Epiphany

FOX anchorette Kayleigh McEnany has the BRCA 2 genetic mutation

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A massive piece of space junk recently smashed into a village in Kenya.

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Epiphany

Shakespeare is famous for encapsulating the essence of a play in his opening scene. And there are many examples in literature where a scene or chapter is a concentration of the larger vision. The Epiphany is such a scene in the New Testament. The Magi--astrologers and dream interpreters--follow thin scientific promptings to Jerusalem and ask Herod for help in the final leg of their journey to find the Christ child. Herod asks his priests to explain who they are seeking. The priests use the Old Testament to explain the Christ prophesies. Then the Magi leave for Bethlehem and Herod plots to find the child and kill him.

So Christ is born, is sought and adored by Gentiles from a metaphysical caste, and is stalked by killers trying to protect their worldly power and position. So far, so good. But the priests are the stunner: They are the academic resource, the intellectuals who know the connection between the Old Testament and the evolving New, the students and teachers of the question. They explain why the Magi are there and explain where they likely are bound. The Messiah may be at stake. And then they, the intellectuals,....do nothing.

Questions/Fragments

A Russian prosecutor “admitted that about a fifth of the Defense Ministry’s budget was stolen; other officials said that it could be as high as two-fifths”

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The West, including Germany, has given Ukraine substantial succor. But absent many more weapons, with fewer restraints upon their use, the West might be purchasing protracted defeat, thereby vindicating Putin’s estimation of the West’s inability to persevere.--will

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Questions/Fragments

One would think a community described as "a fish tank of bad behavior" would have a police superintendent who looked serious rather than like your great aunt.

Then the FBI spokeswoman reveals she doesn't understand either terrorism or syntyx.

These reminders that government attracts and promotes the inept should solidify the basic, unique American suspicion of government and should call into question why anyone would ask government to do anything more than the basics.

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New York restaurants responded to the crazed restrictions of Covid with outdoor dining. It was spontaneous and surprisingly successful. 13,000 outdoor dining options emerged in New York.

Then the regulators with their fees moved in.

Of the approximately 13,000 outdoor dining setups that once lined NYC's streets, fewer than 3,000 restaurants have applied for permits for next season. Among them, about 1,400 are for dining sheds, while the rest are for traditional sidewalk cafes.

"The King's men are here."

Predatory

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Tesla sales dropped in 2024. Some numbers from Europe:

In August 2024, new EU car registrations saw a sharp decrease (-18.3%) with negative results across the region’s four major markets: double-digit losses were witnessed in Germany (-27.8%), France (-24.3%), and Italy (-13.4%), with the Spanish market declining by 6.5%.

Battery-electric vehicles (BEVS, “full” electric vehicles) saw their market share drop from around 21 percent in August 2023 to 14.4 percent in August 2024. Sales dropped from 165,000 to 92,000. This decline was above all driven by massive falls in Germany and France.  

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...lawlessness is one reason so many Americans discount the left’s assertions that Donald Trump endangers democracy. Mr. Biden acts like he’s king, and Democrats and media voices cheering him on have no standing to object if Mr. Trump follows the Biden precedent.--wsj

“People violate laws any time they want.”

Those words, shrugging off an alleged unlawful move last week, did not come from some Chicago gangbanger or Washington car thief. Those words of wisdom came from Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

They came in response to the fact that the Democratic majority on the election commission had decided to ignore a binding state Supreme Court ruling in an attempt to engineer the election of Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. spoke as she and Democratic Board chairman Robert Harvie, Jr., dismissed the earlier Pa. Supreme Court rulings in order to accept ballots without required signatures or mandatory dates. She declared that she would not second the motion to enforce the rulings “mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws any time they want. So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

Reminds you of Sanctuary Cities, doesn't it? Or Biden's persisting in invalidating loans.

This is more than inept.

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A new age of government guidance:

...the most fashionable female economist in the world nowadays, Mariana Mazzucato...[in her]... elegant and self-confident and economically primitive books, such as one reviving the labour theory of value, inspire in my own country Senator Elizabeth Warren from the Left and Senator Marco Rubio from the Right. The senators recommend therefore a Mazzucatian ‘industrial policy’. Let us have arts graduates in governmental offices arrange for innovations. The European Commission under Mario Draghi is about to spend 800 billion euros every year choosing winners from Brussels.--McCloskey

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America’s revolutionary leaders — by English standards, minor gentry at best — worked hard to adopt the new liberal characteristics that had come to define what it meant to be truly civilized — politeness, taste, sociability, learning, compassion and benevolence — and also what it meant to be good political leaders: an aversion to corruption and courtier-like behavior. These enlightened and classically republican ideals, values and standards came to circumscribe and control their behavior. Life became a theater, and the leaders became actors and characters. Jefferson was obsessed with politeness, and it became the source of much of his success in life. Washington always acted as if he were a character on a stage.

The revolutionary leaders thus committed themselves to behave in a certain moral, virtuous, and civilized manner. The intense, self-conscious seriousness with which they made that commitment is what ultimately separates them from later generations of American leaders. But that commitment also sets them sharply apart from the older world of their fathers and grandfathers. --Wood

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There is a plan to build two islands off the European coast to manage the development and distribution of alternative energy sources. Apparently united Europe is having trouble doing that within national borders.

Faith-based problems demand faith-based solutions.

How to Make a Tiger

Tesla posted its first annual sales drop in over a dozen years Thursday.

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The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year, a dramatic rise driven mostly by a lack of affordable housing as well as devastating natural disasters and a surge of migrants in several parts of the country, federal officials said Friday.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said federally required tallies taken across the country in January found that more than 770,000 people were counted as homeless.

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How to Make a Tiger

How many men does it take to make a tiger? 

Three.

"Three Men Make a Tiger" is a Chinese Idiom. There is a story behind this idiom recorded in the Chinese history book Zhan Guo Ce.

During the Warring States period (about 5th century BC) in China, seven prominent states battled each other and sometimes made alliances.

One year, the state of Wei allied with the state of Zhao. To ensure this alliance, the two states had to exchange princes as hostages.

Pang Cong, the minister of Wei, was chosen to accompany the prince of Wei to go to Zhao. He was worried that his political opponents would speak ill of him while he was away, so he came to the king of Wei, saying, "Your Majesty, if someone were to tell you that there was a tiger running in the street, would you believe it?"

"No," the king replied.

"If two people were to tell you there was a tiger running in the street, would Your Majesty believe it? "

"I might suspect it, " the king said hesitatingly, "but I wouldn't believe it." 

"What if three people were to tell you that?"

After thinking for a while, the king said, "Yes, I would."

Pang Cong said, "Your Majesty, it is for sure no tiger is running in the street. But after being told by three people that there was one, you would believe it was so. Now I'm going to Han Dan (the capital of Zhao) far away from Da Liang (the capital of Wei). There will certainly be more than three people speaking ill of me in front of you, and I wish that Your Majesty would give it your discernment."

The king said, "Yes, I will."

However, after Pang Cong left, the king believed the slanderous gossip about him and no longer trusted him.

This idiom, "Three Men Make A Tiger," came to mean a lie, if repeated often enough, will be accepted as truth.  

(N.B. This is a little historical/cultural note and has nothing to do with the internet, the Press, or politicians.)

Americans and Europe

Re the attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas: 

Messianic causes, religious or political, demand engagement. It should be clear that no culture can be safe from them. The idea that the U.S. specifically or the West generally can simply disengage and walk away from the Middle East or Russia is naive.

   --The FBI's first instinct (their first announcement from Ms. Duncan declared the attack 'was not terrorism') is to manage public opinion. Truth does not seem ever to be a priority.
   --60% of radical Islamic online social media presence is from North Africa.

   --Messianic causes are programmed to engage, regardless of their victims' nature. That is why they are so comfortable attacking schools, hospitals, and nunneries. They are robotically aggressive. They will not stop.

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Argentina’s deregulation czar, Federico Sturzenegger has discovered a rough rule of thumb: Where deregulation happens, prices decline in the range of 30%. He has seen it in textiles, logistics, and some agricultural products.
30% is a decade of 3% extra growth.

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One in eight individuals will end up in the top 1% of U.S. income earners at least once in their lifetimes; only 1 in 166 will remain there for a decade.

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Americans and Europe

The Americans are deeply criticized by a loud, intense, European minority. Some are simple foreign agents on a relentless, insincere social media crusade, some are fanatical faith-based social zealots, and many are mean, jealous outsiders with a nationalist bias. Here is a clarifying little snippet that is informative:

'While Europe has created 14 companies worth more than $10 billion in the past 50 years, with about $400 billion of market value in total, Americans have created nearly 250 such companies, worth $30 trillion.

That success has driven up America’s middle-class incomes. The median disposable U.S. household income, according to the OECD, is now 25% greater than the median German household and 60% greater than the median household in Italy.

Europeans’ incomes would be even lower if they weren’t free-riding on American innovation, defense spending, and higher drug prices, which incentivize research. America’s median incomes would be higher if we had more talent devoted to supervising and creating jobs for blue-collar workers or Northern Europe-like distribution of test scores.

The outsize success of America’s talented entrepreneurs doesn’t stem from their superior intelligence. It comes from working at companies such as Google and Microsoft, which mine the technological frontier and expose employees to valuable knowledge, insights, and opportunities. Apple is worth more than the 30 largest German companies combined. Apple’s employees and its alumni use their knowledge and training to create more value than their counterparts in Europe.

Unlike Europe, the enormous success of American entrepreneurs motivated an army of talented Americans to get valuable on-the-job training, work longer hours, take risks, and succeed. A small amount of success bubbles up from a large pool of failure.

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When entrepreneurs capture as little as 5% of the value they create for others, it makes little sense to encourage successful risk-takers to quit working long before they achieve outsize success. With the effect technological success has on the productivity of talented American workers, who are our constraint to growth, and the effect of their productivity on the growth of middle-class incomes relative to Europe, that’s not a “policy failure.”'--Conard

There are myriad additional factors involved with the distinctions here. Many are outlined by the insightful McClosky. Another is the failure of Americans to indulge in vindictive, self-destructive tax policies. However the major one is an old De Tocqueville observation: Americans regard success highly and do not see the success of others as an impediment to their own individual efforts to attain similar success.

Happy New Year

Witnesses told CBS News reporter Kati Weis that a truck crashed into a crowd on Bourbon Street at high speed in the early hours of New Year's Day. Then the driver got out and started firing a weapon, with police returning fire.
The City of New Orleans said in a statement posted online that 30 people were transported to area hospitals with injuries and 10 people were confirmed dead.

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The energy industry employs more than 8 million Americans and accounts for more than $1.3 trillion in annual economic activity.

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The fiscal year 2024 data show that the Biden administration has overseen a record $926 billion in improper and unknown federal payments since 2021

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Happy New Year

One of the curiosities about New Year's Resolutions is the unspoken belief that new and better ideas are always coming to the fore. I hope that is true but my advice is always a hash of old suggestions:

Seek fulfillment. Emphasize safety.

The great Old and New Testament sin is pride, the great sin of the doomed Greek was anger engendered by pride. These geniuses were not kidding.

Do not go out of the house in your pajamas.

Spend less than you earn.

There are better ways to do military-type lifts that pressure bones and joints but no good reason to do them at all.

Find a good podcast.

Keep boundaries. Always reassess them.

One thing at a time. Multitasking is terribly inefficient.

Do not be on time, be early.

Never use the phone at social events, dinner, or in elevators.

Keep up-to-date phone numbers and addresses of friends. Use them. Keep up with old friends with a line or e-mail; do not let them slip away.

Get seven hours of sleep a day.

Use audiobooks.

The time before and after exercise is essential. Warm up and cool down.

People will not remember presents but they will remember how you made them feel.

Ours is a period of downgrading. Start a mild upgrade with more effort on appearance. It may catch on.

Do not phone from the bathroom.

A first date should always be coffee or lunch.

Do not read anything other than menus while eating a meal with others.

Regularly pay off your debt, even bit by bit.

Sign all petitions and always vote "no."

Build a good wardrobe, one good piece at a time.

Do not put ice in wine. If the wine is not cool enough, go to a better place.

Angry people are usually entertaining but avoid them after 6 o'clock.

Read a formal literary effort, a book, essay, or play, a little bit every day.

Wake up. Early. The day will be nice and long and full of opportunities.

Go to bed at a reasonable time. Anything that happens late at night is because the perpetrators think no one is watching.

Do not name your children after large cities in Texas. Or European cheeses.

If you are going to drink alcohol, drink only good alcohol. Never drink something because it is there.
Never drink alcohol because you "don't want to waste it."
Never forget, alcohol is a neurotoxin.

Generalizations are verboten in our time. Nonetheless, the Irish have an inordinate appreciation of alcohol. Watch it.

Memorize one insightful quote or poetry line every week.

Do not run at night wearing black.

Have your teeth cleaned every six months.

Make a budget. The discipline alone is helpful. 

Set aside a percentage for two groups of savings. Use one account to go to when necessary for a big purchase or a surprise problem. Use the other one for retirement. Never touch the second one.

People tend to like what they do when they are good at it. So, be good at your job and your diversions.

Always get the cost of goods or services upfront. This is especially true of lawyers.

When traveling:

Never travel without a phone that works.
Always, always get the harbormaster's number when you leave a ship.

Never travel alone to an area where you do not know the language or the alphabet.

Always travel with enough money.

Avoid areas where you might depend upon the goodwill of people with old political grudges towards some group you remotely resemble.

Again, always, always get the harbormaster's number when you leave a ship.
 

Buy one tailor-made piece of clothing to see the difference from retail.
 

Floss.
 

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none." (Friedrich Nietzsche) 

Remember this when attacking another's beliefs. You are attacking more than his intellectual position, you are attacking his area of comfort and command.

Save 10% of your income for retirement.

And some book suggestions from a very limited reading year:

   A Coffin for Demetrios by Eric Ambler. The man who developed the mystery. This is his first big success. A bit congested.

   Drawing Life by Gelernter. With some of the population ambivalent--or overtly supporting--the murder of the insurance CEO, it might be time to revisit the Unabomber, a brilliant but horrible guy who captured the imagination of many academics and writers. This book is a nice antidote.

  Martin's Game of Thrones series is very good. It will be too violent/sadistic for some but very imaginative with consistent characters and intricate plots. Mainly it is fun.

  I reread some of Emerson's essays and he is fascinating. His new American voice from the 19th Century was picked up by Whitman.

  Brown's Red Rising was imaginative and relentless. Cliffhanger after cliffhanger. Not a great sci-fi/fantasy but pretty good.

  A Study in Scarlett is Doyle's first Holmes story. Very interesting. Half is set in the American West.

  Shaw's Saint Joan was arch and disappointing. Mostly a legal and jurisdictional argument.  One can see why the extraordinary story was ignored by Shakespeare. Read Twain's story instead.

  Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson. A fascinating book written by an elegant critic so disillusioned with war--all war--that he openly opposed American involvement in WWII and refused to pay his taxes. This book is long, involved, and academic. Because he believes all conflict is evil, his topic, The Civil War, is handled with a disarming evenhandedness through the analysis of many participants and observers, some obscure, some well known but with an obverse take. This book was published in 1962 and created a firestorm. One critic wrote its aim was to “criticize our myths and, even, to enrich them.” Long. My favorite this year.

 

Paul's Letter to the Galatians says that Christ on earth means that all men are adopted sons of God, heirs to His infinite creation.
So every man, regardless of station or circumstance, wealth or heritage, birthright or appearance, sickness or health is equal in the eyes of God. There have been a lot of notions--from nihilism to castes, from divine right to class conflict, from Freud to Malthus--that have come down the pike since the beginning of recorded time but has there ever been a more radical, more hopeful, more optimistic idea than that? And could there be a better thought to start the new year? 

And how could the vicious alternatives compete with it?

Happy New Year.