The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (25 Jul 1902-1983)
I watched the first innings of the Pirate game last night and was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. They are appallingly bad.
The rumor is they are willing to trade Vasquez to the Dodgers but want their best minor leaguer.
China’s GDP was less than $300 billion in 1980, a figure that had risen to $11 trillion by 2015. The country’s total trade with the outside world came to just $40 billion in 1980, but in 2015 it was $4 trillion—a hundredfold increase. Allison has plenty more shockers up his sleeve: “For every two-year period since 2008, the increment of growth in China’s GDP has been larger than the entire economy of India. Even at its lower growth in 2015, China’s economy created a Greece every sixteen weeks and an Israel every twenty-five weeks.” In fact, since the Great Recession of 2008, 40 percent of all the economic growth in the world has occurred in just one country: China. Allison quotes Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, for the coup de grรขce: “It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state since July 4th, and most of those quakes were aftershocks of the two very large events that hit the Ridgecrest area early in the month.
“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This, one of Lady Macbeth’s most famous lines, is cited by Elizabeth Winkler in her recent Atlantic essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” as a "thrilling instance of a woman’s resistance to femininity." Winkler then goes on to compare Lady Macbeth’s anger to women’s #MeToo “fury.” “This woman,” Winkler says of Lady Macbeth, woke her out of her “adolescent stupor” by “rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status.”
"a woman’s resistance to femininity?"
This is a very unusual explanation of these lines. The good Lady is calling for divine help to assist her in killing the innocent king, a guest in her home. This is one of the real villains of Elizabethan drama. Is this really #MeToo?
This is in The Atlantic!
On this day in 1864, a Union advance was stopped at the Battle of the Crater.
The Roots of Conflict
Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent has the right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. The same can be said about the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, sex education and other hot-button issues in education. These become contentious issues because schools are owned by the government.
In the case of prayers, there will either be prayers or no prayers in school. It’s a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not, and parent groups with strong preferences will organize to fight one another. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent will be forced to either concede or muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. Such a conflict would not arise if education were not government-produced but only government-financed, say through education vouchers. Parents with different preferences could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice. Instead of being enemies, parents with different preferences could be friends.
People also have strong preferences for goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for white wine and distaste for reds while others have the opposite preference — strong preferences for red wine. Some of us love classical music while others love rock and roll music. Some of us love Mercedes-Benz while others love Lincoln Continentals. When’s the last time you heard red wine drinkers in conflict with white wine drinkers? Have you ever seen classical music lovers organizing against rock and roll lovers or Mercedes-Benz lovers in conflict with Lincoln Continental lovers?
People have strong preferences for these goods just as much as they may have strong preference for schooling. It’s a rare occasion, if ever, that one sees the kind of conflict between wine, music and automobile lovers that we see about schooling issues. Why? While government allocation of resources is a zero-sum game — one person’s win is another’s loss — market allocation is not. Market allocation is a positive-sum game where everybody wins. Lovers of red wine, classical music and Mercedes-Benz get what they want while lovers of white wine, rock and roll music and Lincoln Continentals get what they want. Instead of fighting one another, they can live in peace and maybe be friends.
It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of market allocation, have government, through a democratic majority-rule process, decide what wines, music and cars would be produced. If that were done, I guarantee that red wine lovers would organize against white wine lovers, classical music lovers against rock and roll lovers and Mercedes-Benz lovers against Lincoln Continental lovers.
Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Again, the prime feature of political decision-making is that it’s a zero-sum game. One person’s win is of necessity another person’s loss. If red wine lovers win, white wine lovers would lose. As such, political allocation of resources enhances conflict while market allocation reduces conflict. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. That’s the main benefit of limited government.
Unfortunately, too many Americans want government to grow and have more power over our lives. That means conflict among us is going to rise.
(This is from an old essay by the always insightful, pure and simple Walter Williams)
I watched the first innings of the Pirate game last night and was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. They are appallingly bad.
The rumor is they are willing to trade Vasquez to the Dodgers but want their best minor leaguer.
- Biden has rebounded to 28.4 percentage points from a low of 26.0 percentage points just after the debate. He was at 32.1 percent before the debate, so he’s regained about two-fifths of what he lost. Harris has fallen to 12.2 percentage points from a peak of 15.2 percentage points. She was at 7.0 percent before the debate, so she’s lost about a third of what she’d gained.
PragerU is a conservative web site with 5-minute videos on various topics. As of last week, 56 of the organization’s 320 five-minute videos on conservative topics — the minimum wage is bad, gun rights are good — are hidden on YouTube from users watching on Restricted Mode (RM). YouTube describes RM as “an optional setting … used by a small subset of users, such as libraries, schools, and public institutions, who choose to have a more limited viewing experience on YouTube.” Some conservatives are furious, claiming "censorship." But 98.5% of YouTube users don’t use restricted mode. And PragerU still has more than two million subscribers, and its YouTube videos receive over a billion views a year. One billion! As to those 56 videos specifically, the thrust of YouTube’s explanation in a Senate hearing last week is that they involve mature topics, including “Gender Identity: Why All The Confusion?,” “Born to Hate Jews,” “Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?,” and “What Is Intersectionality?”
Brazilian Prison Riot Leaves 52 Prisoners Dead, 16 Decapitated. Probably not scared straight yet.
"…. if your view is that the progressive agenda is morally wrong, that people shouldn’t receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes, you should be aware how many Americans are already “takers,” “moochers,” whatever. In fact, we’re talking about a vast swath of the heartland that includes just about every state that voted for Donald Trump. I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states’ federal “balance of payments” — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue. The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states."
This is from Krugman and it is hard to think about. Does he think that the government takes money then gives it back to the people who paid them? Does anyone think that taxes should be just returned? This is the strawest of straw men. I get a headache just reading it.
Capital One said a hacker accessed the personal information for roughly 106 million credit card customers and applicants, one of the largest data breaches of a big bank.
This is from Krugman and it is hard to think about. Does he think that the government takes money then gives it back to the people who paid them? Does anyone think that taxes should be just returned? This is the strawest of straw men. I get a headache just reading it.
Capital One said a hacker accessed the personal information for roughly 106 million credit card customers and applicants, one of the largest data breaches of a big bank.
Kyle Giersdorf, a 16-year-old video-game player, won $3 million on Sunday after winning the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. In an interview with ESPN, Giersdorf was asked what went through his mind when he won. “I don’t even know. That all the hard work I put into the game has finally paid off,” he said. The Pennsylvania teen, who goes by the screen name “Bugha,” played the insanely popular battle royale shooter game eight to 10 hours a day, his mother told ESPN. That dwarfs the approximate one-hour average time that many people spend playing video games, according to a 4,500-person survey on online gaming that Limelight Networks released earlier this year.
Antagonism is being touted as a quality inherent to populism. One article points to Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher of the Nazi era—he is sometimes called the "crown jurist of the Third Reich"—who has had a strong influence on both the hard left and the hard right. In The Concept of the Political (1932), a relentless critique of classical liberalism and constitutional democracy, Schmitt sought to displace the ideal of voluntary cooperation with the idea of conflict. The "specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced," Schmitt wrote, "is that between friend and enemy."
So there is no effort to come together, to have a pluralistic society discuss their differences and come to a mutually agreed upon solution. But this sounds much more like the Left than populism.
This year, the government will raise $3.5 trillion, borrow $1 trillion, and spend $4.5 trillion.
So there is no effort to come together, to have a pluralistic society discuss their differences and come to a mutually agreed upon solution. But this sounds much more like the Left than populism.
This year, the government will raise $3.5 trillion, borrow $1 trillion, and spend $4.5 trillion.
China’s GDP was less than $300 billion in 1980, a figure that had risen to $11 trillion by 2015. The country’s total trade with the outside world came to just $40 billion in 1980, but in 2015 it was $4 trillion—a hundredfold increase. Allison has plenty more shockers up his sleeve: “For every two-year period since 2008, the increment of growth in China’s GDP has been larger than the entire economy of India. Even at its lower growth in 2015, China’s economy created a Greece every sixteen weeks and an Israel every twenty-five weeks.” In fact, since the Great Recession of 2008, 40 percent of all the economic growth in the world has occurred in just one country: China. Allison quotes Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, for the coup de grรขce: “It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state since July 4th, and most of those quakes were aftershocks of the two very large events that hit the Ridgecrest area early in the month.
“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This, one of Lady Macbeth’s most famous lines, is cited by Elizabeth Winkler in her recent Atlantic essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” as a "thrilling instance of a woman’s resistance to femininity." Winkler then goes on to compare Lady Macbeth’s anger to women’s #MeToo “fury.” “This woman,” Winkler says of Lady Macbeth, woke her out of her “adolescent stupor” by “rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status.”
"a woman’s resistance to femininity?"
This is a very unusual explanation of these lines. The good Lady is calling for divine help to assist her in killing the innocent king, a guest in her home. This is one of the real villains of Elizabethan drama. Is this really #MeToo?
This is in The Atlantic!
On this day in 1864, a Union advance was stopped at the Battle of the Crater.
The Roots of Conflict
Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent has the right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. The same can be said about the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, sex education and other hot-button issues in education. These become contentious issues because schools are owned by the government.
In the case of prayers, there will either be prayers or no prayers in school. It’s a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not, and parent groups with strong preferences will organize to fight one another. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent will be forced to either concede or muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. Such a conflict would not arise if education were not government-produced but only government-financed, say through education vouchers. Parents with different preferences could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice. Instead of being enemies, parents with different preferences could be friends.
People also have strong preferences for goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for white wine and distaste for reds while others have the opposite preference — strong preferences for red wine. Some of us love classical music while others love rock and roll music. Some of us love Mercedes-Benz while others love Lincoln Continentals. When’s the last time you heard red wine drinkers in conflict with white wine drinkers? Have you ever seen classical music lovers organizing against rock and roll lovers or Mercedes-Benz lovers in conflict with Lincoln Continental lovers?
People have strong preferences for these goods just as much as they may have strong preference for schooling. It’s a rare occasion, if ever, that one sees the kind of conflict between wine, music and automobile lovers that we see about schooling issues. Why? While government allocation of resources is a zero-sum game — one person’s win is another’s loss — market allocation is not. Market allocation is a positive-sum game where everybody wins. Lovers of red wine, classical music and Mercedes-Benz get what they want while lovers of white wine, rock and roll music and Lincoln Continentals get what they want. Instead of fighting one another, they can live in peace and maybe be friends.
It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of market allocation, have government, through a democratic majority-rule process, decide what wines, music and cars would be produced. If that were done, I guarantee that red wine lovers would organize against white wine lovers, classical music lovers against rock and roll lovers and Mercedes-Benz lovers against Lincoln Continental lovers.
Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Again, the prime feature of political decision-making is that it’s a zero-sum game. One person’s win is of necessity another person’s loss. If red wine lovers win, white wine lovers would lose. As such, political allocation of resources enhances conflict while market allocation reduces conflict. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. That’s the main benefit of limited government.
Unfortunately, too many Americans want government to grow and have more power over our lives. That means conflict among us is going to rise.
(This is from an old essay by the always insightful, pure and simple Walter Williams)
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