes around a portable printer so she can, at any point, dash out a paper copy (Trump’s preferred form in which to read things) of a poll or a news story. She has learned his cadence—and unorthodox capitalizations—well enough to draft social-media posts for him to approve. She trawls social media for material that the president can use in his feeds, including posts that have led to trouble, such as one depicting the Obamas as apes. Some aides have quietly grumbled to those I spoke with that Harp is too inexperienced to have such unfettered access to the president.

Each item she prints, whether a positive poll of dubious origin or an attack on a political foe, reinforces Trump’s worldview. In Regime Change, a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump is depicted explaining to people that Harp is the only aide who loves him as much as his family does. Haberman now says that Harp is Trump’s “human binkie.” Tales of Harp’s commitment to Trump are legion: She rode in the trunk of an SUV to accompany him to court. She sprinted across a golf course in Scotland so he wouldn’t be out of her sight. She left notes for the president that documented her intense devotion. And so on.

In effect, she is a professional flatterer.

You will notice that these reports contain leaks about Harp from other people in the administration. The current wave of press attention comes after a Democratic senator made an offhand reference to her and the Trump administration responded with exaggerated outrage that functioned to elevate questions about Harp rather than to suppress them—an excellent example of the Streisand Effect.

But don’t be fooled by that immediate trigger. Note that several wildly sycophantic letters from Harp to Trump—letters that go beyond sycophancy and read like the ranting of a demented stalker—were leaked to the press by people in Trump’s staff.

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