Election Night Links

• Some in Trumpworld thought it better for him politically to let blue cities rot on the vine, to marinate in the anarcho-tyranny of masked rioters set loose on the populace while law-abiding families had to mask their toddlers. This, however, rang hollow overall with the American people. Trump’s whole schtick as a candidate was that of the decisive leader, the outsider candidate from the business world who criticized his foes as “all talk, no action.” Yet, in the critical moment of dual crises in 2020, in a matter of clear public emergencies where the President has maximum authority to act unilaterally, he flinched. He tweeted and whined but ultimately did little to fix the exact sort of problems Americans expected him to fix. It made him, for the first time in the public eye, look small and impotent. That critical turn created the sort of weakness Machiavelli warned his princes against, and he became neither feared nor loved, but rather pathetic. This lack of action, I believe, directly led to the temporary cultural triumph of wokeness. [The Tom File] 
• Deep fractures have grown between Trump and abortion opponents, who just two years ago were on top of the world after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated a constitutional right to the procedure. The ruling was the culmination of the movement’s unlikely relationship with Trump. The onetime abortion-rights supporter appointed three conservative justices that helped overturn Roe and was the first sitting president to attend the annual March for Life. That relationship is now in tatters, and the movement to end abortion in America finds itself struggling not to be written off as a political liability by Trump and the Republican Party, which are facing a public backlash to the rollback of abortion access. Antiabortion groups also have lost seven consecutive ballot referendums and appear on track to lose most of the 10 measures to protect abortion rights that are on state ballots in this election, including in conservative states such as Florida and Missouri. [WSJ]
  
• The Make America Healthy Again movement is an incredible opportunity to repudiate the top-down centralized public health policy that smothered our rights during the COVID era, to rid our public health institutions of their corruption, and to embrace regenerative farming, healthy food and living, and getting toxins out of our food and environment. [Chris Masterjohn]
• The study of literature should not be content-neutral in a Catholic school, either. Great literature is integral to our faith in many ways. The goal for an English class in a Catholic school should not be to perform well on standardized tests. It should not be all about making students read short passages and “find the main idea.” The development of reading comprehension must be ordered to the reading of great literature. Otherwise, why learn to read at all? Without the ennobling influence of great literature and Sacred Scripture, all literacy is good for, to paraphrase a colleague, is to make people more susceptible to advertising and propaganda. [The Lamp]
• We have excess capacity and we have sluggish demand in all three of our key commodities that's metallurgical coal, soda ash and thermal coal. At the moment, I can't see any specific drivers that are going to change this environment here in the near to intermediate future. Now, I'm always surprised about that, because I never do see the factor, the drivers that are going to turn the market, for these commodities, but they eventually do turn. But just right now, I cannot point to any of that. The good news, that I think would be important to note here for us, is that, despite the fact that, this is a very negative time in terms of the collective sentiment of all three of our, and the collective outlook for all three of our key commodities, it's actually a pretty robust time for the business outlook for our common equity, simply because of the fact that we are coming to the end of eliminating our obligations at which time there'll be a lot of free cash that's freed up for common equity. So it's sort of a tale of two cities. It's a bad time for the business outlook. Actually, collectively for all three of our commodities together, I would say that, with the exception of COVID, this is the worst collective business outlook we've had in my almost 10 year tenure here at NRP. But, it's certainly the best outlook from the standpoint of an equity holder that we've had in the almost 10 years that I've been in NRP. [Natural Resource Partners LP]
• Tocotrienols are thought to have more potent antioxidant properties than α-tocopherol. The unsaturated side chain of tocotrienol allows for more efficient penetration into tissues that have saturated fatty layers such as the brain and liver. Experimental research examining the antioxidant, free radical scavenging, effects of tocopherol and tocotrienols have found that tocotrienols appear superior due to their better distribution in the lipid layers of the cell membrane. [Pharmacological potential of tocotrienols: a review]  
• My current question – though it’s more of an obsession than a question – is trying to learn more about Vertical Integrators than anyone in the world. Over the past couple of months, I’ve read American Colossus, The Prize, Saudi Inc., Zero to One, Cable Cowboy, Kochland, My Life and Work, Empires of Light, The Wright Brothers, Dealers of Lightning, The First Tycoon, and The Fish That Ate the Whale. I have about ten more books on the topic loaded on the Kindle and ready to go. The other day, I read a 1990 economics paper that, just last year, might have seemed too dry to finish, but now, read like a Rosetta Stone. [Not Boring by Packy McCormick]