WOD. Etymology: career (n.)

1530s, "a running (usually at full speed), a course" (especially of the sun, etc., across the sky), from French carriere "road, racecourse" (16c.), from Old Provençal or Italian carriera, from Vulgar Latin *(via) cararia "carriage (road), track for wheeled vehicles," from Latin carrus "chariot" (see car). The sense of "general course of action or movement" is from 1590s, hence "course of one's public or professional life" (1803).

See Car and Careen.

***

Those most immediately interested in a particular issue are not necessarily the best judges of the interests of society as a whole.

***
The author commissioned a survey on the image of capitalism in 34 countries. In only six of these countries – led by Poland and the United States – do pro-capitalist attitudes dominate. Although approval of capitalism increases when the word ‘capitalism’ is omitted (and instead only described), even then a positive attitude dominates in only seven of 34 countries. The most frequently mentioned criticisms of capitalism are that capitalism is dominated by the rich and that capitalism leads to growing inequality. Respondents with higher incomes and higher levels of education, men, and those who classified themselves as being on the right of the political spectrum are less anti-capitalist or are more pro-capitalist than the population at large in most countries. In 33 countries, anti-capitalists tend to be more conspiracy-minded than pro-capitalists.

That is from a new paper by Rainer Zitelman.

***

An arrest warrant has been issued for a man charged with trafficking $1.6 million in fentanyl after he didn't show up to court Monday. He was released after arrest without bond.

The Stargate Project
 
"The Stargate Project was a long-running program, funded under various names, by the CIA, Army, and Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate and use psychic powers to defeat enemies of the United States, foreign and domestic. The program can be dated back to the end of World War II but it picked up in the 1970s with rumors that the Russians had a lead in ESP and with the popularity of the “psychic” Uri Geller.

Geller in fact consulted for the program and his powers were investigated under a DIA grant by the Stanford Research Institute. SRI concluded that Geller had “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.” The CIA agreed concluding in 1975 that:

“A large body of reliable experimental evidence points to the inescapable conclusion that extrasensory perception does exist as a real phenomenon….the work at SRI, using gifted individuals, has achieved some convincing and striking demonstrations of the existence of paranormal perception, and has demonstrated perhaps less convincingly the possible existence of psychokinetic influences upon sophisticated physical instrumentation.

In fact, as late as 2017 the physicist running the SRI program thinks Geller was “clearly gifted when it came to doing certain psychic tasks.”

Need I tell you that Johnny Carson did a much better job than the DIA of showing Geller was a fraud or that a later investigation suggested that “Geller was allowed to peek through a hole in the laboratory wall separating him from the drawings he was being invited to reproduce.”

Nevertheless, the Stargate Project continued for decades and not just investigations. So-called “remote viewers” were recruited and paid to try to locate hostages, missiles and other locations of military and domestic intelligence secrets:

As he later told the Washington Post, McMoneagle was involved in some 450 missions between 1978 to 1984, including helping the Army locate hostages in Iran and pointing CIA agents to the shortwave radio concealed in the pocket calculator of a suspected KGB agent captured in South Africa.

Another remote viewer, Angela Dellafiora Ford, was asked in 1989 to help track down a former customs agent who had gone on the run, she recounted recently on the CBS News program 48 Hours. She was able to pinpoint the man’s location as “Lowell, Wyoming,” even as U.S. Customs was apprehending him 100 miles west of a Wyoming town called Lovell.

Publicly, the Pentagon continued to deny it was spending money on any kind of psychic research, even as reports leaked out in the 1980s of the details of the government’s experiments. Finally, in 1995, the CIA released a report conducted by the independent American Institutes for Research, which acknowledged the U.S. government’s long-rumored work with remote viewing for military and intelligence purposes.

In other words, don’t believe in star gates."

(Tabarrok December 7, 2020 in Current Affairs)