Reverie

When did disagreeing with someone become akin to oppression? --anon







Robert Lewis Stevenson spent the last five years of his life in Samoa. One estimate puts the number of words he wrote during that time at 700,000. 
Stevenson understood Samoan society through his knowledge of ‘the ethos and culture of community’ of the old Highland clan system. According to Joseph Farrell in his new book Treasured Island, Stevenson, the ‘lapsed’ Calvinist conservative, had ‘a quintessentially Scottish state of mind’. He was both comfortable in his new surroundings and impatient to remedy the evils he saw. Much of this came from the European competition for empire and he wrote the politically charged non-fiction work Footnote to History (1892), and also a series of letters to The Times, in defense of the native Samoans. The Times editors worried about him, felt he was wasting his talents and becoming peripheral. Farrell thinks his work erratic but some, particularly Ebb-Tide, quite good.
In December 1894, he died.


Elon Musk, through his various companies, has received so far in government subsidies over $5 Billion dollars.

95 percent of drugs  fail along the way. The 95 percent failure rate is an average; some drugs have a 50 percent chance of success and others have a 1 percent chance. It depends on the drug, the therapeutic area, and the stage of the drug's development. A 2014 study by researchers at Cleveland Clinic found that 99.6 percent of more than 400 Alzheimer's clinical trials had failed. The $2.558 billion tab accounts for those "dry holes."

Between 1999 and 2005, the average length of a clinical trial grew from 460 days to 780 days, while the number of procedures on each patient (e.g., blood draws, scans) grew similarly, from 96 to 158. Comparing the 2001-2005 period to the 2011-2015 period, one study found that the number of study participant visits to care providers (e.g., hospitals, clinics, doctors' offices) increased 23-29 percent; the number of distinct procedures increased 44-59 percent; the total number of procedures performed increased 53-70 percent; and the cost per study volunteer per visit increased 34-61 percent.

in the early 1990s, one of its biggest drugs was Vasotec (enalapril). It was tested in 2,987 patients before FDA approval. Mevacor (lovastatin), another of Merck's big drugs at the time, was tested in 6,582 patients in the EXCEL Study. At the time, that was thought to be a massive trial. But the REVEAL trial, in which Merck is currently testing the experimental drug anacetrapib, includes an unbelievable 30,000 subjects and is being conducted at 430 hospitals and clinics in the United Kingdom, North America, China, Germany, Italy, and Scandinavia. (from Hooper)

 

 

I spoke this weekend with a man who owned a vineyard for many years. He said it would be impossible to harvest grapes without immigrant workers and the "sanctuary" being offered in some states is a desperate effort to prevent several state industries from collapse.


Who is...Milton Freidman?


California now has 11 counties with more voters than citizens of voting age.

Well-to-do people are often very clever at using democratic processes as mechanisms for transferring wealth to themselves from people who are poorer than they are.  And part of this cleverness lies in creating the false appearance that the democratic processes are being used to promote the public good.  Because so many intellectuals never bother to look beyond or beneath superficial appearances, intellectuals leap to the conclusion that those who oppose policies that superficially appear to genuinely promote the public interest necessarily are enemies of the public interest.--editorial

 Since 2003, the average household has earned more than 4.5% a year from their investments...exceeding the returns from a diversified hedge fund index, which earned just 1.6% a year.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/cab-thoughts-8313.html

Cab Thoughts 8/3/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor. ~Jim Grant       While the addition of i...

Freidman in an old interview in Reason on why intellectuals espouse collectivism. It is not complementary. The question posed by the interviewer is a complex one:

FRIEDMAN: Well, I don't think we'll get very far by interpreting the intellectuals' motivation. Their critical attitudes might be attributed to personal resentment and envy but I would say that a more fruitful direction, or a more fundamental one, is that intellectuals are people with something to sell. So the question becomes, what is there a better market for? I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong pass a law and do something about it. If there's something wrong it's because of some no-good bum, some devil, evil and wicked--that's a very simple story to tell. You don't have to be very smart to write it and you don't have to be very smart to accept it. On the other hand, the individualistic or libertarian argument is a sophisticated and subtle one. If there's something wrong with society, if there's a real social evil, maybe you will make better progress by letting people voluntarily try to eliminate the evil. Therefore, I think, there is in advance a tendency for intellectuals to be attracted to sell the collectivist idea. REASON: It's paradoxical but people might then say that you are attributing to the collectivist intellectual a better feeling for the market.
FRIEDMAN: Of course. But while there's a bigger market for Fords than there is for American Motors products, there is a market for the American Motors products. In the same way, there's a bigger market for collectivist ideology than there is for individualist ideology. The thing that really baffles me is that the fraction of intellectuals who are collectivists is, I think, even larger than would be justified by the market.

“Proper cynicism is not a matter of personality, but of intellectual attitude. Their goal (the Greeks that is) was to blow away the fog and confusion and see reality with lucidity and clarity. The contemporary cynic (of which Mencken is an example) desires the same. The questioning and doubt is not an end in itself, but a means of cutting through the crap and seeing things as they really are.”--Baggini

“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of this land will reach their heart’s content at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”--Mencken

And, from a correspondent:

 

 

 

 

My pain manager doc had lunch with the Governor earlier this week. He reports that the Governor has no understanding of the health care issues at all.

 

 

 

 

In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” – James Madison, 4 Annals of Congress 179 (1794)      

A small but growing number of investors is buying the rights to musicians’ future earnings, lured by returns that can run the potential for higher rates of return than traditional investments. (wsj)


Consumption in the U.S., per capita, measures about 50 percent higher than in the European Union. American individuals command more resources than people in countries such as Norway or Luxembourg, which have higher per capita GDP. The same American consumption advantage is evident if you look at dwelling space per person or the number of appliances in a typical home.
Once we focus on consumption, America’s high health-care expenditures no longer appear so unusual. (cowen)

The Pirates are playing bad baseball but you can tell that without having to suffer through their games: Simply look at their charities. When they start losing, they ramp up their charities. If they get real bad, their charities will surpass their patriotism. When they are really terrible they look like a charity with a ball team attached.


President Trump is expected to make a speech and sign a memorandum at the White House Friday that will target China's intellectual property and trade practices, effectively firing the first shot in what could escalate into a major US-China trade war.


Oscar Pistorius became the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics, running in an opening heat of the men’s 400-meter. Pistorius finished second out of five runners and advanced to the semifinals, where he finished eighth out of eight runners. Most thought this a heartening human achievement; others did not see the success of adaptation to a disability but the risk of a dehumanizing mechanical enhancement in competition.

Mark Zuckerberg appears to be building an army of presidential advisors.

More numbers:
Productivity growth (TFP) continues to fall and is quickly approaching zero. It is currently in decline in many developed economies.


In 2016, the first baby boomers turned 70 marking an acceleration point for retiring workers and those taking retirement distributions. 10,000 boomers are now retiring daily, which adds pressure to fiscally unstable government programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

State and local pension funds are hugely underfunded. According to a Hoover Institute study published in May 2017, current pension shortfalls total over $3.8 trillion versus the GASB cited shortfall of $1.3 trillion.

Gore's climate sequel is out this month. He is having some trouble with it, even from the Left.

Two weeks ago, Gore came under fire by comparing climate change to slavery abolition, saying both movements were “met with ferocious resistance.”

And the approach to the problem is evolving. Up-and-comers such as the Copenhagen Consensus Center’s Bjorn Lomborg have called for making green energy cheaper by increasing funding for research instead of entering into sweeping global treaties like the kind Gore favors.

A Bloomberg poll this month found that only 10 percent saw global warming as the most important issue facing the country. A Chapman University poll released in October found that those surveyed were more afraid of clowns than global warming.


The economic phenomenon that people who call for higher minimum wages ignore is that when the price of anything rises, people seek substitutes.--Williams
This is one of the arguments against people voting on the basis of the price of a new car; like people priced out of the downtown housing market, people adapt, they buy a used car or do Uber or car pools. The cost of something causes a reaction, it is not a sentence.

Here's a scary early study: Prions are insidious proteins that spread like infectious agents and trigger fatal conditions such as mad cow disease. A protein implicated in diabetes, a new study suggests, shares some similarities with these villains. Researchers transmitted diabetes from one mouse to another just by injecting the animals with this protein. The results don't indicate that diabetes is contagious like a cold, but blood transfusions, or even food, may spread the disease.


"These sanctions, which I pray Europe can independently judge and discard, are as dumb as giving out medals to Generals who keep losing wars...With all the computer geniuses we have in our country, can we not even accept the possibility that perhaps our intelligence agencies are not doing their job, and maybe, just maybe, are deliberately misleading us to continue their false-flag war against Russia?"--the highly self-esteemed Oliver Stone


Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today's lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable... Ionic Materials could change that with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company's breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones. Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid.


AAAAAaaaannnndddd......a graph:

Triage

Cost, Price and Triage


The cost of medical care has always been confusing because the target has been the collective cost, not the price of individual encounters. And people often confuse cost with price. For example increasing availability of providers would presumably drive the cost of their services down but might increase the aggregate cost by making them more affordable to marginal patients. The classic way of managing this problem is through restricted access. The free market restricts on the basis of expense; not everyone can afford dental care or plastic surgery so not everyone gets it. Government controlled systems control access through bureaucracy--meeting arbitrary milestones and restricted access through bottlenecks. Should a drug addict get a liver transplant? Should an eighty year old man get dialysis?


Survey results this week showing that a third of people with chronic or persistent illnesses who had been rejected for insurance claims said their conditions worsened following the rejection. According to CBS, the survey is the latest development “in the ongoing tug of war between doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurers over just how much insurers should be involved in the decision-making role for patient care.” The article adds that this study may “raise questions about how insurance practices have changed,” in particular, since the ACA took effect.


Health insurers denied coverage for nearly a quarter of the Americans with chronic conditions or persistent illnesses. The U.S. General Accounting Office study based on early 2010 data indicated that denials then were only 19 percent, and a study by the American Medical Association in 2013 found that figure even lower. 


The desire to feel better is universal. Resources are not. That conflict must be resolved in some way.  After all, politicians cannot repeal the laws of supply and demand, they just say they can. Costs can sometimes be pressured but price is arbitrary. The essence of decreasing price is where, and how, to create the shortages.

Equality/Diversity

Equality or diversity


James Damore, formerly of Google, has opened a can of worms.


Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller writes the following:

The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;

The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.

Regrettably the basic proposition in these two arguments are diametrically opposed.


If the sexes and races don’t differ at all, and if psychological interchangeability is true, then there’s no practical business case for diversity. If there are no differences then it does not matter who you hire.


On the other hand, if demographic diversity gives a company any competitive advantages, it must be because there are important sex differences and race differences in how human minds work and interact. For example, psychological variety must promote better decision-making within teams, projects, and divisions. Yet if minds differ across sexes and races enough to justify diversity as an instrumental business goal, then they must differ enough in some specific skills, interests, and motivations that hiring and promotion will sometimes produce unequal outcomes in some company roles. That is to say, if diversity offers differences in outcomes then those diversities should be exploited. So, if demographic diversity yields any competitive advantages due to psychological differences between groups, then demographic equality of outcome cannot be achieved in all jobs and all levels within a company.


So, psychological interchangeability makes diversity meaningless. But psychological differences make equal outcomes impossible. Equality or diversity. You can’t have both.
Weirdly, the same people who advocate for equality of outcome in every aspect of corporate life, also tend to advocate for diversity in every aspect of corporate life. They don’t even see the fundamentally irreconcilable assumptions behind this ‘equality and diversity’ dogma. (some from Rod Dreher)

Libertarians/Shaffer

Bretigne Shaffer is a filmmaker and a libertarian blogger whom I came across on the internet. She is also an antivaxer, opposed to children's vaccines. This is strange stuff but she does not seem nuts or dumb. This is a subculture of fear and anger and a little inquiry here is quite revealing. In this particular instance she is simply flat-out furious, apparently at Obama but I'm sure many others. I am not sure how important this view is but it is unsettling, nonetheless. This is lifted from a recent blog:

 

It’s been a weird couple of months. I’ve seen more people unfriend each other on FaceBook than in the past few years combined; There have been several reports of both Trump supporters and minorities being physically attacked; I’ve been asked to wear a safety pin to proclaim to the world that I am not a racist, because the presumption now is that everyone is a racist and you have to (secretly - only not so secretly) announce to everyone if you’re not; and the senior editor of ThinkProgress is afraid of his plumber. (This, based solely on whatever profiling techniques they use over at ThinkProgress - “…a middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.” - rather than anything resembling a conversation with the man.)

1. We no longer have a Fourth Amendment, nor the right of habeas corpus (you remember: it was kind of the foundation of our justice system). Yes, the demise of these fundamental protections has been a long time coming, but President Obama delivered the death blow when he gave himself (and all future presidents) the right to imprison indefinitely or even assassinate any human being on the planet with no due process whatsoever.
Number One should be enough. Any normal person should look at the first item on this list and say “OK, I guess that’s a little bit worse than making fun of a disabled reporter.” (And I say this as the mother of an intellectually disabled daughter.) But, because I know it won’t be enough, I’ll continue…
2. Obama has bombed more countries than George W. Bush did, and his drone strikes have killed more than six times as many people as those under Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (killing unintended victims 90% of the time.)
3. He has given himself (and all future presidents) the power to wage war without Congressional approval.
4. He has greatly expanded the mass surveillance of American citizens.
5. He put in place a statist health insurance mandate that has sent insurance premiums skyrocketing.
6. He has continued the same brand of crony capitalism and debt expansion of the previous administration.
7. He has deported more than 2.5 million immigrants - more than any other American president in history.
8. After running on a platform of more government transparency, he has presided over an administration more hostile than any other to whistleblowers and a free press.
9. Police brutality has not abated, nor has the mass incarceration of Americans (and especially black and Hispanic Americans. Maybe it’s only “racism” if the president is a white Republican?)
10. Did I mention he - and all future presidents - now has the legal right to kill anyone on the planet, including American citizens, with no conviction, no charges, no semblance of due process at all. Did I mention that?

Sunday/Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins sj(28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading if more innovative Victorian poets. 

Hopkins became a skilled draughtsman and found that his early training in visual art supported his later work as a poet. His siblings were greatly inspired by language, religion and the creative arts. He went through an ascetic period in school and, at Oxford, converted from the English Church to Catholicism.

At Oxford he forged a lifelong friendship with Robert Bridges which would be of importance in his development as a poet and in establishing his posthumous acclaim. Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences^. During this time he studied with the eminent writer and critic Walter Pater, who tutored him in 1866 and who remained a friend until Hopkins left Oxford in September 1879.

Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English  poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating "feet" of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm.  Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot and is said to anticipate free verse.
Hopkins is an intricate, metaphysical writer with influence from Welsh.

The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or “caught”) one of these birds in the midst of its hovering.

Hopkins thought it his best poem.



Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging: the bird’s perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are inseparable. He mixes different parts of the sentences together in an intense unity.


“Sprung rhythm” is a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird’s pausing and racing.



The sestet has puzzled many readers because it seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced in the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover’s motion now give way to the phrase “my chevalier”—a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback, to which the poem’s subtitle (or dedication) gives the reader a clue.

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Reverie

Evidence of the quasi-religious nature of Sartre’s serial dictator-worship is in the title he gave to the newspaper he relaunched in the 1970s and which still publishes today: Libération. Liberation from what, exactly? France at the time was hardly a tyranny. It is difficult not to conclude that what was meant was a mystical or other-worldly liberation from the existential conditions under which mankind is constrained to labor forever.--Dalyrmple

Global warming is not even the obvious top environmental threat. Dirty water, dirty air and insect-borne diseases are a far greater problem today for most people world-wide. Habitat loss and human predation are a far greater problem for most animals. Elephants won’t make it to see a warmer climate. Ask them how they would prefer to spend $1 trillion—subsidizing high-speed trains or a human-free park the size of Montana.

.... Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable. (wsj)

Who is....Joseph Priestly?

This is from a recent movie review of "Dunkirk:"

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, ..... is both an astonishing filmmaking achievement and an epic narrative failure. Nolan, who wrote and directed Dunkirk, made a deliberate choice to tell the story almost exclusively from the close-up perspective of individual sailors, soldiers, and pilots. This relatively short, blindingly sharp, and painfully vivid feat of impressionistic moviemaking gives one a rare sense of the horrors of war as experienced by those whose country is losing the fight. Nolan is a great director. What he is not, in this picture, is a great storyteller. His view of the events at Dunkirk is nearsighted. He misses the forest for the trees.

The economic phenomenon that people who call for higher minimum wages ignore is that when the price of anything rises, people seek substitutes. We see it with anything. When the price of oil rose, people sought ways to use less of it through purchasing more insulation for their homes and fuel-efficient cars. When the price of beef rose, people sought cheaper substitutes such as pork and chicken. The substitution effect of price changes is omnipresent, but do-gooders and politicians seem to suggest that labor markets are an exception. It’s bad enough when do-gooders and politicians have that vision, but it is utterly disgusting and inexcusable for a trained economist to buy into that zero-elasticity vision.--Williams

This is the basis for all of the government's efforts at social engineering. They raise the price of cigarettes through increased taxation to decrease their availability. The only place where this economic law does not apply is the minimum wage.

Why do you suppose Trump closed down the CIA's Syrian covert program?



The top 200 S&P 500 companies have pension shortfalls totaling $382 billion and corporations like GE spent more on share buybacks ($45b) than the size of their entire pension shortfall ($31b) which ranks as the largest in the S&P 500.



Hackers have broken into the networks of HBO and reportedly leaked unreleased episodes of a number of shows, as well as the script for next week's "Game of Thrones" episode.


In 1774, dissenting British minister Joseph Priestly, author of Observations on Civil Liberty and the Nature and Justice of the War with America, discovered oxygen while serving as a tutor to the sons of American sympathizer William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, at Bowood House in Wiltshire, England.
Joseph Priestley shared the liberal religious and political philosophy of many of America’s revolutionary leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom became his friends and correspondents. ("Dissenting" here means "non-Anglican." He was a Unitarian.)


"The abiding genius of Karl Marx lies precisely here, in his acute understanding of the possible reaction of the ignorant intellectual to the workings of the capitalist or market order." This is Buchanan on one of his beliefs about Marxism, that it's success hinges on the Left's not knowing anything about economics.

An indictment, unsealed recently, describes alleged illegal dealings of former FCA labor relations chief Alphons Iacobelli, deceased UAW Vice President General Holiefield and his widow, Monica Morgan, a prominent Detroit photographer. Morgan will be arraigned in a Detroit federal court today, July 31. Iacobelli will be arraigned Tuesday, Aug. 1. Federal investigators claim the three were at the center of a conspiracy from 2009 through 2014 that included Iacobelli personally pocketing $1 million and helping funnel $1.2 million from the UAW- Chrysler National Training Center to Holiefield, Morgan and other high-ranking members of the union.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/bicycles-taxis-and-history_12.html

Bicycles, Taxis and History steeleydock.blogspot.com General von Schlieffen bicycled through the Belgium countryside reconnoitering the grounds of the war he knew would come. Years later, in...

VW is trying to go electric. Matthias Müller was hired to drag the automaker away from the emissions scandal and into the world of modern automotive technologies. He’s facing opposition from the company’s skeptical managers. (wsj)

"The reason why startups are disrupting companies in the 21st Century is not because they are smarter. It's because they have capital to do so," said Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur, startup mentor and adjunct professor at Stanford University. [...] The zeal that prevailed just two years ago has faded. Seed and angel investors completed about 900 deals in the second quarter, down from roughly 1,100 deals in the second quarter of 2016 and close to 1,500 deals during that time period in 2015, according to a report released last month by Seattle-based PitchBook Inc, which supplies venture capital data. The dollar amount provided by seed and angel investors was $1.65 billion in the second quarter. That's just shy of the $1.75 billion for the same time period of 2016 and down significantly from 2015, which saw $2.19 billion invested into fledgling startups

Contrary to myth, the United States in recent decades has not experienced a flood of immigrants. The net annual inflow of immigrants per 1,000 population is actually lower than the average rate since 1820. Foreign-born residents account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, compared to 20 percent in Canada and 27 percent in Australia.


Major health insurers in some states are seeking 2018 premium increases on Affordable Care Act plans of 30% or more, according to new federal data. (wsj)

There is news of a really important new inscription discovered recently in Pompeii. It is the funerary memorial of a wealthy man with seven  surviving lines about 4 metres in length, according to Mary Beard. One highlight that has been reported is a reference to him giving a gladiatorial display with 416 gladiators. 416! The other thing that is going to be important are some added details about the riot in the amphitheatre in Pompeii in 59 CE. It apparently says that the local magistrates in Pompeii at the time were exiled by Nero (something we didn’t know already and isn’t mentioned by Tacitus who is our main source of information).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “scientific” recommendations  include “reduced gender inequality & marginalization in other forms,” “provisioning of adequate housing,” “cash transfers” and “awareness raising & integrating into education.” Even if some of these are worthy goals, they are not scientifically valid, cost-benefit-tested policies to cool the planet.(wsj)

"Nearly half of Americans do not benefit from DOW 22,000." That is a headline from the WashPo. Someone high in the news industry thought that insightful and important.

At the time, NFL officials claimed they did not know why ratings were down and even used the 2016 presidential election as an excuse for why more people weren't watching. But according to a new survey from J.D. Power, NFL fans did in fact tune out in droves because of the disrespect and protest of the National Anthem before games.

William Browder before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Graham: So, I just want to absorb that for a moment. The group that did the dossier on President Trump hired this British spy, wound up getting it to the FBI. You believe they were working for the Russians?

Browder: That's correct.  And in the Spring and Summer of 2016 they were receiving money indirectly from a senior Russian government official.

The government bought a disused budget hotel to turn into a shelter for up to 85 migrants. Protesters in the town in southwest France under the cover of darkness have built a nearly-two-yard-high wall around the entrance to try to prevent access to it.

AAAAAnnnnnnddddd.......a chart:

Candor

A story off an economic blog:
  
I was invited to a major political dinner in Washington with the former Chairman of Temple University since I advised the University with respect to its portfolio. We were seated at one of those round tables with ten people. Because we were invited from a university, they placed us with the heads of the various environmental groups. They assumed they were in friendly company and began speaking freely.

Dick Fox, my friend and Chairman of Temple, began to lead them on to get the truth behind their movement. Low and behold, they too admitted it was not about the environment, but to reduce population growth.

Dick then asked them, “Whose grandchild are we trying to prevent from being born? Your’s or mine?”

Left/History

A War Against History

The Left has always been at a disadvantage in its attacks on America: The country was created out of the philosophical belief in the equality of men and, in two hundred years became wildly successful. Historically the Left has gone through many--sometimes contorted--ways to dismiss America. First Marxism and the "alienation from work" thesis, then the inevitable poverty thesis. When it was clear that America and its workers were more successful and more content than anyone in history, the Left agreed but said it was the function of a world-destroying engine run on petroleum which had to be dismantled. That did not catch on. Recently the idea that America disdained financial equality--a notion that is actually historically true--emerged but financial equality itself was a mushy concept and leading men out of inequality required a hierarchy that everyone saw, so that failed.


Their new tact might work. Their new tact is an attack on history. They have chosen the Civil War period. As with all spiritual ideas, it is a hard sell but it has promise. The idea is that we modern people can hold the rebels morally responsible for treasonous revolution and connect that revolt to slave-holding. This greatly simplifies the Civil War, of course; every high school student in the nation has sweated over that mandatory essay at some point in his academic career. But there is certainly guilt by association here.


The problem is its profound demands upon unreality: Slavery was  the product of war and greed, not bigotry, and was a time honored institution. And the people involved must be seen as prototypes, as pure elements rather than the complex amalgams they are. After all, if you want to burn a witch, she must be all witch, not a mother or sister or a daughter and a witch. She must be all witch. So the South must be held morally responsible for a legal act that, at the time, was virtually institutionalized throughout the world. More, every southerner must be seen solely as a representative of that outrage without any redeeming value. That done, we can now attack statues, works of art and Civil War paraphernalia with a righteous fury. The end point will be an attack on the founders of the country who certainly show imperfections. Once revealed, they may be able to invalidate their revolutionary creation.


This is a bold gamble but not without risk. What if feminists start examining Marx' personal life? What would happen if their opponents dragged up the old Progressive fascination with eugenics? What if Woodrow Wilson's racial beliefs became well known?
But this pales before the risk to Roosevelt, a man high in the Left hagiography, whose outrageous internment of American citizens of Japanese background violated most of our social and political mores, then and now.
Demanding purity and homogeneity creates a heavy burden. Ask Robespierre.

Reverie

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -Frederic Bastiat, 1848

In fact, there is precious little scientific support for the ideology that pristine nature is somehow better than the mélange that humanity has created by moving species around the globe.--Bailey

...none of the countless campaign reporters and commentators is on record as having noticed the car “affordability” statistics distributed in June 2016 via www.thecarconnection.com. Derived from very reliable Federal Reserve data, they depicted the awful predicament of almost half of all American households. Had journalists studied the numbers and pondered even briefly their implications, they could have determined a priori that only two candidates could win the Presidential election – Sanders and Trump – because none of the others even recognized that there was problem if median American households had been impoverished to the point that they could no longer afford a new car.--Luttwak

What is....WhatsApp?


The stupidity, venality and meanness of the current political scene is something no citizen should see. Perhaps it will be Trump's real legacy, the revelation of how small, petty and completely self-absorbed these politicians are. The old adage is true: Airlines should never raise questions of a competitor's safety. But....there is this government to run.....



This is a good quote. It is surprisingly both obvious and revelatory: Despite their rhetoric, interest groups are not organized for the intention of improving the working of the economic order; they form for the sole purpose of increasing their members’ welfare and will do so knowing full well that it comes at a cost to others.  Interest groups do not, then, seek public goods for the nation but to obtain more private goods that could not be gained in the private economy.  Special interests and especially those representing producers seek to have income and wealth redistributed to themselves.-Buchanan
Now, substitute "political parties" for "interest groups."



S&P 500 Price to Sales Ratio is at an all-time high. Total domestic corporate profits  have grown at an annualized rate of .097% over the last five years. Prior to this period and since 2000, five year annualized profit growth was 7.95%, a period that included two recessions.



Squeezed in between the public in-fighting and the appalling bad taste of the current administration is some governing reality. The Republican effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act collapsed when a slimmed-down Senate measure to pare back selected pieces of the 2010 health-care law failed, undermining the GOP leaders’ efforts to deliver on a longtime campaign promise. (wsj) McCain, who ran against the ACA, voted to continue it unchanged. It will fall apart. So who will be blamed when it does, the Democrats who voted unanimously to protect it or the Rube-publicans who had three votes with the Democrats?



Officials seized Trump protesters' cell phones, cracked their passwords, and are now attempting to use the contents to convict them of conspiracy to riot at the presidential inauguration. Prosecutors have indicted over 200 people on felony riot charges for protests in Washington, D.C. on January 20 that broke windows and damaged vehicles.
 
Here is a very sensible, if obvious, idea from economics professor Wright. He is speaking about the idea of monopoly being not necessarily a business concept but the overall generality is worthwhile: It is harder to deal with a wolf in sheep's clothing than it is to deal with a wolf. The essential drive toward the routine society comes from both the left and the right, but in the case of the union movement it is given all sorts of altruistic labels which make it much more difficult to pin down.


There is some interesting talk about time-travel in science fiction and why it appears so late in the West. Many think H.G. Wells' Time Machine is the first but someone (I can't remember who) said that A Christmas Story offered all the prerequisites.


Whoa! "Ivanka Trump is duly apprenticed in the White House that, according to my sources, she means to occupy as America’s first female President."--Luttwak


According to filings at the end of January 2017, the Clinton campaign  spent some $1.4 billion, Trump $948 million. 1.4 billion dollars to be president.


A Marxist student group at Swarthmore College disbanded itself earlier this year after realizing that its members were too rich and too white to be real communists.
The demise of the Swarthmore Anti-Capitalist Collective (SACC) came in the wake of a farewell letter from a member who had decided the group could never be an effective proponent of “unproblematized anticapitalist politics” due to its “history of abuse, racism, and even classism.”


Facebook has announced that more than one billion people use its instant messages and voice calling app WhatsApp every day.

Hackers at a competition in Las Vegas were able to breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America's election infrastructure.

Google has expelled 20 Android apps from its Play marketplace after finding they contained code for monitoring and extracting user's e-mail, text messages, locations, voice calls and other sensitive data.

Multiple university studies all came to the same conclusion -- if quality is maintained, a multitasking person takes the same time to complete the jobs as if they were each done sequentially. Said another way: the only time a multitasking person saves time is when the quality of the work is degraded. Every study got the same answer.

You must separate out being pro free-enterprise from being pro-business.  The two greatest enemies of the free enterprise system, in my opinion, have been on the one hand my fellow intellectuals, and on the other hand, the big businessmen – for opposite reasons.--freidman


Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/mani-1-several-bricks-or-syllables-shy.html

steeleydock: Mani 1--Several Bricks or Syllables Shy of a ... steeleydock.blogspot.com I do want to explain myself: As dirty and harmful a bastard as politics can be, it comes from pure and noble parentage. Politics is the result of man's ...

In Einsteinian physics there is no such thing as a collision. For example, the Einstein joke -- Einstein on a train asks the conductor “What time does Boston get to this train?”

NASA’s own data reveal that worldwide ocean levels have been falling for nearly two years, dropping from a variation of roughly 87.5mm to below 85mm.


AAAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddd.....a graph: