The Magi

On the morning of Boxing Day, 2004, a tsunami was unleashed across the Indian Ocean after a giant undersea earthquake struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killing over 230,000.

***

Montana Supreme Court voted 6-1 this week and effectively declared a state constitutional right to protection from climate change.

***

More than half of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act's estimated costs came from tax incentives to green corporations.

***

And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Christmas

Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It's a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a lifelong atheist.--Niall Ferguson on X

***

This is the time of year when we contemplate whether man's discontent can be overcome by force, will, and circumstance. And particularly, if that discontent can be alleviated by harming or otherwise taking advantage of his neighbor.

***

Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

"The indisputable fact that nobody can argue is that when we do get there, our current securities, the cybersecurity systems — which includes everything from Bitcoin to email — will be in great danger."--senior lecturer at the University of Kent Perez-Delgado on quantum computing

***

Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

***

No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well.--Churchill

***

Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

A Christmas Story

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his female victim burned to death.

***

Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment.

***

President Biden is granting clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences. Their sentences will be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The three inmates who didn't get clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the gunman at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. 

Well, some criteria must be present, I guess.

And the Democrats are worried about Musk influencing the government?
The country is being run like a college frat house.

Is there a bigger scandal in the country than this unreported substitution-presidency?

***

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Quantum Computing

Crews conducting an excavation at an ancient cemetery, an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt, in what was once the Roman city of Nida, discovered an ancient silver amulet with a Christian inscription in a grave. This implies a Christian extension into northern Europe two centuries earlier than supposed. And wide travel and commerce.

***

Discussions between Biden and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Treasury over the last four years were not conversations or discussions, they were scripted. Literally written out before the meeting.

***

Quantum Computing

An announcement from Hartmut Neven Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI


"Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. 

Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years-- 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. (Yikes!)

So quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that are inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimizing certain learning architectures, and modeling systems where quantum effects are important. This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives. Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing."

This is the beginning of a new age, a technology that is parallel to--and enhances--Artificial Intelligence. And will prove to be an economic driver for cultures and economies with the foresight and infrastructure to support and develop it.

Hide the women. 

Stats

Today is the winter solstice.

***

Terry Flenory is known in the hip-hop community for founding the organized crime organization Black Mafia Family alongside his brother Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory in 1985 Detroit. He and his brother were sentenced to 30 years in 2008 for running a nationwide crime ring. Biden just pardoned them.


***

Stats

Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey found a quarter of Americans agreed that "patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country" — the most in the nearly three years the question was asked since Donald Trump's first White House term.

*

Most voters (68%) think the actions of the killer against United CEIO Thompson were unacceptable, while 17% found them acceptable, an Emerson College poll out this week found.

Young voters: 41% found the killer's actions acceptable, while 40% found them unacceptable, per the poll. About 24% found them "somewhat acceptable" and 17% "completely acceptable."

22% of Democrats found the killer's actions acceptable, while 59% found them unacceptable. Among Republicans, 12% found the actions acceptable while 16% of independents said the same.

Men (19%) found the killer's actions slightly more acceptable than women (14%).

Murder was acceptable to some. This is a lot worse than math scores.

*

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spoke Tuesday, warning the incoming Trump administration that "unfettered exports" of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, could drive up domestic prices and increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. "Unfettered exports of LNG would increase wholesale domestic natural gas prices by over 30%,'' costing American households an additional $100 a year by 2050, Granholm said.

So exporting a product, making it less available, and not using it raises the price.

Ms. Granholm does not include in her calculations the effect of the energy deprivation in Europe --a result of their aggressive taxation and anti-oil policies--that would result with the loss of U.S. LGN.

And an independent analysis found that increased LNG exports would support nearly half a million domestic jobs and contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product through 2040.

This woman is making policy.

It's worse. 

Available data and recent history contradict one of the key points of the Biden administration’s long-awaited study on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
“There is zero evidence of any such correlation,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the Daily Caller News Foundation regarding Granholm’s suggestion that more exports could lead to higher domestic prices. “It is abject nonsense.”
S&P Global released its own study on the impacts of long-term U.S. LNG export growth on the same day that DOE put out its report. S&P’s analysis found that domestic natural gas prices have not increased despite massive export growth, and that the LNG industry has the potential to contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. GDP by 2040, in addition to generating enormous tax revenues for the public coffers.
“Not only is this not Granholm’s job, the study findings in the report published Tuesday simply do not support any such conclusion,” Blackmon said.

*

The AI revolution is American. There is no such development in Europe

*

"Energy Insecurity." Energy inequalities across the globe are astounding. On average, an American citizen uses 30 times as much energy as a Nigerian does. There are also inequalities within our own borders: More than a third of U.S. households experience some form of energy insecurity. That fraction will increase if decarbonization efforts continue their current course.

*

 

Cost of living:

• France: $1,200 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• U.S.: $1,166 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Canada: $1023 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Thailand: $650 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Portugal: $592 per month for a single person, not including rent.

The College

As time goes by, the question will move from where Trump got his votes to who could possibly have voted for Harris.

***

Chicago police make arrests in only 20% of fatal shootings.

***

Democrats are accusing Musk of usurping the Trump presidency, this from the party that has been pretending that Biden has been president for four years.

There is something to the charge your enemy will accuse you of their crimes.

***

The Ohio legislature passed legislation to let a coal-burning facility claim renewable energy credits.

***

Biden administration’s Middle East aid envoy Lisa Grande reportedly made demands of Israel regarding the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, in a harsh phone call with Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians, COGAT chief Gen. Ghassan Alian. 

Channel 12 news reports that Grande demanded during the call that Israel declare it is not following a policy of deliberately starving Gazans amid the ongoing war. She also demanded that Israel cancel all civilian evacuation orders, allow Palestinians who have been evacuated to return to their homes, and present a comprehensive plan to reduce harm to civilian infrastructure, according to the report.
Alian was “stunned” by the call.
Who are these people?

***

The College

Senate Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment on Dec. 16 that would abolish the Electoral College and ensure the country’s presidential elections were determined by the popular vote.

It is easy to dismiss such acts as amendments to the Constitution are very difficult and cumbersome to achieve. And most of the supporters also supported the peculiar "Super Delegates" notion. But these skirmishes are important as they point to a misreading, either purposeful or ill-informed, of a basic concept that formed the foundation of the American Revolutionary movement: the Founders' preoccupation with the defense of the minority. 

The Electoral College recognizes the specific economic grouping of geography and statehood. Cities will have certain interests that rural areas will not share. The same for coastal versus inland areas. River versus mountain. There are countless such subtle subdivisions. All deserve representation.

From Many, One. 

They saw America as a collection of individuals and groups with common interests that needed protection. Strangely, this is not unlike Critical Theory, which sanctifies subsets with common backgrounds, histories, and immutable natures that isolate them from the majority. But, unlike Critical Theory, in the Founders' view, these separate peoples were united with a basic root of individual freedom, inherent to them. Unlike Critical Theory, these individual qualities were distinctive but unifying.

One has to look no further than the last election, where the news carefully examined the voting tendencies of the subsets of states throughout the national map, to see these groupings play out in practical terms.