Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Reverie

A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.--deTocqueville



This deactivating of Trump's Twitter account might be amusing to some. But the real point is that the President of the United States has a broadcast medium that apparently is insecure. What if someone hacks it and publishes something really dangerous, like threatening North Korea? One might argue that we are somewhat already in the world of unreliability but is there any reason to exaggerate it?



From what I have seen, the Facebook people say that Russian propaganda was responsible for 0.004% of political traffic and most was aimed at undermining Trump after the election. So how does that fit the current popular narrative?




Populism revives the ancient ideology of zero sum for an age of majority rule.  [Classical] Liberalism, by contrast, is a recent ideology of positive sum, with rights for minority groups, which often generate the positive sum. --McCloskey


Media executives are rallying around an explanation for the NFL’s declining TV ratings: too much football available in too many places. Meanwhile, there is no evidence of a red-state boycott over national anthem protests. (wsj)


What is...the Missouri Compromise?



 Gen. Kelly is getting flak for his remarks about Gen. Lee and the Civil War. Many academics have come forward to ridicule his notion that it was a failure of compromise--slavery, I suppose, being a horror beyond compromise. While I would never presume to argue with an academic, there was a pivotal event that preceded the Civil War called, inconveniently enough, the Missouri Compromise that was structured to maintain the balance between the North and South and prevent hostilities. It admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free one. More, it banned slavery in the rest of the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. So it froze the territories into pre-ordained free and slave states and limited the expansion of slavery. This was in 1820. 1820. The tensions from the original founding of the nation was thus calmed. This was a compromise of national law vs. popular sovereignty, a conflict that persists to this day.


As the Mormons expanded into Utah and the train lines into the mid-west, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and opened the territories of Nebraska and Kansas to slavery should their residents so choose. Hence "Bloody Kansas."  This also affected the polygamy interests of the Mormons who claimed the right of polygamy through "local sovereignty." This inadvertently opened up unbridgeable sectional divides in both of the two major parties. Southern Whigs abandoned their party to support the expansion of slavery, whereas many anti-slavery northern Democrats found the Missouri Compromise's repeal intolerable. Out of that political chaos, an assortment of Know-Nothing nativists, Whigs, and anti-slavery northern Democrats coalesced into a new Republican Party. (In 1856, the Republican platform linked slavery and polygamy together as the "twin relics of barbarism," the unholy fruit of popular sovereignty.)  Popular sovereignty vs. national law.

So, I suppose, the "compromise" failed. But what has really failed--and is failing now--is an understanding of people and their times. And forgiveness.

I have started "Stranger Things" on my Netflick phone connection. I am beginning to understand the phone addiction a bit better.


I read a review of "The Deuce" over the weekend. I read that it was a TV series that wrestled with very serious problems, especially the disenfranchised and racism. I am glad I read this because I happened to see a few minutes of one show and I would have thought it was just pornography.
 

"Saw a 60 second segment on abc evening news about THE BATS.
Evidently all World Series bats are being made by one company, using their own forest, tendered by the same Maine family for many generations. Made by God, turned and sanded and finished by man. Result no breaks. The news piece did not discuss the lack of breaking. But they did discuss dependability and beauty. "--Tony




 It's tempting for libertarians to celebrate Luther's defiance of the Roman Church as a great victory for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but the Reformation's main fruit was over a century of horrifying warfare.  The Thirty Years' War, with a death toll around eight million, is the best known.  The French Wars of Religion claimed yet another three million lives.  These numbers are even more gruesome when you remember that Europe's population was far lower back then: For 1500 AD, Angus Maddison assigns twelve million to Germany and fifteen million to France. So opines Caplan, who concludes that the decline of religion in Europe did not have to be violent or revolutionary; it has declined in the last years through  apathy, apathy being a bloodless coup.




Richard Wilbur, the eminent poet and former professor of English at Wesleyan University, died Oct. 14 at the age of 96. Wilbur joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1957 and taught there until 1977. During his two decades at Wesleyan, he received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Things of This World (1956), was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and founded the renowned Wesleyan University Press poetry series.

Over his long and distinguished career as a poet and translator, he was appointed as national poet laureate, received two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Medal of the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the T.S. Eliot Award, and the Frost Medal, among others.

Wilbur died at a nursing home in Belmont, Mass.

There are many obits., some kinder than others, but all careful. The NYT is typical of the ambiguity this elegant writer had to endure; the most complimentary line is taken from a letter to the editor. Shameful, really.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/15/obituaries/richard-wilbur-poet-laureate-and-pulitzer-winner-dies-at-96.html




On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour wrote a letter to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. This was only a declaration but after WW1 Britain assumed control of much of the Middle East. Bad things happen when wars end. According to the “mandate” system created by the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Britain was entrusted with the temporary administration of Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Many Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey. In the years after the war, the Jewish population in Palestine increased dramatically, along with the instances of Jewish-Arab violence. The area’s instability led Britain to delay making a decision on Palestine’s future. In the aftermath of World War II and the terrors of the Holocaust, however, growing international support for Zionism led to the official declaration in 1948 of the State of Israel. (from History)


Pointing out this interesting fact--during half a century of Republican rhetoric of frugality, 1960 to 2010, entitlement spending grew 8% faster under Republican presidents than under Democrats--George Will has a nice line about the coming tax changes: "In 1975, Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw explained what he would do with his $75,000 salary: "Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women and Irish whiskey. The other 10% I'll probably waste." If you work hard, make a pile, then choose to squander it on dissipations, go ahead, it's a free country. But try to pass the pile to progeny, grasping government will intervene."



Sen. Rand Paul faces the possibility of an extended absence from the Senate as he recovers from serious injuries that he suffered on Friday after police said he was attacked by a neighbor at his Kentucky home. Apparently this is another Political Derangement Syndrome attack. Militant leftists, militant atheists, militant religious proselytizers. What's next?


The question for Asian governments anxious about an impulsive U.S. president looking for a foreign-policy success: Will he be tempted to strike a bargain? (wsj)


Dick Rutan's and Jeana Yeager's Voyager landed in California after flying non-stop around the world. As they got out of the cockpit and started visiting, my wife asked where all the government officials are who always swarm around when there's a big government project. I told her that it was not a government project.--Henderson



Rousseau is back. A not-so-new idea is flourishing that argues that what we call civilization--i.e. the State--is an arbitrary creation for the subsidy of The Rich. The real heroes are the Outsiders, the Barbarians, who did not have artists or printing presses to prove it. A line from a recent book review of James Scott's Against the Grain:

"The built world that sustains us is so vast that, for every pound of an average person’s body, there are 30 tons of infrastructure: roads, houses, sidewalks, utility grids, intensively farmed soil, and so forth. Without all that, global population would fall to ten million or so, where it stood during much of Scott’s story, or perhaps 200 million, as it was at the beginning of the Common Era. We are creatures of the artificial world that began with Scott’s walls and canals. The Earth is so thoroughly the world we have made that our domestic animals outweigh wild terrestrial mammals by a factor of 25 to one."


And this from a review of Conrad: "If Conrad sounds cynical to readers today, it is because he voices truths that are now deemed unmentionable. He did not believe in what Russell, in a 1937 essay, called the ‘superior virtue of the oppressed’. All human institutions, including newly independent states, were steeped in crime; barbarism and civilisation would always be intertwined, with old evils continually reappearing in new guises. It is a vision as disruptive to the censorious liberalism that holds the reins today as it was to imperial fantasies of progress a hundred years ago."


The only difference between gamma rays, x-rays, infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, radio waves and visible light is the wavelength and frequency. Since gamma rays and x-rays are dangerous, should we hide from all light?


None of the prohibitory provisions of the Constitution was to take on greater significance than the one forbidding individual states to erect barriers to commerce among themselves.  Making trade free  with an internal market that was to expand to vast proportions permitted the nation to indulge, for example, in recurrently restrictive tariffs, as the politics of a good century and a half seemed to dictate, without serious hindrance to economic progress.  Our great market was to lie at home in a free-trade area larger than the world has yet experienced anywhere else.--Nutter

One of the unspoken lessons of these mass shootings is, that despite their regulations, these governments can not protect us.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/oscars-entertainment-and-sharing.html

steeleydock.blogspot.com
One of the enduring mysteries of life is why the annual award event for the entertainment industry can not be entertaining. True, it is di...




A lot can be understood simply by recognizing that individuals strive to achieve the best they can as they perceive it, rather than asserting that they achieve best outcomes in their actions.--Boettke


Since at least the Scottish Enlightenment, classical liberals have understood that "spontaneous order"--order that develops from human action but not from human design--is critical to understanding how societies work. Markets and prices are one example of spontaneous order, but they're only one example. Economics doesn't teach us that markets are always good; it teaches us that people are really good at figuring out when to rely on markets. And that's what we should be teaching our students and our politicians.--Davis


There seems to have been a Democrat victory in the elections. One can hope it was stimulated by a yearning for good taste, if nothing else.  

Danica Roem, a Democrat,  will be one of the nation’s first openly transgender elected officials; the press seems to be  excited by what she is rather than what she thinks.


In 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays. Rontgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature.

X-rays are electromagnetic energy waves that act similarly to light rays, but at wavelengths approximately 1,000 times shorter than those of light.



A poverty map. The U.S. is pretty low:

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