The extender ritual is explained by the phenomenon of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. That’s where the recipients of government handouts
have a greater incentive to fight for the preservation of their benefits than the larger number of taxpayers, whose costs are spread thinner, have to resist them. And the longer the EV tax credit exists, the more powerful its constituency becomes.--deRugy
Morals, including especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a creation of man’s reason but a distinct
second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution — runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person
is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including ‘socialist’)….
And since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist any useful knowledge
that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason. Thus [they say]: ‘Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be mocked and deplored’.---Hayek
Who was....Charles Fox?
Re: college diversity officers, Frum wrote in the Atlantic, “The pages of the diversity officers’ journal reveal more fascination with increasing demand for their own employment—via compulsory
programs in ‘cultural competence’ for example—than in the hard work of mentoring and tutoring.”
Diversity administrators are, Frum notes, “an already thriving growth industry” that has considerably “bulked up” in the last few years, but they do little except to raise the cost of college.
In 1790, Charles James Fox, the paragon of early 18th-century
English liberalism, rose in Parliament to defend the rights of religious minorities. He referenced England’s long history of burning heretics for daring to dissent from the existing religious opinion of the Crown, whatever the opinion happened to be. When
he spoke, the Catholic Church was suppressed by law. He rose to speak in defense of the right of conscience: "We should perceive no vice, evil, or detriment, had ever sprung from toleration.
Persecution had always been a fertile source of much evil; perfidy, cruelty, and murder, had often been the consequence of intolerant principles…. It proceeded entirely on this grand fundamental error, that one man could better judge of the religious opinion
of another than the man himself could. Upon this absurd principle, persecution might be consistent; but in this it resembled madness: the characteristic of which was acting consistently upon wrong principles….Torture and death had been the auxiliaries of persecution;
the grand engines used in support of one particular system of religious opinion, to the extermination of every other."
It demonstrates just how racialized liberal thinking—liberal in the American sense, not in the classical, Adam Smith sense—has remained in America. Once you start down the road of equality
of outcome as the measure of justice, rather than equality under the law, you inevitably start dividing humans into groups, and one of the most obvious ways to do so is race. So, having spent years denying that there is any objective reality to racial classifications,
liberals start sifting people into racial categories with an obsessiveness that puts South African policemen under the old regime to shame. Race, among other classifications, becomes a lens through which the whole of social life is examined. In short, there
is no racist as fanatical as an anti-racist.--Dalrymple
In the budget deficit of under $800 billion this year, the actual amount of debt added last year was well over $1 trillion. That is due to “off budget” stems that Congress, in its wisdom,
thinks shouldn’t be part of the normal budgetary process. It includes things like Social Security and Medicare—which vary from time to time and year to year—and can be anywhere from $200 billion to almost $500 billion.
The federal government spent approximately $4.1 trillion in FY 2018, of which it had to borrow $779 billion on budget and a few hundred billion more off-budget (amount TBD). And over
40% of the on-budget deficit went simply to pay $325 billion in interest on previously-issued debt.
Schadenfreude: satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.
Schadenfreude is a direct borrowing from German. In German
Schadenfreude is a compound noun made up of the nouns
Schaden “harm, injury, damage” and
Freude
“joy.”
Schaden is related to English
scathe (via Old Norse).
Freude is a derivative of the adjective
froh “happy,” and is related to English
frolic, which comes from Dutch
vrolijk “cheerful, gay.”
Schadenfreude entered English in the late 19th century.
Science is our main path to knowledge, and yet so often science tells us that we don’t know.
That is all the more true for social science, and macroeconomics may well stand at the summit of our epistemic limitations…. We need to be more modest when it comes to what we can
possibly know. --Cowen
Roberts on the Isaacs study: ...
in the last three decades of the 20th century in the [Julia] Isaacs study: the children from the poorest families added more to their income than children from the richest families. That reality isn’t consistent with the standard pessimistic story that only
the richest Americans have benefited from economic growth over the last 30–40 years. Or that only the richest Americans have gotten raises. The pessimistic story based on comparing snapshots of the economy at two different points in time misses the underlying
dynamism of the American economy and does not accurately measure how workers at different places in the income distribution are doing over time.
From
a report on entrepreneurship: "The
notion that successful startups must launch and scale (expand) in Silicon Valley or another leading American city no longer holds true. Increasingly, the world's high-tech entrepreneurs are choosing to stay in their home city or nation."
Fiction continues to outsell non-fiction, probably because it's more believable.
One wonders what the implications of a tilt in the scarcity/surplus balance will have in any culture. One thing we have a surplus of is information.
Yesterday I was watching the C-Span book network and a man was discussing his book on the vanished colony of Roanoke. He casually mentioned that the estimate of deaths among American Indians in the first one hundred years of the arrival of the Europeans was
up to 200 million people. Now the population of Europe, an agricultural community, was about 60 million people at the time of the discovery of America. But we are supposed to believe that a hunter-gatherer culture without the wheel was able to support three
and a half times that? Lewis and Clark would be stepping over bodies all the way to the Pacific. But one of the casualties of the information surplus is the phrase "I do not know."
Why is it assumed that "Whistleblower" is a compliment?
Is it that it assumes truth and an effort to suppress it?
Golden oldie:
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
Nothing is new under the sun. We are having discussions about the impact of computers, the availability of information and dissemination o...
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Who was not represented at Bethlehem? Answer below.
So,
any new mutation is likely to have not just one effect but several. Though one of the effects may be beneficial, it is unlikely that more than one will be. This is simply because most mutational effects are bad. In addition to being a fact, this is to be expected
in principle: if you start with a complicated working mechanism – like a radio, say – there are many more ways of making it worse than of making it better.--Dawkins.
While this observation may be obvious, it is no less important. Fine-tuning something that works well has some serious risks.
Ty Cobb stole home 54 times.
Yes,
they’re largely in it for the money; but – unlike
every government on Earth –
business rarely puts a gun to your head. Businesses assemble teams of volunteers to
meet the needs of willing
consumers – and succeed wildly.--Caplan
Karaoke
Nation: Just like everyone thinks they can sing, so many think they can govern.
A
lawyer's rule is, never ask a question you do not know the answer to. Has society decided to do the same?
Not at Bethlehem? Priests.
Boaz: "...
something very candid that the
socialist
economist Robert Heilbroner wrote:
that socialism depends on central planning and a collective moral commitment and thus on command and obedience to the plan. And that means that “The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a
deliberately embraced collective moral goal… Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.” Democratic liberties like free speech and free press are an inherent threat to
the planners’ control."
A
serious admission.
The
back and forth over the U.S. and its behavior in the world is interesting and fun. The European position--often taken by Sandra and David--is that the Americans are a meddling and
usually self-centered lot who try to manipulate the world to their advantage. The opposite view is that the Americans are always trying to stabilize the world after some idiotic and well intentioned European effort--or devastating and decades-long conflict--has
created some awful unintended consequence. These positions usually are usually flavored by the concerns that the Europeans have a history of unbridled animosity and violence towards
others that the Americans simply do not have and that the Americans are currently led by a guy who thinks everything is negotiable, something that is probably untrue. Recently Sandra sent an article from Al Jazeera that made the Americans look base and inept
in their dealings with Palestine and I responded by claiming that none of this is our fault and someone has to be a grownup here.
Then I went to a lecture on pandemics given by a guy from Hopkins named Adalja. It was very interesting and I learned
a lot--until a guy wearing a black jacket despite the heat asked: "Are you implying that the Russians have reopened their Biopreparat bioweapons program?" And the guy said, "Yes."
So the Russians are back to weaponizing smallpox and Ebola. That makes a lot of our concerns academic. There is real evil in the world.
I came home with a serious depression.
Canada said it was "gravely concerned" over a new wave of arrests of women and human rights campaigners in the kingdom, including award-winning gender rights activist Samar Badawi.
The Saudis responded by throwing the Canadian ambassador out. That's what happens when you act like the righteous Americans.
AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd.....a list:
