Robbing Peter and Paul

 

***


“Our series (against Philadelphia) ended on a Wednesday. That Sunday night, there was Tampa-Montreal Game 7 (Canadiens won 2-1), and then Colorado-Minnesota Game 1 of their series (Avalanche won 9-6). The Montreal-Tampa game, I question whether our team could compete in that environment defensively. When I flipped over to Colorado-Minnesota, I questioned whether our team could compete in that environment offensively. That’s really the way that I view everything.”--Pen's GM Kyle Dubas

***

A study published in Nature reported that the probability of an investor’s bankruptcy increases with the frequency of their leveraged trades. Investors have accumulated more than $1.22 trillion in margin debt to trade stocks as of May 2024. (Margin debt refers to money borrowed to purchase securities.)

***

The Murtaugh reversal should give us all pause in the trust we place in our government, particularly in our entrepreneurial legal system.

***

Chinese police stations in NYC, Sharia Law courts---anybody worried yet?

***

Good news: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an opinion on the Western Union merger plans.

***

Robbing Peter and Paul

In New York City, the socialists are taking credit for balancing the city's chronic budget deficit.

Mamdani has reportedly gotten the governor and state lawmakers to agree to change the way New York City’s underfunded public pension plans pay off debt they incurred a generation ago by making unwarranted, rosy assumptions about how their investments would perform.
The working state is subsidizing the socialist city.

The city wants to reduce those debt payments and instead pay them off over a longer period, likely well into the 2040s — meaning tomorrow’s workers will be taxed extra to pay for city services delivered before some of their parents were born.

Mamdani, like all these politicians, regardless of their "philosophy," is proud of this manipulation as if it were an achievement rather than just another procrastinating, distorting economic gimmick. (The kind of economic sleight-of-hand, by the way, the prim socialist is supposed to disdain.)

The Russian communist state lasted for three generations.
See? Socialism works.

Vigilangione, Continued

 

Joyce taught English at Berlitz schools in Pula and Trieste, and is supposed to have known up to thirteen different languages.

***


Vigilangione, Continued

Order is restrictive; when does it become oppressive? It certainly is convenient. If half the people literate in English wrote from right to left, we would have no fewer literate people, but they would not be comprehensible to one another. If half of Americans decided it was right to drive on the left side of the road, car travel would stop, the car would become useless, and its convenience would be replaced. What would happen to chess if activists tried to broaden its appeal by straightening out and simplifying the knight's move?

Mormon polygamy was seen in the eighteenth century as a threat to the U.S. moral structure and was fought, legislated against, and eventually bullied away with very little legal justification. In Europe, polygamy has become a significant socio-economic problem for the growing nurturing state as dependents logrithmically outstrip underpinning arithmetical working support.

The values of the West are increasingly impractical in the modern, expanding world. In America, the values of equality and freedom have become a threat to the stability of the culture. The Americans suffer domestic disruption by people who oppose the very laws that protect their outrage, even to the point of organized street opposition to legitimate law enforcement agencies. The British now have hate-speech laws that rival any communist country. Sitting in judgment of your fellow citizens has become very disruptive, even if you're right. And Americans are telling themselves that by taking products without paying—a behavior they call "microlooting' known to the rest of us as "stealing"—they are, in fact, engaging in a quiet political protest.

Is this a trend percolating up or seeping down? What did the Americans do in Venezuela? They declared the country an outlaw — as they did with the Barbary states — and preemptively invaded it. The danger is that, in a larger view, Venezuela deserved it. American behavior in Iran is more illustrative. Iran is certainly a danger to the civilized world, and a nuclear weapon in its hands, according to its own philosophy and statements, would result in economic disruption and nuclear destruction to friends and enemies alike. That said, there is no obvious legal or moral reason Western nations should be able to control Iran's internal affairs simply because they fear the implications of its national ambitions. Nonetheless, the Americans and Israel preemptively destroyed most of Iran's military and scientific infrastructure.

Again, this was all in a good cause. The world's nonreaction even implied its tacit approval. The Americans want only stability and stable commerce. But is their action consistent with their values? Does the threat justify their extraordinary means? And, worse, what would have happened had the Americans not resorted to those extraordinary means?

So Mangioni, whoever shot Kirk, whoever attacked the Press Dinner, the gerrymanderer, Trump himself--all place their personal motives aside and, like the sin eater of ancient times, sacrifice themselves for what each knows is the greater good.

The Morality of Lynching

 

The Morality of Lynching

As the Bell Curve flattens, more murders seem motiveless. Children shoot other children in schools, strangers push strangers in front of trains. But most murders are still reasoned. A perceived enemy, a rival in business or love, or a simple envy. But we humans always expand our world and encounter new risks. In the jungle, we found AIDS, in the lab, COVID. And the anxious, intense modern body politic has picked at the scab of dimwittedness and resentment and uncovered a new version of an ancient depravity: the vigilangione.

Vigilante means "watchman." It is from "vigil" meaning "watchful, awake," and has the same origin as "vigor." It emerged in early American communities that had grown beyond the law and resorted to undeputized law enforcement. "Angione" is from "Mangione," a pretty boy who made up a crime, made up a punishment, convicted a man of that crime in his mind, then murdered him. 

Mangione's victim was not even the perpetrator of Mangione's made-up crime; he was just in the moral vicinity. But the scythe of righteousness swings wide. The vigilangione is much like the religious maniac doing God's work, but without a letter of marque. He's a man of the time of "the feud," where Hatfields were held responsible by McCoys for acts, sometimes serious, sometimes merely perceived, sometimes only distantly related, often from barely remembered times.

The vigilangione emerges from a world of uncodified law, where rules are created and enforced by individual whim, not just for personal gratification, but for a perceived greater good. Like at an individual lynching, the man stands by his work.

Or like the modern politician, who must set aside society's abstract legal restraints and rise above the law to set things right.

So it is in a land that has rejected the very laws that allow us to live together. 

Cry Havoc.

 
 

The Danger of History

 

The defense lawyers for the most recent Trump attacker are trying to remove those people at risk during the attack from testifying because, as potential victims, they will not be objective.

There was a time in America when they would be called "witnesses."

***

A Danger of History

I feared that on a recent trip to Knossos, one of the favorite places of my youth, I might be force-fed the old truth that "you can't go home again." I still believe that if you've never seen the astonishing ancient Minoan city, you should; but if you have seen it, you probably don't need to go back. 

The modern recreation of the archaeological site is now representational. It is history at arm's length. Wooden walkways guide us, restricting the remains from our contamination and us from the rugged terrain. Thus, the ruins--and we--are protected from each other. Modern cement has filled in spaces. The grass has been cut, the areas staked out, and some glassed over. Areas have been roped off. What was once a spontaneous immersion in a historical site of profound depth and meaning is now a visit to a museum or the Stations of the Cross.  

Analysis and micro-examination of the sources and evidence of one of the great human achievements has disrupted the very interstitium of life itself. Imagination can no longer fill in to enhance the gaps.