Demographics and Demagogues

                       Demographics and Demagogues

When you hear people talking about the notion that America is not a democracy, as if they had never read the first page of any American civics book, they are not talking about rights or social justice. They are talking about this:

By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by 70 senators.

The pamphleteers at the New York Times say: When Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole. Similarly, gerrymandering and geography means that Democrats need to win a substantial majority in the House popular vote to take the gavel. And a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and Ishaana Talesara calculates that the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage means “Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

When these people talk about remaking the country they are talking about restructuring the country away from the basic compromise the majority made with the minority that allowed for the creation of it, i.e. the country's very essence. While the slaveowners were a part of this compromise, that does not invalidate the argument; the main concern was the protection of the minority from the demagoguery of the majority.

This may not be for everybody. But that's what we are.

The Art of the Possible

                                  The Art of the Possible

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, tweeted Wednesday during the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump: “Overheard convo between two Republican Senators who only watch Fox News. ‘is this stuff real? I haven’t heard any of this before. I thought it was all about a server. If half the stuff Schiff is saying is true, we’re up [expletive] creek. Hope the White House has exculpatory evidence.’”

The tweet remained active on Mr. Lockhart’s account and had been shared nearly 10,000 times and favorited nearly 40,000 times and counting.

About 10 minutes and a couple of tweets after making the claim, Mr. Lockhart admitted to making up the story.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., kicked off Democrats’ historically momentous impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump by opening with an abject lie, which he later claimed was a “parody.”

Schiff later said he had evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. The findings of the Mueller report did not proved him wrong; when you have a fantasy, you cannot be proven wrong.  He simply had no evidence for anything.

We have come to a new time in the world. These people do not see themselves as liars, they see themselves as artists. And, indeed, art is the creation of an extra-reality that bears witness to reality. Which apparently allows anyone to mimic his own view of reality. And arrogantly try to deceive everyone with it.

The difference is, of course, how it is presented. Reality and unreality are two separate realms. One does not get to lie and then claim when the lie is discovered that, indeed, your information was misplaced; it should actually have been placed on the fiction shelf. 

Nor can one hold up a bank and, when caught, claim you were rehearsing.

Plague

                                Plague

In 1918, the influenza pandemic took the lives of more people than died in World War I. World War I. It was the most devastating epidemic recorded in world history. It infected 500 million people around the world, including people on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million. You could not hide.

In two years, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40, unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy. A half. An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).

Compare this to the Black Death. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century. It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its previous level. The plague recurred as outbreaks in Europe until the 19th century.

The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population. Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. In London approximately 62,000 people died between the years between 1346 and 1353. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a third of the European population had already died. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. The disease bypassed some areas, and the most isolated areas were less vulnerable to contagion. Monks and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death.
Caregivers always die first.

(couple of sources, incl wiki)

Viral Particles

                                              Viral Particles

Some tidbits--talked about but not proven--about the virus:

China’s National Health Commission Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period for the virus can range from one to 14 days, during which infection can occur, which was not the case with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Ma Xiaowei made a startling statement Sunday about the Wuhan coronavirus: He said people can spread it before they become symptomatic. “This is a game-changer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This has tremendous implications as you get no signal as to who to quarantine. This allows the virus to hide and spread from asymptomatic--but infected--people. This is very dangerous. The healthy guy beside you might be a carrier.

Experts at Lancaster University estimated there may already be 11,000 people infected in Wuhan – and that only one in 20 infections has come to medical attention. The experts calculated the number could grow to 190,000 by February 4.

About 5 million residents had already left Wuhan before the lockdown

So far, there are 2,886 confirmed total cases of the coronavirus. All but 61 of them are in mainland China. The death toll so far is 81. If you can believe what is said by any government.

But cases have also been found in France, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. That list includes the world’s three largest economies (the U.S., China and Japan).

And now the topper: The word “coronavirus” is an anagram of “carnivorous.”

The Virus

                                        The Virus

A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.

Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”

The relatives of all three said the deceased hadn’t been included in China’s official count of 41 deaths attributed to coronavirus.

The Beijing News, a newspaper, reported this week that many patients weren’t officially labeled as carrying the new virus, even though their doctors and nurses said they were.

So, it is going to be hard to get objective information here. That said....

                                          *********

Dr. Dena Grayson is an M.D. and researcher who has years of training developing Ebola treatments. Unfortunately, she is also a politician. In 2016, she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the United States House of Representatives for Florida's 9th congressional district. With that caveat, here are some of her tweets about this coronavirus:

a. Having YEARS of experience developing an Ebola treatment, I was concerned about this Coronavirus Outbreak from the outset, because this coronavirus strain is very contagious, causes severe illness, and NO treatments or vaccines are available.

b. Unlike H5N1 "bird flu" (which does not spread easily between people) or SARS (which was spread by only a handful of "super spreaders"), this coronavirus DOES appear to spread easily between people, even after making the jump from an animal (this is not common).

c. In addition to being highly contagious, this novel coronavirus can cause a SEVERE infection that can kill even healthy people. It's rare to see BOTH of these (bad) attributes in the same novel virus. Usually, it's one or the other.

d. Per @CDCgov, "Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China reportedly had some link to a large seafood/animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread." Now, many newly diagnosed patients have NO connection to the market, supporting human-human spread = BAD

e. Ominous signs. Forbidden City (major tourist attraction) is now closed, and tours in #Beijing are now canceled. I fear that #Beijing soon may be locked down, joining at least 11 of cities in #China with a collective 50+ million people

Sunday/Video Replay

                                    Sunday/Video Replay

Is dogma fluid? Is the unflinching believer in a universal truth a man of determined integrity imposing a certain reality on a volatile world or an inhuman automaton applying laws to a world whose very nature is compromise?

There is a new book by Caldwell, a book with a truly terrifying thesis. The book deals with the conflicts in American political thinking, its origins, evolution and his appalling conclusion. Park MacDougald's review is pieced together here, in and out with me. Hair-raising.

Christopher Caldwell is not a household name. But for the relatively small set of people who care deeply about political writing, he is a towering figure. His prose — full of wit and irony, enlivened by an eye for paradox and the telling detail, informed by a polyglot and polymathic erudition — is second to none in the world of conservative journalism and exceeds nine-tenths of what is published in the press at large. In a review of Caldwell’s previous book, 2008’s immigration-skeptic Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson, himself one of the most learned individuals on the planet, praised Caldwell’s “cultural range” as “perhaps without equal” among American journalists and noted, respectfully, that his “columns in the Financial Times make much liberal opinion look the dreary mainstream pabulum it too often is.”

He develops the idea that America, filled with guilt and desperate to reverse previous errors, put theory and philosophy on hold and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In doing so, it set up an inherent conflict between it and the original constitution.

Was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “de facto constitution” incompatible with the original one? In a strict legal sense, Caldwell argues, it is that the Civil Rights Act and associated Supreme Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, conflicted with or modified what had traditionally been understood as Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed rights. Court- or legislatively-mandated integration, for instance, curtailed freedom of association, in the same way that legal prohibitions on discrimination in hiring or renting out a room curtailed the property rights of a business or hotel owner.

Near the end of the book, he mentions in passing that Republicans have failed to see that “the only way back to the free country of their ideals [is] through the repeal of the civil rights laws.” It’s a shocking notion, and it is hard to believe that even Caldwell believes it is a viable way to proceed. In another late passage, he writes:

"As they moved inland in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Americans had obliterated whole cultures with a clean conscience, as if the continent were unpeopled. In the half-century after the mid-1960s, America’s leaders, still dreaming their big dreams, obliterated their own cultural institutions in a similar spirit."

Years ago Robert Coover wrote a fantasy novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., about a fantasy baseball league--before any existed. It is an unsettling book with purposeful religious implications. In the book's pivotal moment the inventor and manager of the game rolls the dice and, by a freak chance, his favorite player is hit by a pitch and killed. So Mr. Waugh changes the rules and raises him from the dead.

The Mother of All Graphs

                       The Mother of All Graphs

This graph looks more interesting the more you look at it. It is almost a micro- course in economics. Costs of domestic origin are rising, those of importation are falling. So, globalization is protecting us from inflation--or allowing us to tolerate new inflationary sources like medical care and education. And diversions are becoming more and more affordable while necessities are less so. Tradable commodities are sensitive, non-tradables are not. The greater the degree of government involvement in the provision of a good or service the greater the price increases over time. And what does it say about the "demand" component?

A few other observations/speculations:

We can expect future declines in the prices of college textbooks, as the traditional textbook market faces increasingly tough competition from alternative options including hundreds of “open textbooks” that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Open Education maintains an “Open Textbook Library” website that lists hundreds of textbooks in more than 20 academic subjects that are available for free online or as a PDF file, or as a print copy at a low-cost ($33.50 for print copies from OpenStax). Just in the field of economics, there are more than 20 free open textbooks for Economics courses including Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, International Economics, Money and Banking, Economic Analysis and Principles of Political Economy.

The annual increase in college tuition and fees of only 1.7% through December of last year was the smallest yearly increase in the history of the CPI for college tuition and fees for any month going all the way back to 1978. And the year-over-increase of 1.7% for college tuition through December was less than annual CPI inflation of 2.3% over that same period, indicating the real cost of college tuition and fees actually decreased in 2019. So perhaps the “higher education bubble” is finally starting to show signs of deflating?

Disparities

                                Disparities


Former Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen, in addressing a Brookings Institution audience said: "Within the economics profession, women and minorities are significantly underrepresented. And data compiled by the American Economic Association's Committees on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and the Status of Minority Groups in the profession show that there has been little or no progress in recent decades. Women today make up only about 30 percent of Ph.D. students. Within academia, their representation drops the higher up one goes on the career ladder. The share of Ph.D.s awarded to African Americans is low, and it has declined slightly in recent decades." Yellen says that diversity in economics is a matter of "basic justice."


So, do disparities prove discrimination? And injustice? How exactly does one assess the innumerable factors in growth and development? And what kind of thinking is this from an economist of her importance?




Sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill men than they are women. Despite the fact that men are 50% of the population, (and so are women,) men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning, 82% are men. Are sharks and lightning the agents of some Angry Power? Why are children of the same parents and households so different?


Can't the Fed do something to clean these disparities up?

The Sediment of Wisdom

                       The Sediment of Wisdom

There are all sorts of little nuggets of distilled wisdom summarizing the modern problem of politics. One appears in various guises like "elites," "bureaucracy," "deep state," aristocracy"--all referring to a distant, unresponsive, arrogant, self-important subset of essentially social engineers who have their own ideas of how we should be and live. Through their good edicts, we are gradually changing our identity from the land of the free and home of the brave to the land of two-flush toilets, meatless hamburgers, and long, long showers.

Bordeaux has a funny article about this subset as he writes about the new film “Mine Your Own Business.”

"This movie is a documentary centered on a small Romanian town, Rosia Montana. A poor mountain village, Rosia Montana was chosen by a western mining company as a site for a new mine — an enterprise that would have offered higher-paying jobs to the mostly peasant, rural population.

Environmentalists, though, opposed the mine. Among their chief reasons was their insistence that the mine would “destroy” the way of life of residents of Rosia Montana. On this point, the environmentalists were correct: The mine would indeed change the way of life in that town. But as the film documents, that’s precisely an outcome that the townspeople wanted.

Their rural way of life — with chickens scampering along the dirt roads and outhouses rather than indoor plumbing the norm — was no joy for them. Most of these townspeople welcomed an opportunity to integrate with the modern, industrial, global economy.

The environmental congregation, however, paid no attention. Living in cities far away from Rosia Montana, environmentalists — against all evidence — insisted that the townspeople really don’t want the industry, jobs and greater prosperity that the mine would bring.

One environmentalist, a Belgian woman, confidently shared her revelation that the people of Rosia Montana prefer to travel by horse rather than by automobile, so the added wealth that the mine would bring to enable the townspeople to afford cars would be pointless.

The townspeople, alas, have very different ideas. Being human, they’re capable of thinking for themselves. And when asked if they’d prefer a horse to a car, droves of them looked at the questioner as if he were stupid to ask such a thing. “A car” was the constant and unambiguous answer of each person asked.

In another scene, a local man in his 20s, after expressing his support for the mine, was asked if he shared the environmentalists’ concern that the mine would destroy the town’s beauty. Looking momentarily befuddled, the young man glanced around his hometown — at the dirt streets, the shacks, the ever-present farm animals — and said matter-of-factly that “It is not so beautiful.”"

But these people will never stop their noble work because they are people of The Ideal;  they know what is best and only they can lead us to it. After all, if these places all modernized and became comfortable, where would the people from "90 Day Fiancé" come from?

Sleep or Not

 Why We Sleep was published in September 2017. Part survey of sleep research, part self-help book. It was praised by The New York Times, The Guardian, and many others. It was named one of NPR’s favorite books of 2017. After publishing the book, Walker gave a TED talk, a talk at Google, and appeared on Joe Rogan’s and Peter Attia’s podcasts. A month after the book’s publication, he became a sleep scientist at Google. A guy named Alexey Guzey read and researched the information in the first chapter and just lost his mind over the inaccuracies. 

This is a summary:

In the first chapter of Why We Sleep, Walker:

1. completely misrepresents the relationship between sleep and longevity and between sleep and cancer (Section 1)
2. erroneously states that getting a good night’s sleep is always beneficial (Section 2)
3. erroneously states that patients with fatal familial insomnia die because of lack of sleep (Section 3)
4. seems to invent a “fact” that the WHO has declared a “sleep loss epidemic” (Section 4)
5. misrepresents National Sleep Foundation’s sleep recommendations and uses them to misrepresent the number of adults failing to get the recommended hours of sleep (Section 5)
   • also seems to invent the WHO’s sleep recommendations
6. calls his book “a scientifically accurate intervention”

Given the density of scientific and factual errors and an apparent invention of new “facts” by Walker, I would caution readers against taking the book’s recommendations at face value.

Growth and Progress

                            Growth and Progress

So how do we recognize progress?

Growth is what actually saves lives, actually reduces misery, and actually meets people’s basic needs over time. Growth raises the material baseline. Now this definition has admitted limits. The improvement in life is what we can measure, materialistic change, and most people would say that such measurements are inadequate for humans; we desire more. And those more spiritual elements are out of materialism's purview.

But criticism currently seems to be over the failure of growth to be perfect, to vary over populations and be spread indifferently.
A recent psychological study suggests what has been called “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear. Success makes failure stand out.
The difficulty is the solution of many such critics is to turn to processes that historically have been inimical to growth.

But what if growth is indeed the big factor in progress. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist isn’t usually over substance, it’s the time frame they’re looking at. Problems are easier to spot today using a single point of reference, but progress is almost always more powerful over time.

If that's the case, there is an argument that progress is relatively new. This graph is really startling in this context:

Some Funny, Some Silly

                          Some Funny, Some Silly

Sunday/Blake's Lamb of God

                                  Blake's Lamb of God

The gospels in the last weeks have a repeating phrase, "The Lamb of God." Today's gospel has the peculiar Baptist, with some pleasure in his own position in the hierarchy, defer quite definitively to Christ as the Son of God.
This is from the mystic romantic poet, William Blake:


Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee



Little Lamb I'll tell thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Charts on Motherhood, CO2 and Texas Production

            Charts on Motherhood, CO2 and Texas Production







Between now and 2050, CO2 emissions are projected to decrease by 4% in the OECD countries and increase by 36% in the non-OECD countries. To combat rising CO2, perhaps Greta Thunberg is lecturing the wrong people

Learning Environments

                                      Learning Environments


From David Epstein:

"The wider world is mostly characterized by wicked learning environments, where you can’t see information. It’s hidden from us. Feedback is delayed and sometimes inaccurate.

One of the examples is a famous New York City physician who was renowned for his ability to predict that patients would get typhoid. He predicted the sickness time and again. He would palpate their tongue (feel around their tongue) and predict, weeks before patients had a single symptom, over and over, and became famous, and as one of his colleagues said, he was a more productive carrier of typhoid than even Typhoid Mary because he was giving his patients Typhoid with his hands. In that case, the feedback he was receiving was reinforcing exactly the wrong lesson.

So that’s the extreme of a wicked environment where your feedback teaches exactly the wrong lesson.”

Process of Diversity

                            Process of Diversity

Does diversity have value in itself? Or, when we speak of diversity, do we assume a certain level of quality? We usually don't include stone-age cultures or cultures rich in human sacrifice when we consider diversity. What is it about diversity we like?

It certainly isn't difference alone. No one wants to spice the college scene with a few affable Nazis. Nor would we advocate diversity for entertainment value alone; there must be something else, something more.

I think most likely the possibility of "contribution," the bringing of a new, perhaps oblique view to the table where the condition of man is being discussed. It implies quality and interest in human advancement, not simple difference. It is a distinction in perspective. A unique vision of value. Diversity is part of the creative direction, not the outcome; it is the interface, not the result.

Here is Sowell on diversity, assuming some basic agreements:

“If there is any place in the Guinness Book of World Records for words repeated the most often, over the most years, without one speck of evidence, “diversity” should be a prime candidate. Is diversity our strength? Or anybody’s strength, anywhere in the world? Does Japan’s homogeneous population cause the Japanese to suffer? Have the Balkans been blessed by their heterogeneity — or does the very word “Balkanization” remind us of centuries of strife, bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities, extending into our own times? Has Europe become a safer place after importing vast numbers of people from the Middle East, with cultures hostile to the fundamental values of Western civilization?

“When in Rome do as the Romans do” was once a common saying. Today, after generations in the West have been indoctrinated with the rhetoric of multiculturalism, the borders of Western nations on both sides of the Atlantic have been thrown open to people who think it is their prerogative to come as refugees and tell the Romans what to do — and to assault those who don’t knuckle under to foreign religious standards.

It has not been our diversity, but our ability to overcome the problems inherent in diversity, and to act together as Americans, that has been our strength.”

Diversity is a part of a process, not the endpoint.

Conservativism, Tribalism and Contradiction

             Conservativism, Tribalism and Contradiction

Conservatism has a lot of analysis. What is its relationship with the economy? With its historical heroes? A couple of good comments on Conservatism from somewhere:

Conservatism, at its heart, is comfortable with contradiction, and in utopian thinking, all contradictions are supposed to be wrenched out of society. No two good things need to be in conflict with each other.

Anti-utopianism requires acknowledging that life can be unfair, that government can’t do everything, that the market will reward things we don’t like and erase things we love. Every government policy involves some trade-off between competing goods. Freedom will produce inequality not because freedom is unjust, but because freedom will yield different results since people are born with different abilities, have different desires, and make different choices. We will never live in a world where school teachers make as much money as professional basketball players. Of course, injustice exists, but the pace of reform must be guided by prudence and cost-benefit analysis. “I must bear with infirmities until they fester into crimes,” as Edmund Burke said.

The second reason is related to the first: Conservatism isn’t supposed to be a tribal identity. There is nothing inherently threatening to the idea of conservatism to say that some conservatives can be evil, stupid, or wrong about some things. Nor is it antithetical to conservatism to concede that some liberals are decent, smart, or right about some things. But tribalism requires drawing a stark line between Us and Them.

That’s what happens when you give in to tribalism: It starts to make sense. It even starts to feel natural—in part because it is natural. But part of what it means to be a conservative is understanding that not everything that is natural is good and not everything that is unpopular is wrong.

P3

                                                             P3

An article popped up on Microsoft News about the Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, California. They are investigating the science of movement. And they have started exactly where you would have guessed.

Dr. Marcus Elliott, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of P3, has seen the data and – he believes – the future.
“We understand these athletes and how they’re going to perform on an NBA court before they set foot on an NBA court,” Elliott says.
“All of these kids going through this NBA Draft – including Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett from Duke (University) – have been coming to see us since they were 16, 17 years old. With our data, we can give them injury-risk models and performance models to help guide their career development,” Elliott says. “Nobody has this biomechanical information on them. We have years of it."

Launched in 2006, P3 is the first facility to apply a more data-driven approach to understanding how elite competitors move. It uses advanced sports-science strategies to assess and train athletes in ways that will revolutionize pro sports – and, eventually, the bodies and abilities of weekend warriors, Elliott says.
“We are challenging them and measuring them. But we’re not interested in how high they jump or how fast they accelerate,” Elliott says. “We’re interested in the mechanics of how they jump, how they accelerate and decelerate. It’s helping us unlock the secrets of human movement.”

Working directly with players and their agents or families, P3 has evaluated members of the past six NBA draft classes, amassing a database of more than 600 current and former NBA athletes.
P3 outfitted its lab with a high-speed camera system manufactured by Simi Reality Motion Systems GmbH, a German company from the ZF Group and a Microsoft partner.
Simi offers markerless, motion-capture software that removes the need for athletes to wear tracking sensors while they play or train. Simi also works with seven Major League Baseball clubs, deploying high-speed camera systems to those stadiums to record every pitch during every game since the 2017 season.

Simi’s software digitizes the pitchers’ arm angles and related body movements, spanning 42 different joint centers across 24,000 pitches thrown per team per season. That produces hundreds of billions of data points that are uploaded and processed on Microsoft Azure, enabling teams to create in-depth biomechanical analyses for the players, says Pascal Russ, Simi’s CEO.
“The first team that deploys this effectively on the field to pick lineups or to see which pitch angles worked well against which batters is going to see a huge separation between them and the other teams not using this,” Russ says.

“It’s freakishly accurate.”

While Russ foresees this technology eventually remaking baseball, such seismic shifts already are occurring in the NBA through P3’s player assessments, says Benedikt Jocham, Simi’s U.S. chief operations officer.
“We provide the software solution that can quantify the movement and analyze, for example, how much pressure and torque a person is putting on various body parts,” Jocham says. “P3 adds the magic sauce. They are wizards at figuring out what it all means and making sense out of it for athletes.”

After the cameras record a player’s movements in the P3 lab, those datasets are loaded into Azure where machine-learning algorithms reveal how that player’s physical systems are most related to other NBA players who were similarly assessed. The algorithm then assigns that player into one of several clusters or branches that predict how their basketball career may unfold, Elliott says.

One branch, for example, contains athletes who had a brief NBA experience and never became significant players. Another branch encompasses players who were impactful during their first three or four seasons then sustained serious injuries that depleted their skills. In still another branch, players share rare combinations of length, power and force that fed elite careers – and they remained healthy.

The data is also helping to shatter long-held theories that successful NBA players who, at first glance, lack the size, jumping ability or quickness of traditional stars are merely compensating by tapping unmeasurable intangibles such as “intuition” or “IQ” or “heart.”
“That’s how people once would have defined (2017-18 NBA most valuable player) James Harden, as somebody who just has this super-high basketball IQ,” Elliott says. “Maybe he does. But he also has a better stopping or braking system than anybody we’ve ever assessed in the NBA.

Case in point: Dallas Mavericks rookie Luka Doncic. In its pre-draft assessment of Doncic one year ago, P3 identified that same hidden performance metric – the elite ability to stop quickly. P3 knew, before his NBA Draft, that Doncic and Harden were in the same player branch. Doncic posted a stunning first pro season.

Every NBA player or draft prospect assessed by P3 receives a report that highlights their injury risks and compares them to league peers based on performance.

Eventually, this same information may become available to amateur athletes and everyone else, Elliott says. The same technologies could predict, for example, that a weekend warrior has too much force going through the left leg while jumping or landing plus a tiny but unhealthy rotation of the left knee and femur, causing too much friction, and, eventually, an erosion of the left knee cartilage.

“What if you identified that when you were 30 or 20, instead of learning when you’re 50 that your cartilage is gone? That really is the future,” Elliott says.

I'll be surprised if we don't see this used by teams like the Pirates, who are always substituting technology and schemes for talent. 

Do We Need Press Briefings?

                                

                 Do We Need Press Briefings?

Seven former White House press secretaries joined six former State and Defense briefers for an open-letter CNN opinion piece arguing for a return to regular press briefings.

The Trump White House has not held a traditional press briefing since March 11, when Sarah Sanders was still the press secretary.


They argue:
"The process of preparing for regular briefings makes the government run better. The sharing of information, known as official guidance, among government officials and agencies helps ensure that an administration speaks with one voice, telling one story, however compelling it might be.
Regular briefings also force a certain discipline on government decision making. Knowing there are briefings scheduled is a powerful incentive for administration officials to complete a policy process on time. Put another way, no presidents want their briefers to say, day after day, we haven't figured that one out yet. ...
Using the powerful podiums of the State Department, Pentagon and White House is a powerful tool for keeping our allies informed and letting our enemies know we are united in our determination to defeat them both on the battlefield and in the world of public diplomacy."

Asked for a response, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Axios:
"This is groupthink at its finest. The press has unprecedented access to President Trump, yet they continue to complain because they can’t grandstand on TV. They’re not looking for information, they’re looking for a moment. This president is unorthodox in everything he’s done. He’s rewritten the rules of politics. His press secretary and everyone else in the administration is reflective of that.
In terms of the former press secretaries — they can publicly pile on all they want. It’s unfortunate, because I’ve always felt I was in this small club of only 29 others who really know what I deal with each day, and that was always comforting. They may not say it publicly, but they all understand why I do things differently. They know I have three roles. They know my boss has probably spoken directly to the press more than all of theirs did combined. They know the press secretary briefs in the absence of the president, and this president is never absent — a fact that should be celebrated.
Like so many trailblazers, history will look back on this presidency with praise — until then, I’m comfortable with how I do my jobs — and my team and I are always available to the press."

How can you say to me, I am a king?

           

            How can you say to me, I am a king?



Harry and Meghan are having a wonderfully human experience as they debate their future.

Immersing the Royals in the world has some dangerous implications. And there are some distressing practical elements too. Coding logs on the Sussex Royal website show that work on their new online presence began in September.

In December, Harry and Meghan trademarked the “Sussex Royal” brand, including 100 items ranging from notepads and socks to counseling services. The Sussexes will most likely be a “luxury brand”, on the levels of Louis Vuitton and Burberry, but they will have to carefully balance their personal lives from a PR respective to maintain that. Andy Barr, retail expert at price tracker website Alertr.co.uk, told Sky News the Sussexes have the potential to “dwarf” the earnings of Prince Charles, whose Duchy brand makes an estimated £100m to £200m a year.

A possible early indicator, the Duchess of Sussex has reportedly signed a voiceover deal with Disney in exchange for a donation to a wildlife charity, according to multiple reports.

Ah, commerce. Maybe it's the Yankee in her. I foresee a partnership--economic and perhaps political-- with Oprah (and maybe the Clooneys.)

Well, let's go back to the more elevated concerns of man."The Crown" has a great moment where the mediocre Charles, fresh from his eye-opening experience in Wales preparing for his investiture as Prince of Wales, returns to Cambridge where he plays Richard the Second in the school play. These are the lines he recites, as King Richard cedes political control of England to the rebellious Henry Bolingbroke:


1 Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.

2 Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes

3 Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

4 Let's choose executors and talk of wills.

5 And yet not so, for what can we bequeath

6 Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

7 Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke's,

8 And nothing can we call our own but Death

9 And that small model of the barren earth

10 Which serves as paste to cover our bones.

11 For heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground

12 And tell sad stories of the death of kings,

13 How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

14 Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

15 Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,

16 All murdered. For within the hollow crown

17 That rounds the mortal temples of a king

18 Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

19 Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,

20 Allowing him a breath, a little scene

21 To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,

22 Infusing him with self and vain conceit,

23 As if this flesh which walls about our life

24 Were brass impregnable. And humored thus,

25 Comes at the last, and with a little pin

26 Bores through his castle walls, and farewell king.

27 Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood

28 With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,

29 Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty,

30  For you have mistook me all this while:

31 I live with bread like you, feel want,

32 Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,

33 How can you say to me, I am a king?

Gender Disparities

                    Gender Disparities



(From Perry)

Power and its Enemies

                  

                     Power and its Enemies




One of the difficulties in reflection on any problem is that we all bring our own colored glasses to the viewing room. So those with a special knowledge or dislike of religious persecution see religion as a special victim or persecutor. The aristocracy is an obvious target; few persecutions are from small groups so obviously unqualified to appoint themselves to lead. The Marxists target the historical backward waiting for displacement, i.e. most people. But this all omits the crucial element: Oppression. What we should always be concerned about is the arbitrary assumption of power. And we should particularly raise our concerns when groups try to undermine institutions and political infrastructure as policy; they can only want one thing.

This is from the witheringly brilliant Lord Acton and his February 26th, 1877, address to the Bridgnorth Institute, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity“:​

In the zeal for the popular interest, however, there was no provision for the unpopular, and the minority soon found itself at the mercy of the majority. The people, now sovereign, felt themselves bound by no rules of right or wrong, no criteria except expediency, no force outside of themselves. They conducted wars in the marketplace and lost them, exploited their dependencies, plundered the rich, and crowned their guilt with the martyrdom of Socrates. The experiment of Athens taught that democracy, the rule of the most numerous and most powerful class, was an evil of the same nature as monarchial absolutism and required restraints of the same sort: institutions to protect it against itself and a permanent source of law to prevent arbitrary revolutions of opinion. Men learned for the first time what later history was to confirm again and again: ‘It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.’

polyamory

                                     Polyamory

Words and efforts at expression always change. Politicians always try to redefine themselves in the best of modern connotation. So one does not hear "liberal" much anymore, but rather "progressive." And "strip club" has morphed into "gentleman's club." What used to be infidelity is now new and all shined up, called "Polyamory."
Polyamorous or open relationships are usually based on “consensual non-monogamy“—the idea that relationships can be loving, committed, and serious, without being sexually exclusive. It’s a more libertarian--as opposed to libertine--approach to sexuality, in which people can negotiate custom relationships, like contracts between firms or treaties between countries, while still retaining some sexual sovereignty and freedom of mate choice. Polyamory takes freedom of association seriously—not just in social and political life, but in the sexual realm. If you can choose to have more than one child, more than one friend, and more than one work colleague, you should be free to choose more than one sexual partner. Or so it is said. But it must also be said that sometimes the heart rises above theory.

None the less, surveys show openness to polyamory is already common among younger American adults:
   About 4 percent to 5 percent of all adults are currently in open or poly relationships;
   About 20 percent have tried some kind of open or poly relationship at some point;
   Among adults aged 18-44, 17 percent have had sex with someone else with the consent of their partner, up from 9 percent among adults aged 45-54;
   About 28 percent of adults say it is not natural for human beings to be faithful to only one person;
   About 29 percent of adults under 30 consider open relationships to be morally acceptable—compared to only 6 percent of adults over 65.

Arguing With Zombies

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman  

Every so often in this mendacious world, someone will reveal what they really think. What really instigates tariffs?  Is the democracy we so widely praise really nothing more than anarchy?  Why do people really spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected to run a country? Those questions are less likely to be answered but when a political commentator comes clean, it is worth the read. For example, Paul Krugman's new book. It was reviewed recently in The Atlantic by Kelsey Dake and it is hard to believe his family let him publish it.

"What drives a dazzling academic—the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, no less—to turn his New York Times column into an undiscriminating guillotine for conservative foes?" Dake asks. Understand, Dake substantively agrees with Krugman; what he questions is his style, his sounding like "a bloodthirsty Robespierre." 
Dake argues that Krugman was an evenhanded commentator until he joined the NYT in 1998 when he began to realize 'Republicans lost respect for facts and data, turning politically neutral technocrats into involuntary foes. “In 21st-century America,” Krugman writes, “accepting what the evidence says about an economic question will be seen as a partisan act.” '

'Commentators in this post-evidence, post-truth environment find themselves “arguing with zombies,” to cite Krugman’s book title. They confront “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

Faced with these alarming undead adversaries, Krugman has concluded that politically neutral truth-telling is not merely impossible. It is morally inadequate. He duly sets out four rules for engaged public intellectuals. First, they should “stay with the easy stuff,” meaning subjects on which experts have achieved consensus: This is where an authoritative commentator can improve public understanding by delivering a clear message. Second, they should communicate in plain English—no controversy there. Third, and a bit more edgily, Krugman insists that commentators should “be honest about dishonesty.” If politicians deny clear evidence, they should be called out for arguing in bad faith. Finally, Krugman proclaims a rule that flies in the face of traditional journalistic tradecraft: “Don’t be afraid to talk about motives.”'

Krugman offers, as an example, climate change. 'Republican leaders have repeatedly ignored the solid expert consensus on climate change. Given that this consensus has been clear for more than a decade, it is fair to conclude that Republican leaders are consciously making false statements—in other words, that they are liars. Guessing at their motives seems risky but not totally unreasonable. Conceivably, they might be lying because they don’t want to irk voters with the news that hamburgers and pickup trucks are cooking the planet. But Krugman is basically right that “almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take.” To state the matter plainly, conservatives lie about this issue because they are paid to lie. Or, in Krugman’s broad and snarling formulation: “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”'

Note that Dake's criticism is not that Krugman is being simplistic, or bigoted, or inaccurate or demagogic. He is not saying that honest disagreement can be overwhelming when presented in the public field, and so good, honest, dissenting positions might be lost. Nor is he saying that the extreme responses that are offered might be equally dangerous to the species as a whole, too dangerous to be applied without absolute certainty in a very uncertain science. No. Dake's complaint is that Krugman's position is impractical: 'By branding Republicans as “bad people,” he reduces the chances of swaying them.'

But, presumably, this sacrifice is necessary as the dishonest are not open to argument. Thus the ferocity of Krugman's style. Krugman does not see himself as a commentator, he has become Jeremiah. He is not hoping to persuade; he is simply screaming. The discussion is over, the results handed down from on high. Krugman is as certain--and as liberated--as Torquemada. The opposition is no longer a dissenter or opponent, he is the enemy. And, the greatest wound of all, he deserves no say, no consideration, no hearing. He is not just wrong, he is tainted. Spoiled. Dissent is a pathology.

"Resistance is futile," as the Borg say.

Well, at least the democracy knows where it stands.

1619 Is a Prime Number

                                              1619 Is a Prime Number

One of the appalling creations of the current race/propaganda/marketing gene splicing to crawl out of the Left's thought problem laboratory is the mind-numbing 1619 proposition recently floated by the formerly august NYT. 

Here is a portion of a take on it from the New Criterion:

It was to console its core readership that The New York Times undertook The 1619 Project in a special flood-the-zone issue of its Sunday magazine in August and then in a snazzy, graphics-heavy series of features on its website. For two years, the Times had invested heavily in the vaudeville entertainment called “Trump–Russia.” The spectacular failure of its leading man, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, to deliver a happy ending to that fiasco underscored the essential futility of the entire enterprise.

This was something that Dean Baquet, Executive Editor of the Times, grasped instantly. Last summer, he huddled with his staff in a town-hall-style meeting—the proceedings of which were promptly leaked—and acknowledged a sad truth: “We built our newsroom to cover one story” (the now-debunked story that Donald Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election). The story didn’t pan out. “Now we have to regroup,” Baquet told the assembled troops, “and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” What story? Henceforth, or at least “for the next two years”—the remainder of Trump’s first term—the Times was going all in on “race, and other divisions.” Robert Mueller couldn’t get Trump. Maybe the Times could by writing about race in a “thoughtful,” i.e., obsessive and one-sided, way—“something,” Baquet added “we haven’t done in a large way in a long time.”

So there you have it. “That, to me,” Baquet concluded, “is the vision for coverage. You all are going to have to help us shape that vision. But I think that’s what we’re going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.” Et voilà, The 1619 Project, which the paper described in a preface as

a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

What followed was a stupefying race-based fantasy about the origins of the United States. The lead essay, by the black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the “architect” of The 1619 Project, set the tone. “[O]ne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain,” she wrote, “was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” So, everything you learned about the American Revolution is wrong, or at least wrongheaded. Forget about the Stamp Act, the, Boston Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, “No taxation without representation,” etc. All that, utterly unmentioned by Ms. Hannah-Jones, was mere window dressing. The American colonists might talk about liberty. What they really cared about, according to this malignant fairy tale, was preserving and extending the institution of slavery. “[S]ome might argue,” as Hannah-Jones coyly puts it, “that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.” Gosh. Of course, “some might argue” any number of incredible things: that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of green cheese, that The New York Times is still a responsible source of news and even-handed commentary. The fact that “some might argue” X does not mean that X is credible.

So it is with the preposterous idea that America was founded as a “slavocracy.” Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very dna of this country.” The claim is obviously metaphorical; countries do not possess dna. But if one were to take the metaphor seriously, as tantamount to asserting that anti-black racism is an essential and therefore unalterable characteristic of America, then the whole 1619 Project would be pointless from the get-go. It would be like complaining about the roundness of a circle or the wetness of water.

Presumably, however, neither Hannah-Jones nor the Times intends for us to take the metaphor quite so seriously. For Hannah-Jones, what is wanted is an expression that simultaneously justifies the endless whining of black radicals about how victimized they are because of things that happened a few centuries ago while also stressing the perpetually renewable guilt (like the liver of Prometheus) of whites, all whites, those living today even more than those actually involved in the African slave trade in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. For the Times, it fits in with what Power Line’s Paul Mirengoff called its “irresistible urge to delegitimize America.” That is the ultimate aim of The 1619 Project: to deliver another blow in the campaign to besmirch and diminish the political and moral achievement that is the United States of America. It is as despicable as it is mendacious.

You might say, Who cares about insane rantings in The New York Times? It is increasingly a niche publication for the credentialed, politically correct nomenklatura, totally out of touch with the main current of America and held afloat only by its unremitting attacks on anything to do with Donald Trump.

This is true. Nevertheless, the paper is not entirely without influence, even today. Indeed, various public school districts, including some in Chicago, have announced that they will supplement their curricula by distributing copies of The 1619 Project to students, thereby promulgating the racialist worldview expounded by that “major” “reframing” of our history. And though the copies will be paid for by the Times and donors, taxpayers will still be indirectly funding a version of history that is politically tendentious and wildly at odds with the facts. The Pulitzer Center (not affiliated with the famed prizes) has announced that it “is proud to be the education partner for The 1619 Project.” As we write, the Center’s website is full of little valentines to Hannah-Jones and her racialist, ahistorical fantasy about the founding of the United States.

We said that The 1619 Project was stupefying. What we meant was that the claims it makes are so outlandish, at once so ostentatiously at odds with historical reality while also being carefully framed in a corset of politically correct verbiage, that any critical response is at first stunned. Someone tells you that the Apollo 11 moon landing was a carefully staged hoax perpetrated by nasa or the Trilateral Commission or whatever. Your first response is a spluttering incredulity.

It is the same with the contention that 1619, the year that the first African slaves were brought to America, marked “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.” But there were already slaves and various other forms of indentured labor in the Americas as there were all over the world. To say that there were slaves in America is not to say that “the country was built” on slavery. Moreover, the African slaves were not “kidnapped” by American or British slavers, as Hannah-Jones asserts, but were sold by other black Africans who were happy to profit by selling people they had enslaved to the colonists.

Fortunately, a rational, historically informed response to The 1619 Project has been building. The National Association of Scholars has inaugurated the “1620 Project,” not just to commemorate the signing of the Mayflower Compact—a much more significant event in the history of the United States—but also to provide an occasion for thoughtful responses to some of the more outlandish claims made by Hannah-Jones and the other writers involved in the Times’s latest campaign of disinformation. (Among our favorites, the contention that double-entry bookkeeping was an innovation “whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.”)

The distinguished historian Allen C. Guelzo, writing in City Journal, notes that “The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.” The great irony, Guelzo writes, is that “The 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America,” The New York Times, “because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.”

(A prime number is one whose only function is 1 and itself, that is it is not the product of any two numbers other than one and itself. It is isolated, autogenerated and alone.) 

Trade and Jobs

                            Trade and Jobs
The current administration has linked the loss of manufacturing jobs with the trade deficit. This is extremely difficult because the world economy is not a level playing field and one circumstance in one area can not necessarily be applied elsewhere. Textile jobs in Vermont will not compare easily to sweat shops in Asia. 
Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have fallen since the mid-70s and, during the same period, the trade deficit has risen. But, contrary to superficial thinking and politicians--not always the same because the politicians always have an extra mendacity card to play--, the two are not necessarily related. There may be a cause and effect relationship or it may be entirely coincidental. Or, like cats and the Plague, it may be a very complex relationship. 
While the percentage of Americans today employed in manufacturing occupations is indeed about half of what it was in the mid-1970s (14 percent today compared with about 28 percent back then), the decline in manufacturing jobs as a percentage of all American jobs started way back in 1945 (when it was about 44 percent of all jobs). Because for most of the period between the end of World War II and 1977 America ran annual trade surpluses, it is illegitimate to read the data as simply that trade deficits reduce manufacturing employment.

Energy Numbers

It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion.--John Kenyon 

On our way back today.

The Kenyon quote is really important and rarely heard. How many arrogant warlords, naive optimists, dreamy democratic visionaries, and simple murderous psychopaths have combined to pile the bodies of average, struggling, working people up as bulwarks and breastworks in their endless battles for self-gratification. (See Middle East)


Eutrapely : noun: Liveliness and ease of conversation. ETYMOLOGY: From Greek (pleasantness in conversation), from eu- (well) + trapely (to turn). Earliest documented use: 1596. It was one of Aristotle’s dozen virtues.

              Energy Numbers

From the June 2018 BP Statistical Review of Global Energy (67th edition) here are some details on C02 emissions in 2017:

1. Global CO₂ emissions from energy in 2017 grew by 1.6% (and 426.4 million tons), rebounding from the stagnant volumes during 2014-2016, and faster than the 10-year average of 1.3%.

2. Declines in CO2 emissions in 2017 were led by the US (-0.5% and 42 million tons). This is the ninth time in this century that the US has had the largest decline in emissions in the world. This also was the third consecutive year that emissions in the US declined, though the fall was the smallest over the last three years. Must be The Paris Accords.

3. Carbon emissions from energy use from the US are the lowest since 1992, the year that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) came into existence. The next largest decline was in Ukraine (-10.1% and 28.1 tons).

4. The largest increase in carbon emissions in 2017 came from China (1.6% and 119 tons), a reversal from the past three years when the largest increases in emissions came from India. China’s emissions in 2017 were 0.3% higher than the previous peak in 2014. China has had the world’s largest increments in carbon emission every year this century except in four years – 2000 and between 2014-16. The next highest increment came from India where emissions rose by 4.4% (93.2 million tons), though lower than its 10-year average (6% p.a.).

5. Together, China and India accounted for nearly half (212.2 million tons) of the increase in global carbon emissions (426.4 million tons). EU emissions were also up (1.5% and 42.4 million tons) with just Spain accounting for 44% of the increase in EU emissions. Among other EU members, UK and Denmark reported the lowest carbon emissions in their history.

Perry: For that impressive “greening” of America, we can thank the underground oceans of America’s natural gas that are now accessible because of the revolutionary, advanced drilling and extraction technologies of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal/directional drilling, and are increasingly displacing coal for the nation’s electricity generation.