Some Reflections on 2024

An interagency trade policy committee is seeking to erode investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) protections under U.S. trade agreements with Colombia, Mexico, and Canada as it leaves town.
Robert Lighthizer, Donald Trump’s first-term trade representative, negotiated limitations on the international tribunals in the revised U.S. trade pact with Mexico and Canada. He and his allies on the left say businesses would build more factories in the U.S. if there were fewer legal protections for overseas investments. But this opens the door to leftwing governments that want to nationalize U.S. investments and harm U.S. shareholders. 

Purposefully making the outside world more unjust to exaggerate your domestic advantage.

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According to the Economist, it is China’s turn to worry about offshoring. Its manufacturers are leaving.

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“The more intelligent a person is, the more he discovers kindness in others, for nothing enriches the world more than kindness. It makes mysterious things clear, difficult things easy, and dull things cheerful.”--Tolstoy

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Some Reflections on 2024

The only thing more astonishing than Kamala Harris' nomination is that people voted for her.

Worldwide per capita income is up 500% since 1950. With such an astonishing growth of wealth, why is its disparity so important to some?

It is said that Russia's expansionist invasion of Ukraine is an aberration in history but it's the post-WWII peace period that is the aberration.

The new baseball contracts are quantum leaps in value, demand, and distortion. Strangely, it has not raised social justice warriors' cry for equity.

The costs of health care and education in the U.S. continue apace despite the fact there has been no success and the country continues to lag other comparably developed nations. Why has no one questioned our methods in the face of such bad results?

Mendacity in politics and journalism has reached an unimagined height. It is now brazen. It looks at the border and declares it closed. It changes the crime rate by redefining crime. The party that has been disguising the very leadership of the nation now accuses its opponents of undemocratic behavior.

Individuals who see themselves as visionaries, moral advocates, and the righteous will subvert law and commonsense to achieve their aims.

No one believes Joe Biden is conceiving and developing the massive government programs and policies his administration has presented over the last years. America has a shadow government, unelected and organized, that develops policies that proceed, gradually and inevitably, toward an agreed-upon end.

Democracies are inherently unstable. Given enough time, they will vilify even their best and brightest, undermining their history, and call into question their present.

Human qualities: Faith. Hope. Charity. The greatest is charity, and the commonest is hope. But, in motivation, the strongest is fear.

Paul Skenes had a remarkable year. He has remarkable stuff.

Pro-Hamas demonstrators are following a long tradition of importing outside problems to the U.S. and making them domestic. They're like the anarchists of the late 1800s who, once here, could not find a target that reminded them of home. And, as they are never arrested, we don't get a chance to know them, their numbers, or their sponsors.

Science, like democracy, is very poorly understood by the public.

The election of Trump and Biden should carve in stone the basic American idea that government is dangerous and needs constitutional structure and limits. Both men needed supervision in office by people the voters did not choose.

America is not a melting pot of culture. This basic, difficult concept is more important now than ever.

The current culture is obsessed with acceptance and will drive the peripheral to the center. For example, gender dysphoria in women is 1/5th as common as dwarfism, yet these unfortunate outliers have become quotidian.

Hierarchies are never expunged, they are always replaced by another hierarchy. 

Anyone who knows anyone with a genetic defect or severe illness knows the truth: equality is a philosophical concept--spiritual or political--not a quality of life.

The debate over the behavior of the head of Harvard is clear. She is in the wrong. But she is isolated from both judgment and responsibility, as all elites are. That is to say, she is immune to self-criticism.

More than 5,000 minors underwent sex-change surgeries between 2019 and 2023 and nearly 14,000 had sex-change treatments, according to research into insurance billing codes conducted by the advocacy organization Do No Harm.

Capitalism is not a philosophy, it is the awkward outgrowth of the commercial behavior of a free people. Thus the attack on capitalism requires a subversion of the liberty that made it possible.

Coal use is up globally again. Some people are taking the CO2 problem of the world less seriously than others.

I have reached a peculiar milestone in my life: I no longer care about Crosby's game. I want him to be happy.

The border problem is astonishing as it is clearly dangerous, a signal of significant failure, and is certain to cause a severe crisis that will have to be managed with great sadness and pain. Perhaps a modern metaphor. Like Social Security. Like the deficit. Delaying today what you can put off for others to do.

Has anyone told the developing nations the sacrifices they will have to make with the forced substitution of expensive, unavailable energy sources for cheap, available ones?
 

A disparity is the result of a hierarchy. It is rarely personal.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have stated publically that the Constitution should be ignored in certain circumstances. This is who they are, their uniting credo.

Wanting what someone else has earned is envy. Anger over the success of others is jealousy, what Middle Ages philosophers called 'sadness.'