"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. "Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil." - From an essay by Frédéric Bastiat in 1850, "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen"
A Ultimately, Brexit is not a referendum on trade, immigration, or the technical rules promulgated by the (awful) European Parliament. It is a referendum on nationhood, which is a step away from globalism and closer to individual self-determination. Libertarians should view the decentralization and devolution of state power as ever and always a good thing, regardless of the motivations behind such movements. Reducing the size and scope of any single (or multinational) state’s dominion is decidedly healthy for liberty.
Sherman introduced total war to the Civil War, targeting crops and farms, displacing non-combatants, killing livestock. Sherman declared to his fellow General Henry Halleck, 'If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking. If they want peace they and their relatives must stop war.' 'You cannot qualify war in harsher terms, than I will. War is cruelty and You cannot refine it,' thundered Sherman in King James biblical cadences, which all Americans understood, 'and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.' But he also said this: 'I want peace, and believe it can now only be reached through union and war .... But my dear Sirs,' Sherman promised, 'when peace does come, you may call on me for anything. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your home, and families against danger from every quarter.'
"This moral and temporal dualism," wrote Michael Fellman, "served to heighten Sherman's fearsomeness, as morally disengaged means could lead potentially to any form or depth of destruction."
According to a paper reported in the Guardian, the environment benefited from Chernobyl. The bottom line seems to be that radiation does far less damage than humans, and thus a nuclear accident that forces humans out of an area is actually good for the environment. We humans are worse than a nuclear accident. It's no wonder these volunteers want to control our lives.
Edna O’Brien, the celebrated Irish-born, London-dwelling writer, has been known as one of the literary world’s great chroniclers of love. She was interviewed recently about her new novel, The Little Red Chairs, about evil.
“And as he told me that I thought, I will bring that stranger [the Karadzic figure on the run, in disguise] to a small Irish hamlet where there is still a wonder about the stranger. A stranger represents hope rather than danger. A stranger represents, to some, a romance. So once I had that little nugget of inspiration, I knew all it needed was hard work."
One inspiration for the book,” she remembered, “was when I was being filmed in Ireland and reading for the camera, and the director said to me, ‘Tolstoy says there are only two great stories in the world.’ I said, ‘What are they?’ He said, ‘A man goes on a journey, like Hamlet—a man on a personal, philosophical quest.’ And ‘A stranger comes to town,’ like, for instance, The Playboy of the Western World [the classic Irish play by J.M. Synge].
Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century worrying that the rich might some day get richer expresses only the latest of the leftish worries about “capitalism.” One can line up the later items in the list, and some of the earlier ones revived à la Piketty or Krugman, with particular Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Science. I will not name the men (all men, in sharp contrast to the method of Elinor Ostrom, Nobel 2009), but can reveal here the formula. First, discover or rediscover a necessary or sufficient condition for perfect competition or a perfect world (in Piketty’s case, for example, a more perfect equality of income). Then assert without evidence (here Piketty does better than the usual practice) and with suitable mathematical ornamentation (thus Jean Tirole, Nobel 2014) that the condition might be imperfectly realized or the world might not develop in a perfect way. Then conclude with a flourish (here however Piketty joins the usual low scientific standard) that “capitalism” is doomed unless experts intervene with a sweet use of the monopoly of violence in government to implement anti-trust against malefactors of great wealth, or subsidies to diminishing-returns industries, or foreign aid to perfectly honest governments, or money for obviously infant industries, or the nudging of sadly childlike consumers or, Piketty says, a tax miraculously arranged on inequality-causing capital worldwide.-- Deirdre McCloskey talk in Italy titled “The Two Movements in Economic Thought, 1700-2000: Empty Economic Boxes Revisited”
The FBI director's leadership team reinforced what the director himself said in 2015 — that passing a law to prevent gun-buying by people on the terror-watch list or the no-fly list would make terrorism suspects aware of their status and would be a blow a potential investigation. So law enforcement doesn't want it. But it sounds so sensible. It's almost as if life is complex.
Who is.....
Ostracism: n: 1. exclusion, by general consent, from social acceptance, privileges, friendship, etc. 2. (in ancient Greece) temporary banishment of a citizen, decided upon by popular vote. ety: 1580s, a method of 10-year banishment in ancient Athens, by which the citizens gathered and each wrote on a potsherd or tile the name of a man they deemed dangerous to the liberties of the people, and a man whose name turned up often enough was sent away. From Middle French ostracisme (16c.), Modern Latin ostracismus, or directly from Greek ostrakismos, from ostrakizein "to ostracize," from ostrakon "tile, potsherd," from PIE *ost-r-, from root *ost- "bone".
Mary Beard has a nice discussion on ostracism as a modern metaphor. Despite its modern fame, ostracism only lasted about seventy years and fewer than fifteen people were ever sent into exile this way. The last was an unlucky character, who is supposed to have been the victim of a stitch-up in 416 BC – when two rival establishment figures, Nikias and Alkibiades, both major candidates for exile, decided to do a deal and get their own supporters to turn their votes against a third party, by the name of Hyperbolos. It was he who was sent away, while the intended targets escaped scot-free. No one could have failed to spot what had gone on. And the glaring exposure of establishment control and of their self-interested trade-off destroyed any myth of people power. Ostracism was never used again.
Puberty appears to be starting earlier in healthy girls, and possibly even boys. At Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, clinicians begin assessing girls for changes related to puberty at age 6. “In general, we think that 7 is now probably a normal age to have some signs of puberty,” says Louise Greenspan, a pediatric endocrinologist at Kaiser Permanente who also researches puberty. “So the cutoff for precocious puberty is a gray zone now.” Maybe they are being stimulated into puberty by the sensuality around them. A lot of hormones in the air. Could this explain Caitlin? Bruce was certainly exposed to a lot of estrogen at home.
Golden oldie:
Honey wine (aka mead) was probably the very first alcoholic beverage people ever made. Made from fermenting honey, mead is a remarkably adaptable drink and easy to infuse with herbs and fruits, or experiment fermenting with different yeasts. The word "Honeymoon" came about in medieval days, when newly married couples were given enough mead to last them a full month. The hope was that the sweetness would increase their fertility and happiness, and grant the couple good luck.
By 1810, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandot nations. For several years, Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy successfully delayed further white settlement in the region. In 1811, however, the future president William Henry Harrison led an attack on the confederacy’s base on the Tippecanoe River. At the time, Tecumseh was in the South attempting to convince more tribes to join his movement. Although the battle of Tippecanoe was close, Harrison finally won out and destroyed much of Tecumseh’s army. When the War of 1812 began the following year, Tecumseh immediately marshaled what remained of his army to aid the British. Commissioned a brigadier general, he proved an effective ally and played a key role in the British capture of Detroit and other battles. When the tide of war turned in the American favor, Tecumseh’s fortunes went down with those of the British. On October 5, 1813, he was killed during Battle of the Thames. His Ohio Valley Confederacy and vision of Indian unity died with him.
In the two centuries after 1800, the goods and services made and consumed by the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 to 100—that is, a rise of 2,900 to 9,900 percent. These are astonishing numbers.
Tecumseh, by Benson Lossing in 1848 based on 1808 drawing.
In the two centuries after 1800, the goods and services made and consumed by the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 to 100—that is, a rise of 2,900 to 9,900 percent. These are astonishing numbers.
In Mises' view (later elaborated by his follower Friedrich Hayek), a modern economy is far too complex to be centrally planned. Even putting aside concerns about dictatorship and shirking, a socialist system cannot implement an efficient use of society's scarce resources because the planners would have no way of evaluating their blueprint--even after the fact--from the standpoint of citizen preferences. To be sure, engineers and chemists could accurately report how much steel, glass, rubber, and labor hours of various qualities went into (say) a particular automobile factory and how many cars came out at the other end. But without a way to translate these disparate quantities of heterogeneous items into a common unit, there would be no way of telling whether the factory's operations had been efficient during the period in question.-- Robert P. Murphy
Suspicion and conspiracy. There is a resurgence in the belief the Earth is flat. Have you ever wondered, the flat-Earther will ask, why commercial aeroplanes don’t fly over Antarctica? Because there is no South Pole. The pictures from space are faked. And Armstrong never went to the moon. The tolerance of all opinions.
The Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium together with 10 other psychiatrists watched 400 movies made between 1915 and 2010 over a 3 year period. They identified 126 psychopathic characters: 105 men and 21 women. The characters were selected based on what they call the “clinical accuracy of their profiles” which are four broad clinical categories about psychopaths defined by the forensic psychologist Hugues Hervé and by the psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman. Leistedt wrote a paper which he co-authored with Paul Linkowski titled “Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction?”, which he published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2013. The most realistic of all the portrayed psychopaths was Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Two of the three least realistic psychopaths were Norman Bates by actor Anthony Perkins in Psycho and Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.
AAAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture of Gloria, nee Gregory, Hemmingway:
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