The Magi

On the morning of Boxing Day, 2004, a tsunami was unleashed across the Indian Ocean after a giant undersea earthquake struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killing over 230,000.

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Montana Supreme Court voted 6-1 this week and effectively declared a state constitutional right to protection from climate change.

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More than half of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act's estimated costs came from tax incentives to green corporations.

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And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Christmas

Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It's a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a lifelong atheist.--Niall Ferguson on X

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This is the time of year when we contemplate whether man's discontent can be overcome by force, will, and circumstance. And particularly, if that discontent can be alleviated by harming or otherwise taking advantage of his neighbor.

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Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

"The indisputable fact that nobody can argue is that when we do get there, our current securities, the cybersecurity systems — which includes everything from Bitcoin to email — will be in great danger."--senior lecturer at the University of Kent Perez-Delgado on quantum computing

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Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

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No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well.--Churchill

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Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

A Christmas Story

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his female victim burned to death.

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Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment.

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President Biden is granting clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences. Their sentences will be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The three inmates who didn't get clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the gunman at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. 

Well, some criteria must be present, I guess.

And the Democrats are worried about Musk influencing the government?
The country is being run like a college frat house.

Is there a bigger scandal in the country than this unreported substitution-presidency?

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A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Quantum Computing

Crews conducting an excavation at an ancient cemetery, an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt, in what was once the Roman city of Nida, discovered an ancient silver amulet with a Christian inscription in a grave. This implies a Christian extension into northern Europe two centuries earlier than supposed. And wide travel and commerce.

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Discussions between Biden and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Treasury over the last four years were not conversations or discussions, they were scripted. Literally written out before the meeting.

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Quantum Computing

An announcement from Hartmut Neven Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI


"Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. 

Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years-- 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. (Yikes!)

So quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that are inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimizing certain learning architectures, and modeling systems where quantum effects are important. This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives. Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing."

This is the beginning of a new age, a technology that is parallel to--and enhances--Artificial Intelligence. And will prove to be an economic driver for cultures and economies with the foresight and infrastructure to support and develop it.

Hide the women. 

Stats

Today is the winter solstice.

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Terry Flenory is known in the hip-hop community for founding the organized crime organization Black Mafia Family alongside his brother Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory in 1985 Detroit. He and his brother were sentenced to 30 years in 2008 for running a nationwide crime ring. Biden just pardoned them.


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Stats

Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey found a quarter of Americans agreed that "patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country" — the most in the nearly three years the question was asked since Donald Trump's first White House term.

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Most voters (68%) think the actions of the killer against United CEIO Thompson were unacceptable, while 17% found them acceptable, an Emerson College poll out this week found.

Young voters: 41% found the killer's actions acceptable, while 40% found them unacceptable, per the poll. About 24% found them "somewhat acceptable" and 17% "completely acceptable."

22% of Democrats found the killer's actions acceptable, while 59% found them unacceptable. Among Republicans, 12% found the actions acceptable while 16% of independents said the same.

Men (19%) found the killer's actions slightly more acceptable than women (14%).

Murder was acceptable to some. This is a lot worse than math scores.

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spoke Tuesday, warning the incoming Trump administration that "unfettered exports" of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, could drive up domestic prices and increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. "Unfettered exports of LNG would increase wholesale domestic natural gas prices by over 30%,'' costing American households an additional $100 a year by 2050, Granholm said.

So exporting a product, making it less available, and not using it raises the price.

Ms. Granholm does not include in her calculations the effect of the energy deprivation in Europe --a result of their aggressive taxation and anti-oil policies--that would result with the loss of U.S. LGN.

And an independent analysis found that increased LNG exports would support nearly half a million domestic jobs and contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product through 2040.

This woman is making policy.

It's worse. 

Available data and recent history contradict one of the key points of the Biden administration’s long-awaited study on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
“There is zero evidence of any such correlation,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the Daily Caller News Foundation regarding Granholm’s suggestion that more exports could lead to higher domestic prices. “It is abject nonsense.”
S&P Global released its own study on the impacts of long-term U.S. LNG export growth on the same day that DOE put out its report. S&P’s analysis found that domestic natural gas prices have not increased despite massive export growth, and that the LNG industry has the potential to contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. GDP by 2040, in addition to generating enormous tax revenues for the public coffers.
“Not only is this not Granholm’s job, the study findings in the report published Tuesday simply do not support any such conclusion,” Blackmon said.

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The AI revolution is American. There is no such development in Europe

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"Energy Insecurity." Energy inequalities across the globe are astounding. On average, an American citizen uses 30 times as much energy as a Nigerian does. There are also inequalities within our own borders: More than a third of U.S. households experience some form of energy insecurity. That fraction will increase if decarbonization efforts continue their current course.

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Cost of living:

• France: $1,200 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• U.S.: $1,166 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Canada: $1023 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Thailand: $650 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Portugal: $592 per month for a single person, not including rent.

The College

As time goes by, the question will move from where Trump got his votes to who could possibly have voted for Harris.

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Chicago police make arrests in only 20% of fatal shootings.

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Democrats are accusing Musk of usurping the Trump presidency, this from the party that has been pretending that Biden has been president for four years.

There is something to the charge your enemy will accuse you of their crimes.

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The Ohio legislature passed legislation to let a coal-burning facility claim renewable energy credits.

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Biden administration’s Middle East aid envoy Lisa Grande reportedly made demands of Israel regarding the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, in a harsh phone call with Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians, COGAT chief Gen. Ghassan Alian. 

Channel 12 news reports that Grande demanded during the call that Israel declare it is not following a policy of deliberately starving Gazans amid the ongoing war. She also demanded that Israel cancel all civilian evacuation orders, allow Palestinians who have been evacuated to return to their homes, and present a comprehensive plan to reduce harm to civilian infrastructure, according to the report.
Alian was “stunned” by the call.
Who are these people?

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The College

Senate Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment on Dec. 16 that would abolish the Electoral College and ensure the country’s presidential elections were determined by the popular vote.

It is easy to dismiss such acts as amendments to the Constitution are very difficult and cumbersome to achieve. And most of the supporters also supported the peculiar "Super Delegates" notion. But these skirmishes are important as they point to a misreading, either purposeful or ill-informed, of a basic concept that formed the foundation of the American Revolutionary movement: the Founders' preoccupation with the defense of the minority. 

The Electoral College recognizes the specific economic grouping of geography and statehood. Cities will have certain interests that rural areas will not share. The same for coastal versus inland areas. River versus mountain. There are countless such subtle subdivisions. All deserve representation.

From Many, One. 

They saw America as a collection of individuals and groups with common interests that needed protection. Strangely, this is not unlike Critical Theory, which sanctifies subsets with common backgrounds, histories, and immutable natures that isolate them from the majority. But, unlike Critical Theory, in the Founders' view, these separate peoples were united with a basic root of individual freedom, inherent to them. Unlike Critical Theory, these individual qualities were distinctive but unifying.

One has to look no further than the last election, where the news carefully examined the voting tendencies of the subsets of states throughout the national map, to see these groupings play out in practical terms.

GP-1 and Economies

Since 1969, major U.S. projects receiving federal funds must submit an Environmental Impact Statement  (ETS) under the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1985, the Chicago Transit Association’s Final EIS for the Orange Line ran 378 pages. The 2022 Final EIS for the Red Line Extension is 50 times longer, at 17,899 pages. That’s for a project that’s half as long.

The planned Red Line Extension is projected to cost seven times more per mile than the Orange Line, which we completed in 1993.

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In 1900, US income (GDP) was $4,096 per capita in 2023 dollars, while in 2023 it was $81,695. The US poverty rate fell from 56% to 11.1% over the same period. How was such a dramatic increase in our widely shared standard of living possible? The answer (without explaining how it came about) is increased labor productivity. Each worker has been able to produce more and more and hence earned a higher income.

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GP-1 and Economies

Ozympic and Wegovy, both GLP-1 agonists that contribute to weight loss, are made by Novo Nordisk from Denmark.

The GLP-1 boom has been such good news for Novo Nordisk that rising drug exports are currently driving the majority of Denmark’s GDP growth—since late 2021, Danish GDP has increased by 3.6%, but economic growth would have been 0% without the contribution of rapid increases in pharmaceutical manufacturing output. In fact, the pharmaceutical boom has been so strong that it has almost singlehandedly made Denmark one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union.

Most of that pharmaceutical production boom has gone towards meeting foreign demand for GLP-1 drugs, especially in the United States. Real Danish goods exports have increased by roughly 37% over the last four years.

Interestingly, despite the country’s increase in economic output over the last two years, Denmark has struggled to fully translate the GLP-1 boom into rising personal spending or domestic investment. Real Danish household consumption and capital formation have both been stagnant for more than three years, mirroring many of the economic struggles seen in Germany and many other parts of the EU.

To some extent, that should not be particularly surprising—pharmaceutical manufacturing is not a labor-intensive industry and the returns to successful drug discovery usually come in the form of increased corporate profits. Yet Denmark is economically synonymous with the Nordic model that has long successfully converted innovative growth into broad-based welfare, and Novo Nordisk itself is unique for being majority-controlled by a charitable fund that is now the world’s largest. 

The task ahead for them is clear—to continue the current GLP-1 boom while more durably translating it into general economic prosperity.--Apricitas

The Sacrifice for Energy

Twelve people are dead after their bodies were found inside a restaurant at a popular ski resort in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia.

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In 2023, the Vatican reported an operating deficit of $87 million. The number had increased by $5.3 million in a year. This is one of the largest debts the Vatican has ever accumulated,
Tourism, one of the Vatican’s largest income streams, has failed to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Pope Francis and his progressive policies are causing a rift with more conservative Catholics, decreasing donations.
The hope is that The Great Jubilee of 2025 - a celebration marking the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, expected to attract over 35 million pilgrims - will be a financial savior.

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Travis Hunter from Suwanee, Georgia, is an anthropology major carrying a 3.798 cumulative GPA. He is the first Academic All-American to win the Heisman since former Florida Star Tim Tebow did so in 2007.

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Honda and Nissan are discussing a possible merger.

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The Sacrifice for Energy

Demand in China, the world's largest coal consumer, is likely to grow by 1% in 2024 to reach 4.9 billion tonnes, nearly a third higher than in the rest of the world combined. The country is set to import 500 million tonnes, more than double the previous import record.

One in every three tonnes of coal used worldwide is burned at a power plant in China to cope with the country's enormous electricity demand. Paradoxically, China is also powering ahead on clean power, building two-thirds of all new wind and solar in the world.

India is also expected to consume more coal than the EU and the US combined as demand in the Asian nation rises by more than 5% to 1.3 billion tonnes, a level previously only reached by ChinaGlobal coal production is expected to reach an all-time high, surpassing 9 billion tonnes for the first time, as the three largest producers, China, India and Indonesia, hit new highs.

The French continue to bail the Chinese boat. The WSJ summary reveals a particularly European view of government and its relationship with the citizenry.

Paris contemplates regulating delivery and returns services for e-commerce to ensure carbon compliance, urging consumers instead to repair defective products rather than replace them. Fancy a steak frites or a duck à l’orange? Not anymore: Paris will insist you switch to vegetarian ratatouille to limit the carbon footprint of your diet.

How and where the French travel will have to change too. The roadmap envisions more electric vehicles, stiff penalties for driving older cars, promotion of remote work to cut down on commutes, fewer business trips and vacations abroad, and denser housing.

The French won’t be able to escape climate policy even in those denser homes. The net-zero roadmap warns of restrictions on screen sizes and resolutions to limit the energy consumption for televisions and smartphones.

Paris even envisions regulating personal climates. The dream (or nightmare) is for “intelligent building control systems” that limit winter heating to 66 degrees Fahrenheit and summer air conditioning to 78 degrees.

This will be achieved via regulations, subsidies, penalties, and taxes. The economic and fiscal costs are proving ruinous wherever they’re attempted, and this month the strain crashed Germany’s governing coalition. With its chronic economic anemia, fiscal bloat, and commitment to the socialistic garrot, France is at the end of its growth. 

But China has plenty of time.

Little Ice Age (Or Be Careful What You Wish for)

Pope Francis has revealed he was the target of an attempted suicide bombing during his visit to Iraq three years ago.

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Ms. Warren offers a national medical plan that budgets 43 trillion dollars over the next ten years. TRILLION! Mr. Sander's plan budgets over 70 trillion. TRILLION! These fabulous expenses are not even remotely possible yet many seemingly sensible-looking people nod solemnly along in agreement. 

A university professor recently asked what advance she thinks the world could well do without replied, "Agriculture." She apparently longs for 7.7 billion hunter-gatherers roaming the wild earth.

These are dangerous but not serious people.

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Heavily funded European interests trying to invest in U.S. electoral processes have lost Round One in U.S. courts. 

Foreigners believe they have the right to influence U.S. elections. They are using First Amendment arguments.

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Little Ice Age (Or Be Careful What You Wish for)

From an article in Aeon by Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Climate History Network. His most recent book is The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018).

Midway through the 13th century, parts of the Northern Hemisphere started cooling. The causes were complex but involved some combination of cyclical changes in the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis, repeated declines in solar radiation, random fluctuations in oceanic and atmospheric currents, and volcanic eruptions that temporarily shrouded the Earth in veils of sunlight-scattering sulfur dioxide.
Temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere fluctuated for a while before cooling sharply in the 15th century. They rebounded briefly in the 16th, then dropped across much of the world – including the Southern Hemisphere – later in that century. Temperatures in some places warmed briefly halfway through the 17th century, then cooled again until early in the 18th. After several decades of modest warming, renewed cooling beset much of the world until midway through the 19th century, when persistent warming finally set in.

These cooling waves are together called the ‘Little Ice Age’, which is more than a bit of a misnomer. Global cooling in even the chilliest decades of the 17th and 19th centuries – the coldest of the period – probably did not exceed 0.5 degrees Celsius. Unlike today’s warming, cooling reached different places at different times, with more or less severity, and hot years could interrupt even the coldest decades. Glaciers did expand out of many mountain ranges, but this was not an ‘Ice Age’.
Nor was it ‘little’. Temperature anomalies were probably longer-lasting and more severe than any had been for millennia, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. They brought short-term changes in ocean currents and wind patterns that repeatedly drenched some regions in torrential rain, or afflicted others with landmark droughts. For those who lived through it, the Little Ice Age was no trivial matter.

Archaeologists and historians have long argued that many societies were woefully unprepared for the cooling of the Little Ice Age, and therefore suffered tremendous losses. When the Little Ice Age first chilled Greenland, for example, the sedentary agricultural practices that Vikings brought with them from Europe were no longer viable. Yet the Vikings, they supposed, stubbornly adhered to those practices, victims of cultural assumptions that they could not abandon. As temperatures continued to drop in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Viking settlements disappeared.

At around the same time, waves of bubonic plague swept across Eurasia, killing tens of millions. Some scholars have argued that torrential rains associated with the onset of a newly unstable European climate in the early 14th century ruined harvests and spurred the rise of disease among cattle, leading to a Great Famine that killed perhaps 10 percent of the continent’s population. Malnutrition in children can permanently weaken immune systems, and those who were children during the Great Famine were especially vulnerable to the later arrival of the plague. Others claim that precipitation extremes provoked by the onset of a cool but unstable climate drove booms and busts in the population of rodent vectors for the plague. When rodents in central Asia multiplied, fleas that carried plague did too; when they declined, fleas overcrowded on surviving rodents fled in desperation to new hosts: humans living nearby. After such migrations, waves of plague slowly traveled west towards Europe.

Famines led to widespread starvation, migration, and epidemics, which in turn kindled rebellions, civil wars, and conflict between states. According to the historian Geoffrey Parker, this ‘fatal synergy’ between climatic cooling, starvation, disease, and conflict culminated in a ‘global crisis’ that killed perhaps a third of the world’s population.

From The Defence Reformation

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von Mises

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Andrew, the Duke of York, has said he “ceased all contact” with the businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.
Sources close to the government of the United Arab Emirates claim the Duke of York is considering a permanent move to the Gulf, where his royal status would still confer a degree of respect, according to the Sunday Times.

***

From The Defence Reformation

We, as a culture, are inundated with manifestos. Most are by self-indulgent lunatics but the culture is broad and forgiving. And curious.

This notebook has often been a sounding board for ideas of varying merit but this article, by the CTO of Palantir, is arresting, radical, and hopeful. 

It is an analysis of the DoD--and may have implications of our efforts to homogenize decisions in our suicidal war on merit that makes life so much easier for administrators..

These snippets are followed by a link, 4000 words. I think it's worth the read.

"In 1993, after the end of the Cold War, America wanted a Peace Dividend and defense spending was slashed by 67%. The Secretary of Defense held a dinner at the Pentagon — the so-called “Last Supper” — to tell the 51 primes they would not all survive. Today, there are 5.

The most important consequence of the Last Supper wasn’t a reduction in competition in the Defense Industrial Base, but the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense and the rise of the government Monopsony. Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so called traditionals. The vast majority of the spend went to companies that had both defense and commercial businesses. Chrysler made cars and missiles. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills — the cereal company — made artillery and inertial guidance systems.

But today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. The Monopsony’s fixation on cost-plus contracting, control, and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks — a luxury only affordable at the end of history. That is not what the most dynamic parts of the American economy do — only the dying parts.

Working with the Monopsony as a defense contractor is so unappealing that Ball would rather make beer cans than satellite buses. That is depressing.

The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. That resembles Europe’s sclerotic capital markets, not America’s.

But Palantir’s addition will not be the last. Because today the Founders are back — in the hundreds — and they are backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital to build in the national interest. However, their effort and capital alone is not enough to resurrect the American Industrial Base. We need a defense Reformation to upend the Monopsony and transform the way the government does business. Here is my treatise on how to get that done.

Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD. The only problem is that we are bad commies.

We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:

'This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.'
 
There is no process that can save us. Reform will be painful. We must be very careful not to conflate pain with error. As world champion cyclist Greg LeMond said, “It doesn’t get easier, you just go faster.” Just as there is no pain-free world class cycling performance, innovation will always be painful, messy, and subject to retrospective bureaucratic critiques from those not in the arena.

Our centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight process values time spent, not time saved. It values costs and effort, not value and outcomes.

The Great Schism has created a religion in government that is unaware or dismissive of power-law outcomes from power-law talent. In Silicon Valley we call them 10x or 100x engineers, meaning they are 10x to 100x as valuable and productive as normal engineers. We once understood this in defense, too: Rickover, Kelly Johnson, Ed Hall and countless legendary talents fought the bureaucracy and got stuff done. We seem to generally appreciate that Usain Bolt is more than a generational talent — even the gold medalist at Paris 2024 was not faster than him. But this is also true for Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Ryan Tseng, and the Founders at the First Breakfast. Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield."

https://www.18theses.com/

Sinterklaas

 

The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.

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…the most significant destruction on the Korean Peninsula was wrought by the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Nearly two million Koreans, a staggering 20 percent of the population, perished during the Imjin Wars, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaigns of 1592-1598 to subjugate the Korean Peninsula. Hideyoshi’s object was the conquest of Ming China (1368-1644) but the result was to turn Korea into a ruined land.--meyer

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Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.

Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.

The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.

Dutch Stamps:

  

Questions

Money is never unlimited. If private or public insurers have to blindly cover everyone, as Obamacare mandated, they will try to limit what they will cover. If insurers are further compelled to blindly cover everything, they will look harder at specific claims. If they can limit neither whom they cover nor what they cover, they will either raise their policy premiums or get out of the business.
It’s rich for progressives who have pushed for all of these developments – from the guaranteed issue of policies to people with pre-existing conditions to mandates of what those policies cover – to now complain about increasing premiums and rising claim denial rates. What did they think would happen?
So now, they are reduced to cheering for literally shooting the messenger.---McLaughlin

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Questions

Does prudence modify principles?

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It will be interesting to see, with the Healthcare CEO murder, how the NY DA office handles a real criminal. 

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Luigi Mangione is charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson - but police have now announced he wasn't even a client of the medical insurer. He potentially targeted the medical insurer because of its size and influence, a senior police official said Thursday.

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Does populism come with a rise in vigilanteism?

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A few years ago, a poll found that whereas 63 percent of voters said they viewed the Founding Fathers as heroes, among the under-thirties that figure shrank to 39 percent. Meanwhile, fully 31 percent of U.S. voters under 30 said they saw the Founders as “villains.”

"Villains."

Can a culture that does not hold itself in high regard, survive?

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Kylie Kelce, wife of former NFL player turned media personality Jason Kelce, beat out Joe Rogan for the top podcast spot on both Apple and Spotify this week.

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John Kerry met with Assad at least six times, including in February 2009, while he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gabbard met with him once as a member of the House of Representatives.

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A year-long investigation by the General Accounting Committee found, that during the transition to the incoming Bush administration, Clinton’s staff had caused about $15000-worth of ‘damage, theft, vandalism and pranks’ although there were no prosecutions.

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The Economist has chosen kakistocracy as its word of the year.
kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century
The word is derived from two Greek words, kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), with a literal meaning of government by the worst people

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Much of the trouble in the world can be attributed to people taking bad studies seriously.
A study of whatever quality raises a bad idea to another power.

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Russia stole $5 million John Deere tractors from Ukraine only to find they could be remotely disabled. 

Imagine that happening with other imported technologies.

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Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so-called traditionals. Today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. 

The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. 

 

Diversity of Outcomes

An 11-year-old girl was rescued after three days of being stranded at sea when a shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island is believed to have killed the remaining passengers on the vessel.
There were an estimated 45 passengers onboard the ship before it sank.
She survived without any drinking water or food and despite suffering from hypothermia, she was "responsive and oriented," according to the release.

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President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

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“Violence is never the answer. But people can only be pushed so far.”--Elizabeth Warren on murdering a CEO
So violence sometimes is the answer?

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Diversity of Outcomes

Inequality is all the rage. It is essentially "differences" in the culture. Its production. Its efforts. Its qualities. In the West, these differences, combined with liberty, have allowed for an astounding, diffuse economic advance across all groups, some more than others. But all have benefitted beyond all historical norms or expectations. Yet, despite this extraordinary achievement, some emphasize the unequal allocation of success.

Segments of a book review by James Hartley:

"Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book.

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As I said at the outset, writing an entire review just documenting how bad this book is would be an incredibly easy task. Pick a page at random, and you’ll find multiple examples of an argument neither cohesive nor persuasive. The question is: how is it possible that the book is this bad? The answer is found in the Introduction. On the third page, Robeyns notes, “For a long time, I felt that there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why.” So, she “decided to deploy my training in philosophy and economics to answer the question: Can a person be too rich?” The arguments in this book did not lead Robeyns to her conclusion; she started with the conclusion. When you start your investigation already knowing the answer to the question, then you may not notice that the reasons you offer for your conclusion are not persuasive to someone who is skeptical about the conclusion. If it seems like the arguments are non sequiturs attacking straw men, that isn’t important to Robeyns. The conclusion is right even if the arguments fail. The result of this approach is a religious book written for the already converted.

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To pretend that you can have all the riches of the modern world and eliminate the ability for anyone to become wealthy is a sure sign of someone who has no understanding of how all this wealth was generated in the first place. Robeyns’ book, however, provides insight into why people advocating income limitation plans often seem so unaware of how economic growth occurs. If getting rid of rich people is akin to a religious mandate to rid the world of evil, then of course it is safe to impute bad motives to anyone arguing that there are possibly benefits to the world from allowing people to do things that will make them wealthy. Despite appearances, Robeyns book is not really an attempt to persuade anyone of her beliefs; instead, it is an insight into the minds of zealots."

Guilt by Association

President-elect Donald Trump selected Kimberly Guilfoyle, his son’s fiance, and a former Fox News host, to be the next ambassador to Greece.

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When the DOJ released the hopeful assassin Routh's letter offering a bounty on Trump's life, Bill Barr said he was "gobsmacked" that such an inflammatory letter would be publicized.
The adjective gobsmacked means flabbergasted, astounded, apparently, in reference to the shock effect of being struck in the mouth. this adjective is from:– the noun gob, of Irish-Gaelic and Scottish-Gaelic origin, denoting the mouth;– the adjective smacked, meaning struck, slapped.

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In 2023, the Times of London reported, “The Chinese navy has lost 55 sailors after one of its nuclear-powered submarine [sic] was caught in a trap intended for American and British vessels, leaked intelligence reports”:

The British report, based on defense intelligence seen by the newspaper, said: “Our understanding is death caused by hypoxia [lack of oxygen] due to a system fault on the submarine.

“The submarine hit a chain and anchor obstacle used by the Chinese navy to trap US and allied submarines. This resulted in systems failures that took six hours to repair and surface the vessel. The on-board oxygen system poisoned the crew after a catastrophic failure.”

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Guilt by Association

The Harvard disaster was clearly signaled by earlier events, most notably the 2019 firing of Dean Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is a noted criminal defense attorney; he was the director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and he is the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, he advised President Obama on criminal justice issues, and he represented the family of Michael Brown. He and his wife were the first black Faculty Deans in the history of the college.

Controversy erupted, however, when Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team. Student protests ensued. The students argued that they couldn’t “feel safe” if a legal representative of a person accused of abusing women was also serving in a role of student support and mentorship. This is, of course, ridiculous. Defending an individual accused of murder does not imply that a criminal defense attorney condones the act of murder.

Harvard should have educated their students. Harvard should have emphasized the crucial role of criminal defense in American law and history. They should have noted that a cornerstone of the rule of law is the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, irrespective of public opinion.

Harvard should have pointed proudly to John Adams, a Harvard alum, who defied popular opinion to defend hated British soldiers charged with murdering Americans at the Boston Massacre. (If you wish to take measure of the quality of our times it’s worth noting that Adams won the case and later became president—roughly equivalent to an attorney for accused al-Qaeda terrorists becoming President today.)

Instead of educating its students, Harvard catered to ignorance, bias, and hysteria by removing both Sullivan and his wife from their deanships. Harvard in effect endorsed the idea, as Robby Soave put it, that “serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus.” 

Thus Harvard tarred Sullivan and his wife, undermined the rule of law, and elevated the rule of the mob. Claudine Gay, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, contributed to the ignorance, bias, and hysteria. (It’s also notable, that Sullivan also criticized Harvard’s handling of the investigation of Roland Fryer as being “deeply flawed and deeply unfair.” This may have been Sullivan’s real sin, as the investigation of Fryer was under Dean Claudine Gay.)

Good and Evil

Mangione reviewed Kaczynski’s book, Industrial Society and Its Future, on Goodreads. He rated it four out of five stars and offered measured praise for it in a public post.

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For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.

“We’ve never seen it before,” Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, said of the flip.

Among Generation Z Christians, this dynamic is playing out in a stark way: The men are staying in church, while the women are leaving at a remarkable clip.

Church membership has been dropping in the United States for years. But within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men.

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Albuquerque is in the top 20 most dangerous cities in the world, per capita.

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1,000 Israeli strikes on Syria last night.

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Good and Evil

The CEO murderer will stimulate a lot of discussion, including moral reflection. Remember Kaczynski had a lot of support from American academics.

Here is an article (the source I can't remember), written about another topic, that has application.

Biden's speech at the UN was a sad farewell. As Israel ramped up its attack on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, Biden prattled on about his hopes for peace. If possible, he projected a sad, discouraged optimism about a world with unfocused threats. Global warming was mentioned 6 times, Iran twice. The UN was quiet; you could not hear the explosions in Lebanon, the gunfire in Ukraine, or the war engines of China.

We want to think that the line between good and evil is clear and that individuals fall into one camp or another. In The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.”

Because the line between good/evil is not as straightforward as we wish, an essential principle for organizing society is, in F. A. Hayek’s words, to ensure that a “bad man can do least harm.”

Many know these famous words by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”

Those who deny this truth of human nature often believe that giving “good” people – those possessing the right ideology – enough power to control others solves the problem of organizing society.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous line doesn’t appear until page 746, and most people are unaware of the context. The famous sentence begins, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good…”

Who disclosed this truth to Solzhenitsyn? It was his own experiences in the Gulag.

In the same section of his book, he wrote, “Looking back, I saw that for my whole conscious life I had not understood either myself or my strivings.” He then draws out what he saw in himself:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.

Insightfully, Solzhenitsyn saw the fallacy of using good intentions as a guide to action: “In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.”

The worst villains can delude themselves into thinking they are doing good. We should not be fooled into believing that freedom can be preserved by relying on good people’s good intentions.

Take an honest look at your stream of thinking and notice how self-interested it is. Yes, notice your thoughts of kindness and generosity toward others, too. But there is no reason for society to trust your good intentions, or mine, with the power to control others.

To find goodness, Solzhenitsyn had first to see his darkness. And then, having done so, a path to goodness opened up: “And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.”

Following his famous sentence about “the line separating good and evil” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

That the line between good and evil oscillates is a truth Solzhenitsyn expressed repeatedly. In Volume 1, he wrote:

During the life of any heart this line [between good and evil] keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood.

Clearly, Solzhenitsyn wanted us to understand our work is never done. Cultivating our goodness is the work of a lifetime.

In both Volumes 1 and 2, Solzhenitsyn repeats Socrates’s admonition, “’Know thyself.” In Volume 2, he added, “There is nothing that so aids and assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes.”

It’s not only the other guy Solzhenitsyn was writing about. Evil can come through any of us if we don’t work to recognize and choose against it. Solzhenitsyn would say we are deluding ourselves when we think evil is only out there. This is a truth that continues to be vindicated.

Recently, Jonathan Mayo compiled new details of the November 2008 terror attack when ten youthful terrorists from the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba murdered 164 people in Mumbai, India. Their targets were ordinary Mumbai residents, people at a Jewish Center, and visitors at a famed hotel catering to tourists.

What stood out about the attack is that, in real-time, the ten terrorists were in communication with controllers, messaging them from Pakistan.

Mayo reports that while terrorists were at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, they received messages that the controllers in Pakistan “are furious there is no sign of a fire at the Taj.” The controllers phoned the youthful terrorists: “Nothing is going to happen until you start the fire. When people see the flames they will begin to be afraid. And throw some grenades, my brother. There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades.”

The terrorists in the hotel seemed “overwhelmed by the opulence of the hotel and [told] their handlers: ‘There are computers here with high tech screens! It’s amazing!’ The controller [insisted] they ‘start a proper fire’ immediately.”

After the attack, one terrorist at the train station drove to a police roadblock and said: “Please sir, I have done what I came to do. Please kill me.” The young man told police that “his father, a street seller, sold him to [the terrorist group], telling his son: ‘We’ll have money, we won’t be poor anymore.’”

The line between good and evil, even in the youthful terrorists, was moving in real-time.

Solzhenitsyn’s testimony helps us see that evil cannot be eliminated, but, in his words, “it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

If Solzhenitsyn is correct about the potential for evil existing in each of us, then Thomas Sowell, in his book A Conflict of Visions, has an important warning:

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late. Their prospects of growing up as decent, productive people depends on the whole elaborate set of largely unarticulated practices which engender moral values, self-discipline, and consideration for others."

Steven Pinker echoed Solzhenitsyn when he wrote, “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

It would be a foolish bet to expect that each person will grow up civilized and exercise their moral agency to turn towards good. Human cooperation and flourishing are enabled by moral traditions and the rule of law that constrains evil.

When unconstrained ideology triumphs over rights and morality, we quickly discover how fast evil triumphs over good.

In contrast, the extended social order created by the free market expands our opportunities to cooperate with others, and crucially, accepts human nature for what it is. The more we cooperate, the more we see our well-being depends on others. The thicker the interdependence, the greater the incentives to cultivate the good side of our human nature. (from somewhere)

Johnson on the US and Europe

Japan’s a nursing home, Europe’s a museum, and China’s a jail. --Larry Summers

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Around 420 million years ago, life was predominantly aquatic. It was then that the ancestors of the modern sharks first appeared. So they're older than trees.

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Zelenskyy said 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and 370,000 wounded. That compares with 600,000 dead and wounded reported in Russia.

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So Assad is gone. And apparently, no U.S. intel agency had a clue. Reminiscent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Biden's offer to Zelenskyy of sanctuary. Not a clue.

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Johnson on the US and Europe

Boris Johnson recently published an editorial in, of all places, The Daily Mail, discussing the relationship between the economies and the cultures of America and Europe. Here are some of his points.

In the year 2000, the average worker was 8 percent more productive even than the average German worker,

Today the gap is widening, and the average German worker – swaddled with EU laws on workers’ rights – is now 16 percent less productive. As for Britain, the story is even worse. They started the century 18 percent behind. They are now 27 percent behind the Americans.

The US taxpayer provides about 60 percent of the defense budget of the entire 32-strong Nato alliance. To understand the scale of the US commitment, in hardware, NATO currently has about 5,000 fighter and ground attack aircraft – of which about 4,000 come from the US, with the 31 other countries of NATO supplying the rest.

Great Britain plans to push defense spending up to 2.5 percent of GDP; yet most other countries are barely on 2 percent, while the US is spending 3 percent of a vastly greater GDP.

Europe will have to learn from America because there is plainly a link between the culture of freedom – the constitutionally protected freedom of speech and thought – and the American culture of innovation. There is a link between American risk and reward, tax cuts and growth, and deregulation and dynamism.

Why should Americans work all the hours God gives, and take a week’s holiday a year (as many Americans do) to pay for the defense of Europeans who can’t even be bothered to go into the office?

Johnson writes, "We need to reacquire some of the incredible energy and can-do spirit propelling their economy. We may not want their healthcare system or their gun laws. But we would be mad to sneer at the US economic model when it is such a storming success. Above all, we can’t sneer at the American economic model and simultaneously sponge off America."

Two Tales

 

The big difference, however, is that market entities deal with each other only through voluntary transactions, so both sides must agree that they are better off for the transaction to occur. The threat of force stands behind transactions with government entities.--Holcombe

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The British Government sent 470 delegates on a 5,000-mile round trip to the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan.
The delegation, including seven ministers, more than 100 civil servants, and two official videographers prompted allegations of net zero “hypocrisy” against the Government. The UK registered 470 delegates to the summit, according to figures reported by the Mail on Sunday, compared with 405 from the US, 437 from Italy, and 115 from France.

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Two Tales

Modern life has turned over two cases with a strange, common thread: the healthcare murder and the Biden pardon. Both acts, one criminal and shameful, one just shameful, have stimulated peculiar sidebars. Some commentators say, 'the insurance industry is abusive,' the Biden apologists say, 'one must empathize with a father's grief.'

This is not simply an argument that two wrongs make a right, it is a muddying moral equivalence that blunts ethical code. and law. This is the hallmark of vigilanteism.

The vigilante does not demand justice, he demands satisfaction. As such, it is egocentric, and not ethical. Any greater vision is subjugated to the demands of symbolism. This is the uncluttered pre-civilized mind.

Civilization sees the individual as such, not as a representative of some larger concept or group. So Hatfield will always hate McCoy and Montague will hate Capulet. The bigot never bothers to see an individual. Civilization changes that. The individual suddenly has value and is no longer reduced to a symbol or a representative.

The healthcare murderer and the child pardoner sidestep the fragile construct of the law. They sacrifice the law--and us--for a businessman or a relative. They demand a 'bigger picture' that includes those dark pre-civilization days of dehumanizing groupthink. 

Neither is Antigone.