Latest news with #Hennessey
Asia Times
16 hours ago
- Politics
- Asia Times
MAGA's overreaching anti-economists get it all wrong
Oren Cass, the founder of the think tank American Compass, is probably the leading intellectual voice of MAGA economics. In a recent blog post, he discusses the question of whether economic forces are like gravity. He writes: [Y]es, the physical world is governed by the laws of gravity. But it is not governed only by the laws of gravity. Indeed, anyone who thought he could reliably predict the motion of bodies with knowledge only of gravity would be something of a moron. Oh, really? Would such a man be a moron? Then please explain to me how Edmond Halley, using only his knowledge of gravity, and having no understanding of any of the other forces of nature, was able to predict a solar eclipse in 1715 to an accuracy of four minutes: In 1715…a total solar eclipse was visible across a broad band of England. It was the first to be predicted on the basis of the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation, its path mapped clearly and advertised widely in advance. Visible in locations such as London and Cambridge, both astronomical experts and the public were able to see the phenomena and be impressed by the predictive power of the new astronomy… Wikipedia will tell you that this is known as Halley's Eclipse, after Edmond Halley, who produced accurate predictions of its timing and an easily-read map of the eclipse's path. Halley did not live to see the confirmation of his predictions of a returning comet – a 1759 triumph for the Newtonian system – but he was able to enjoy his 1715 calculations, which were within 4 minutes[.] Cass — who holds a Bachelor's in political economy from Williams College and a law degree from Harvard, but has no apparent training in physics — confidently assures us that anyone who attempted what Edmond Halley did would be 'something of a moron.' This is the kind of insult that says less about the target than about the person doing the insulting. Before you make confident assertions about a field of study, you owe it to your readers to attempt to understand that field at least a little bit. A botched physics analogy is harmless enough. But Cass' main argument isn't about gravity at all — it's about economics. And it's here where his willingness to make grand pronouncements about whole fields of study gets him into real trouble. Cass' post is a response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Matthew Hennessey. Hennessey, in turn, is responding to J.D. Vance's declaration that markets are a 'tool.' Hennessey argues that markets are more like a force of nature than a tool.1 Cass is trying to rebut Hennessey, criticizing market fundamentalism while also taking a swipe at the entire discipline of economics. Now, I am no fan of market fundamentalism, and I spent my early years as a blogger bashing the field of (macro)economics — often with even more scorn than Oren Cass employs in this post. But I like to think that when I did this, I generally stuck to making specific criticisms about actual economic models and methods. A lot of econ critics don't do this. Back when I was at Bloomberg, I used to have fun poking at the grandiose broadsides against economics that periodically appear in British publications like The Guardian or The Telegraph. These critiques tend to repeat the same old nostrums over and over — economics isn't a science, it doesn't do controlled experiments, its assumptions are bad, its theories don't work, people can't be predicted like particles, etc. etc. There are grains of truth to these boilerplate critiques, but the people who write them generally haven't bothered to pay much attention to what modern economists actually do . Here's what I wrote in a Bloomberg post back in 2017: [E]conomists have developed some theories that really work. A good scientific theory makes testable predictions that apply to situations other than those that motivated the creation of the theory. Slowly, econ is building up a repertoire of these gems. One of them is auction theory, which predicts how buyers will bid for things like online ads or spectrum rights — Google's profits are powered by econ theory as much as by search algorithms. Another example is matching theory, which has made it a lot easier to get an organ transplant. A third is random-utility discrete choice theory, which is used in everything from marketing to transportation planning to disaster preparedness. Nor are econ's successful theories limited to microeconomics. Gravity models of trade, though fairly simple in nature, have proven very successful at predicting the flow of international trade. These and other successful economics theories can be used confidently in a wide-variety of real-world situations, by policy makers, engineers and businesses. They prove that anyone who claims that econ theories will never be reliable, because they deal with human beings instead of atoms, is simply incorrect. Yes, studying mass human behavior is different than studying the motions of the planets, in a number of important ways. But the intellectuals who loftily declare that economics 'isn't a science' don't seem like they've bothered to think very hard about what those differences are , or when and why they matter. For example, what do the people who write that 'economics isn't a science' think about natural experiments — the empirical technique that has taken over much of econ research in the last three decades? Do they think that these are always less informative than lab experiments in the natural sciences? And if so, why? What do they think are the strengths and weaknesses of natural experiments relative to lab experiments, and how much can they help us test theories and derive general principles about how economies work? I suspect that very few of the econ critics have thought seriously about these questions, and that far too few have even heard of natural experiments. Certainly, if they have, they must have some good reason for never mentioning them. And certainly they must have good reasons for never talking about auction theory, matching theory, discrete choice models, gravity models, or any of the other economics theories that prove themselves in the real world day in and day out. Right? But the screeds in The Guardian or The Telegraph are downright erudite compared to what Oren Cass serves up in his own criticism of econ. Here's what he writes: Economics is nothing like physics. Its principles are not generated from repeatable experiments, nor do they hold consistently across space and time. Trusting otherwise is a quite literal example of the blind faith and fundamentalism at issue. That's it. That's literally Cass' entire criticism of the field of economics in this post. He spends the rest of the post pulling quotes from conservative political thinkers — G.K. Chesterton, Robert Nisbet, Yuval Levin, Roger Scruton, etc. — who urge us to value things like community, tradition, etc., or who assert that markets can't work without a robust social fabric. Those are interesting things to think about, to be sure, but they don't bear on the question of what, exactly, Cass thinks is so inadequate about economics. Cass does not name or criticize any specific economic theories in this post. He cites zero papers and names zero researchers. I looked through a bunch of his other posts about economics, and I almost never found him naming or criticizing any specific theories in those posts, either. In one post, I did find him criticizing the theory of comparative advantage, and he did make one useful, substantive point about it — that comparative advantage can't explain trade deficits and surpluses. He's right about that. That's by far the most substantive, knowledgeable criticism of economics that I could find on his blog. If Cass is aware of any economic models other than comparative advantage and the basic Econ 101 supply-and-demand model, he plays his cards close to his chest. He doesn't mention gravity models of trade, which some economists use to try to predict the effects of tariffs (with some success). Nor does he mention Paul Krugman's New Trade Theory, which implies that countries can sometimes benefit from targeted tariffs against other countries' national champions (but which wouldn't recommend the kind of broad, sweeping tariffs Trump has tried to implement). Neither of those theories is outside the mainstream; both were invented by economists who went on to win the Nobel. Why doesn't Oren Cass mention them, or grapple with their implications, or use their existence to inform his criticisms of the field of economics? My guess — and this is only a guess — is that Cass is completely unaware that these theories exist, that he has no interest in discovering whether such theories exist, that if he did discover them he would have no idea how to evaluate them, and that even if he did know how to evaluate them he would have no interest in doing so. A sophisticated understanding of what mainstream economics actually says and does is not useful to Oren Cass' project, which is to denounce intellectual rivals within the conservative movement. If you want to actually figure out how trade works and what tariffs do, it would help to look at the research literature. If you didn't get the training needed to understand that literature, it would help to ask some people who did get that training, or at least read a little Wikipedia and ask ChatGPT a few questions.2 That won't give you all the answers — the world's best economists don't even have all the answers — but it would leave you a lot more knowledgeable than you started out, and it would give you a much better idea of where economists are on solid ground and where there are gaps in their understanding. On the other hand, if all you want is to dunk on Wall Street Journal writers, perhaps all you need is some hand-waving rhetoric about 'market fundamentalism' and a vague half-knowledge of one simple trade theory developed 200 years ago. The real problem with these econ critics — both the lefty writers in The Guardian and the new crop of MAGA defenders — is that their project is fundamentally political. The lefty writers think that if everyone accepts that econ isn't a science, and that the econ Nobel isn't a real Nobel, and people aren't like particles, and so on and so forth, then some sort of lefty ideology — Marxism, or degrowth, or whatever — will flow in to fill the hole left when economics vanishes. The MAGA writers think that it will be Trump's economic ideas that fill that void instead. But Matthew Hennessey, the Wall Street Journal writer, got one big thing right: Simply replacing academic theories with your own ideology can win you power, but there are important things it can't do. It can't change the nature of what tariffs actually do to the economy. Even if you and your friends and your political allies all shout very loudly that tariffs will restore American manufacturing, and act very scornful toward nerdy academics who tell you it doesn't work like that, the economic headwinds that tariffs actually create for American manufacturers won't change one iota. However limited mainstream academic economics is as a tool for understanding the consequences of your policies, ideology is even worse. NOTES: 1 Who's right, Vance or Hennesey? Both are right. Market forces are , quite literally, forces of nature. And markets themselves are, quite literally, a tool. Tools work by harnessing forces of nature. A pendulum clock works by harnessing the force of gravity. A market works by harnessing the forces that drive people to buy and sell things. Vance is right that markets should be shaped to serve our desired ends, rather than being an end in and of themselves. Hennesey is right that market forces can't be denied, ignored, or wished away. 2 Just to see how AI is doing, I asked ChatGPT o3 about the papers on gravity models. Its characterization of the papers' results was oversimplified and omitted crucial nuance about the ex ante predictive accuracy of Fejgelbaum et al. (2020). But overall, its explanations weren't too bad! This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Plant City woman gets 67 years for 2nd fatal drunk driving crash
TAMPA — The Plant City woman who for the second time in her life admitted driving drunk and causing a crash that killed someone should serve 67 years in prison, a judge ruled Friday. Jennifer Carvajal wept and buried her face behind her long black locks throughout a three-hour sentencing hearing. She apologized repeatedly to the family of Pedro Carbajal, her cousin who was killed in the crash off Interstate 4, and two others who were seriously injured. 'No matter how many sorrys I say to each of you, or even him, I could never forgive myself,' Carvajal said. Hillsborough Circuit Judge G. Gregory Green said he struggled to comprehend how Carvajal, 28, for the second in her life could be accused of the same deadly crime. 'It is almost as if instead of taking every step to avoid putting yourself in that situation again, you took steps to ensure that it happened,' Green told Carvajal. 'And that is incomprehensible for this court.' The sentence dwarfed the five-year term Carvajal previously served the first time she was convicted of DUI manslaughter. In that case, and on Friday, too, judges heard testimony about Carvajal's horrific childhood, which included sexual abuse at the hands of male relatives. The abuse only came to light after Carvajal, at age 9, was diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, a social worker testified. She never received substantial mental health treatment for what was later pegged as post traumatic stress disorder and depression. At age 11, she was caught drinking beer in school. She contemplated suicide and was known to harm herself with broken glass. This time around, though, there was little notion that the horrors of Carvajal's past should ensure anything but a lengthy prison sentence. 'Two people have lost their lives at the hands of Jennifer Carvajal,' Assistant State Attorney Dawn Hart said in court. 'This community is not safe if Miss Carvajal is ever allowed back in society.' A packed courtroom heard the details of what led up to the crash from one of the survivors. Lexcia Gonzalez was Pedro Carbajal's girlfriend. They had a son named Julian. On the witness stand, she said she knew Jennifer Carvajal, but not well. She knew she had been to prison. On the night of April 24, 2021, the three of them met up for a family gathering at Pedro's grandfather's home in Plant City. Another cousin, Grady Ramirez, was there too. Late that night, they left in Gonzalez's car, a silver Hyundai Elantra. They first went to the Twilight Zone Lounge, a liquor store near the Hillsborough County line. They bought a bottle of Hennessey cognac. They later went to a Circle K store and bought Polar Pops to mix the liquor. They spent the evening drinking, hanging out at a Waffle House, alternating between the Polar Pops and taking swigs directly from the Hennessey bottle. Late that night, they went to another Circle K to use a restroom. While they were there, Carvajal asked Gonzalez if she could drive. 'I kind of ignored it the first time,' Gonzalez testified. 'She asked again.' When they left, Gonzalez was the front passenger. The two men sat in the back seat. Carvajal drove. They headed toward Ybor City. As they moved to get onto Interstate 4, Gonzalez noticed Carvajal having trouble steering. On the highway, she pressed the gas. Gonzalez watched her use her phone to take a SnapChat video of the Speedometer, showing the car topping 100 mph. Blue lights came on behind them. Gonzalez told Carvajal to slow down. 'She started panicking,' Gonzalez said. 'And saying that she didn't want to go back to jail.' Carvajal turned the wheel hard. The car went into a ditch, then up an embankment, then over a fence into the parking lot of the Gator Ford auto dealership. It overturned, smashed into a truck and knocked down a concrete pole and a palm tree. Gonzalez blacked out. When she awoke, she was on the pavement. She felt a burning pain in her body. Both her thighs were broken. Pedro Carbajal lay on a patch of grass bleeding from his head, his legs pinned beneath the car's crumpled metal. Jennifer Carvajal crawled out of the wreckage and went to him. She tried to pull him out and began to cry, Gonzalez said. She told Gonzalez: Tell them you were driving. She walked to a fence line that bordered the interstate. A road ranger who'd responded to the crash and two bystanders encountered her there. 'I'm on papers,' the ranger heard her say. 'I have a curfew. I'm not even supposed to be driving.' She said she needed to leave. Soon, though, Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrived. They noticed bruising on Carvajal's left shoulder extending down toward her waist. The driver's seat belt in the car was extended; none of the other belts had been used. An FDLE analyst determined that Carvajal's blood alcohol content at the time of the crash was between .10 and .14, above the .08 limit at which the state presumes impairment. A decade ago, Carvajal was accused of causing the death of a man named Keith Allen Davis. He was delivering copies of the Tampa Tribune early one morning in February 2014. As the sun rose, he moved his black Toyota Echo onto North Alexander Street. Carvajal at that same moment sped at 55 mph through a red light in an SUV, plowing into his car. Davis was declared dead at a hospital. Carvajal was days away from her 17th birthday when that happened. This is a developing story. Check back with for updates.
Wales Online
25-05-2025
- Wales Online
Drunk van driver drove erratically through residential streets then punched the police officer who tried to stop him
Drunk van driver drove erratically through residential streets then punched the police officer who tried to stop him Sean Hennessey, 41, was violent and during the struggle he punched the officer repeatedly to the head and face. A drunk-driver attacked a police officer after being pursued and failing to stop. After he was pulled from his van, he became violent and punched the officer multiple times to his head and face. Sean Hennessey, 41, was followed by police after they received reports of a drunken man who had driven off in a van in Cardiff at 11.30pm on March 22. The van was later spotted and officers signalled for the vehicle to stop but the defendant failed to do so. A sentencing hearing at Newport Crown Court on Friday heard a pursuit followed before Hennessey was finally cornered in a residential area after he crashed into another van. For the latest court reports sign up to our crime newsletter. Drink driver Sean Hennessey, 41, repeatedly punched a police officer after a pursuit (Image: South Wales Police ) He was removed from the van by an officer but the defendant resisted arrest. Hennessey was violent and during the struggle he punched the officer repeatedly to the head and face. Article continues below Despite using PAVA spray in an attempt to restrain Hennessey, he managed to break free and ran off. He was arrested a short while later by officers from the dog section. Hennessey later pleaded guilty to assault with intent to resist arrest, dangerous driving, driving whilst disqualified, driving without insurance, failing to stop and failing to provide a specimen. Drink driver Sean Hennessey, 41, repeatedly punched a police officer following a pursuit. (Image: South Wales Police ) The defendant was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. Following the hearing, chief inspector Danielle Doyle, of South Wales Police's specialist operations, said: "Sean Hennessey's actions that evening were deplorable. "Drink-driving is one of the main causes of fatal collisions, and by getting behind the wheel and driving through residential areas dangerously and at speed, he showed utter contempt for the safety of himself and others. 'Our roads policing officers used their skills and training to bring his reckless actions to a safe conclusion, but the level of violence he then unleashed was completely unwarranted and reprehensible. Drink driver Sean Hennessey, 41, repeatedly punched a police officer following a pursuit. (Image: South Wales Police ) 'Fortunately, he was able to call upon the support of colleagues from the specialist operations department, in order to ensure his swift arrest and preventing him from causing any further harm.' Assistant chief constable Jo Maal said: "No-one should go to work fearing being assaulted, and our officers are no different. 'Every day they wear their uniform with pride, with a promise to serve the communities of south Wales with courage, integrity and compassion. But behind that uniform is a human being, and they do not deserve to be treated as punchbags, particularly when they are working hard to keep others safe from harm. Article continues below 'The officer in this incident was faced with a violent offender who repeatedly punched him to the face and head, causing concussion and bruising. As we've seen too many times before, a single punch can have fatal consequences, so it is by sheer fortune that Hennessey was not facing a more serious charge. "The officer is still recovering from his physical injuries, and the psychological effects can be long-lasting. We will support him as he deals with that trauma, but I implore the public to get behind our emergency workers and work With Us, Not Against Us."
Auto Car
25-05-2025
- Automotive
- Auto Car
Here's how to design a 300mph hypercar, according to Hennessey
Designer of one of the world's fastest cars explains how designs can bend the laws of physics Hennessey Venom F5 is aiming to reach a top speed of 310mph-plus Close Ever wondered why so many supercars claim a '217mph-plus' top speed? The McLaren P1, LaFerrari and Lamborghini Revuelto are just a trio of heavy-hitting examples. An easy, clean conversion to a mite under 350kph is one possible reason. Another explanation, however, is aerodynamics. 'There's an exponential increase in difficulty and complexity beyond 220mph,' says Nathan Malinick, Hennessey's director of design. 'Most hypercars can do that no problem, but 250mph and above remains very, very difficult. You have to know what you're doing.' His most dramatic work so far is the Hennessey Venom F5, its target to be the fastest production car in the world. Its theoretical 310mph-plus top speed (itself a neat 500kph) will outstrip Bugatti and Koenigsegg should it come to fruition, but Malinick is only too familiar with the soaring aerodynamic challenges as you try to surpass the triple-ton – at which point you're covering a mile every 12 seconds and pushing tyre technology to its very margins. Handily, his CV includes work in the aerospace industry. 'We are a comparatively small company and we have to be extremely efficient. If our target was closer to 200mph then the requirements would be totally different. That's still fast, but it's nothing like 300, which is getting more into the aerospace side of things versus automotive,' he says. 'There is quite a bit of crossover. From an aesthetic and philosophical standpoint, the F5's interior is relatable to some of the cockpits that I was working on in my previous role. Simplicity drives a lot of what we do; on the exterior, it drove things in maybe unusual ways. One instance would be a lack of active aerodynamics, because we didn't want to have an aspect of the car that would be susceptible to a failure at such high speeds. 'You're not going to see the flicks and blades of an F1 car on an F-35 or F-22 jet. Likewise, you're not going to see them on our car because they contradict its purpose of top speed.' Supercars mostly sell on glamour, so how easy is it for Malinick to ensure his team's designs are beautiful enough to be coveted by the collectors with the requisite millions to buy one? 'We're lucky to have creative engineers who recognise the value of design and want to support it, because ultimately people buy with their eyes,' he says. 'The kind of people we're talking to already have one of everything. Our car needs to pull on their heartstrings. 'Our design and engineering teams work hand in hand. It's not like we progress a design element and then say: 'Hey engineering, take a look and see what you think.' Feedback is in real time. We might need to stop and take something into CFD [computational fluid dynamics], or rapid-prototype something in the wind tunnel to ensure there's no time lost. 'The engineers are helpful in saying 'this area of the car is not as significant, so do whatever you want here'. But sometimes our design will be dictated by function. Some of that is neat: a purely engineering-driven detail underneath the car that you're not going to see unless it's jacked up on a lift.' Despite its lofty goals and Malinick's aerospace past, the Venom F5 can still thank pencil and paper for its design. 'I do a ton of sketching,' admits Malinick. 'It's my favourite part of the process. I probably have thousands and thousands of sketches, whether it's F5 or what we're moving onto next.' It's bait I can't resist taking: what is coming next? He says: 'If the F5 is all about performance, the next car is about driving interaction. It's not going to be as powerful; it doesn't need to be. "The feedback we've had from customers and dealers has been really strong. It's very much the antithesis to the digital age of cars we find ourselves in.' Does that mean it's a manual? 'If the customers come back and say 'we want a DCT', okay, that's fine,' he says. 'But as of now, I'd say it's analogue to the nth degree.' Which suggests it will be free of the Venom's turbocharging. 'We're still determining that,' says Malinick, 'but we're leaning towards something free of forced induction for the purity of it all. "We want something very, very high-revving.' Sounds like a noble target to us. Join our WhatsApp community and be the first to read about the latest news and reviews wowing the car world. Our community is the best, easiest and most direct place to tap into the minds of Autocar, and if you join you'll also be treated to unique WhatsApp content. You can leave at any time after joining - check our full privacy policy here.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Remains of local WWII veteran, POW identified -- burial set for August in Boonville
May 22—WASHINGTON — The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency recently announced that U.S. Army Pvt. Harland J. Hennessey, 24, of Boonville, who was captured and died as a prisoner of war during World War II, was accounted for Sept. 23, 2024. Hennessey's nephew John Hennessey provided a DNA swab to confirm the identification of the remains. Although Private Hennessey died before his birth, Mr. Hennessey grew up hearing of his uncle and saw pictures of him. "I know he liked to drive his jalopy around the race track," Mr. Hennessey said. "I was told he never had a license but he did it any ways." Mr. Hennessey said his uncle could have been buried in Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C. "I think he would have wanted to come back to Boonville — he had been gone so long and will be buried next to his parents." Under the care of the Trainor Funeral Home, Pvt. Hennessey will be buried in the Boonville Cemetery on Aug. 23 next to his parents Howard and Dorothy Hennessey. The Boonville Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5533, which was named in honor of Harland J. Hennessey in 1945, is planning to hold a celebration this summer. Hennessey's history Private Hennessey entered the U.S. Army from New York and served in the 803rd Engineer Battalion, Aviation. He was stationed in the Philippines at the time of the Japanese invasion of the islands in December. Intense fighting continued until the surrender of the Bataan peninsula on April 9, 1942, when Hennessey was captured, and of Corregidor Island on May 6, 1942. After the surrender, the Japanese began the forcible transfer of thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war to various prison camps in central Luzon, at the northern end of the Philippines. Hennessey was among those subjected to the 65-mile Bataan Death March and then held at the Cabanatuan POW Camp -1. The largest of these camps, the notorious Cabanatuan Prison Camp held approximately 8,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war that were captured during and after the Fall of Bataan. Camp overcrowding worsened with the arrival of Allied prisoners who had surrendered on Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Conditions at the camp were poor, with food and water extremely limited, leading to widespread malnutrition and outbreaks of malaria and dysentery. More than 2,500 POWs died in this camp during the war. According to prison camp and other historical records, Pvt. Hennessey died on Nov. 1, 1942. He was reportedly buried in Common Grave 704 (CG704), but complications in the burial and recovery process precluded identifying his remains immediately following the war. American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) personnel exhumed those buried at the Cabanatuan cemetery and relocated the remains to a temporary U.S. military mausoleum near Manila. In 1947, the AGRS examined the remains in an attempt to identify them. Two of the sets of remains from Common Grave 704 were identified, while the remaining eight were declared unidentifiable. The unidentified remains were buried at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial as Unknowns. In 2018, as part of the Cabanatuan Project, the DPAA exhumed the Unknowns associated with CG704 for comparison to associated casualties. Laboratory analysis and the totality of the circumstantial evidence available established one set of remains as those of Pvt. Hennessey. To identify Hennessey's remains, scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA and mitochondrial genome sequence analysis. Although interred as an Unknown in the Manila American Cemetery, Hennessey's grave was meticulously cared for over the past 70 years by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Today, Hennessey is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for. For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to account for Americans who went missing while serving their country, visit the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency website at Or learn more on social media at or
