Reverie

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one." - Albert Einstein






James M. Buchanan’s political economy should be read as part of a big European tradition in political philosophy following Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and John Sturt Mill (On Liberty ) on the nature of democracy who feared that democracy may threaten liberty. Mill and Tocqueville feared the democratic revolution and particularly the modern passion for equality may threaten liberty. Tocqueville asks what becomes of people when they are overcome by this passion? The growth of state power and the homogenization of state power society as results of homogenizing of society as two consequences of equalizing conditions. The growth of government inspired many of Buchanan’s earlier writings. What Mill, Tocqueville and James Buchanan teaches us is that to love democracy well, we must love it moderately.--Foss


The health care debate is confusing. Is the Affordable Care Act a success or not? The U.S. has always had its health care system criticized by outsiders; is that criticism over now that ACA is in place? If the ACA actually is a failure and the Rube-publicans are unable to fashion a new plan, why would anyone have optimism that the central government will do a better job the next time it tries?

Who is...John Newton?

 

In 2013, a team of U.N. chemical weapons inspectors confirmed that sarin had been used in an attack that killed as many as 1,400 men, women and children in Ghouta, a suburb on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria. The Syrian government denied responsibility for the attack, as they did for the most recent incident. That 2013 attack was the most lethal use of chemicals in global warfare since the 1988 Halabja massacre, where Iraqi forces led by dictator Saddam Hussein killed thousands of their own civilians by using the gas.

Sarin was also used in the 1995 Tokyo subway attack by Shoko Asahara's cult, which killed 12 and sickened thousands. Members of the cult used the tips of their umbrellas to puncture plastic bags filled with liquid sarin on five crowded subway cars before hurrying off — leaving their fellow riders trapped with the toxic gas.

The U.S. says  sarin was the chemical behind the attack that killed more than 80 people, including at least 27 children, in Syria's Idlib province earlier this year.

The number of colleges in the U.S. declined by nearly 6% since the 2015-16 academic year, with the drop largely from closings of for-profit colleges that had low graduation and high student-loan default rates. (wsj)

“A lawyer, a spy, a mob boss, and a money launderer walk into a bar. The bartender says: you guys must be here to talk about adoption.” — Some guy on Twitter

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-umpire-fable.html

The Umpire: A Fable steeleydock.blogspot.com In a tight pennant race, the two contending teams met on a Saturday for the "Game of the Week." Both teams were talented, the race had dr...

Polemic: n:

1. a controversial argument, as one against some opinion, doctrine, etc.
2. a person who argues in opposition to another; controversialist.

Example: The second [book] is an angry polemic against the pervasive corruption of representative democracy wrought by economic inequality.
-- Jonathan A Knee, "The New Gilded Age in Philanthropy," New York Times, May 1, 2017
An interesting origin:

Polemic comes from the Greek adjective polemikós, a derivative of the noun pólemos “war, battle” in the strict sense and not as in, say “war of words.” The adjective is also restricted to warfare. The current (and only) senses “controversial, controversialist,” first appear in Middle French in the late 16th century and in English as an adjective and noun in the early 17th century.

John Newton was a slave-trader-turned-preacher who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace."

He went to sea with his merchant marine father at the age of eleven; sent to Spain as a shopkeeper's apprentice at fifteen; another try as sailor in Venice at seventeen; press-ganged into service aboard an English man-of-war but such a trouble-maker that he was released to a slave-trader; abandoned by the trader to the whims of his "African princess" concubine, who starved him, and encouraged the natives to jeer and throw rocks at her white slave; a sequence of better or worse treatment by other captain-traders, and a series of broken pledges to reform a life "big with mischief"; finally, at age twenty-two, a passage home to England and, during a savage storm off the coast of Newfoundland, a born-again deliverance into evangelical Christianity.
Newton eventually became a passionate abolitionist; his famous hymn eventually became popular in the slave-bound American South. In the 1830s, decades after Newton had died, Southern hymnbooks began to include "Amazing Grace" -- now so re-titled from Newton's original "Faith's Review and Expectation," and sung "shape-note" fashion to the anonymously-written tune the world now knows. The lyrics, too, had a life of their own: in Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, lines were added to emphasize the religion; other, "disrobed" versions, such as the one made popular by Judy Collins, represent "the transmogrification of the hymn into a self-help anthem" and do not, complain some Christians, represent Newton's intent. (steve king)

 

Real GDP has grown 1.97%, .83% and .69% over the last 3, 5, and 10 years respectively.

 

 

...men are generally more honest in their private than in their public capacity, and will go to greater lengths to serve a party, than when their own private interest is alone concerned. Honour is a great check on mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together, this check is, in a great measure, removed; since a man is sure to be approved by his own party . . . and he soon learns to despise the clamour of adversaries."--David Hume

 

Laura June, writing for The Outline: It's a well-known, well-documented fact that women entrepreneurs face an uphill battle in the fight to get funding for their businesses. But a new study suggests that it can actually be almost impossible. According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Venture Capital,  an all male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them

From 2002 to 2012, the arrest rate fell by 11 percent among those ages 18 to 64, according to federal data analyzed by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

But the arrest rate rose by 23 percent for people over 55. It rose even more markedly — by 28 percent — among those over 65, more than 106,000 of whom were arrested in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available.

This may not be an indicator of growing criminality among the elderly but rather simple dementia. That sounds great.

“...since the effect of any individual vote is so very small, it does not pay a voter to acquire information unless his stake in the initial issue is enormously greater than the cost of information.” --Arrow


CIA Director Mike Pompeo with a remarkable opinion:
“Wikileaks will take down America any way they can and find any willing partner to achieve that end,” Mr. Pompeo said Thursday at a security summit in Aspen, Colorado, where questions concerning the website’s publications and the Trump administration’s intended reaction peppered an hour long discussion on subjects ranging from Wikileaks and its publisher Julian Assange to Russia’s role in last year’s election and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
“This is the nature of these non-state hostile intelligence services,” he added. “I think our intelligence community has a lot of work in figuring out how to respond to them.”

The dictatorship of the [Communist] Party once established, and given a monopoly of propaganda, the problem of controlling the proliferation of romantic myths, of unifying and stabilizing and concentrating on one system at a time should be simple in the extreme. One of the greatest of modern scientific developments is waiting to serve the regime in this regard and save the world from turmoil. I refer, of course, to psychology in its applied aspect. In this connection we may thrill with patriotism as well as hope. No other country has approached our own in the succession of peerless psychologists we have given to the world. To name but a few: P.T. Barnum; Jay Gould; Mrs. Mary B.G. Eddy; Mrs. Aimee S. McPherson (notice the due representation of both sexes); Billy Sunday; Goat-gland Doc Brinkley; and coming to our own home town, our own dear Big Bill Thompson, Balaban, and Katz, and WGN.
As a climax to this glorious series I would name Dr. John B. Watson. It is not necessary to prove that he is the world's greatest psychologist; he admits it. And besides, doesn't he draw $40,000 a year [note: this is over $700,000 in 2017 dollars] for his psychologizing? Speaking for myself, I must express chagrin that it is so little. A man who can stand before the cream of the intelligentsia and exhort them to believe that they do not believe, but only react, to think that there is no such thing as thinking, but only muscle-twitching, that the whole idea of struggle and error is an error against which we must struggle until we see that seeing is an illusion, and illusion likewise an illusion--in short, one who repeats that "I am not saying anything, and you are not hearing anything, the gears are in mesh, nothing more," and makes them like it and pay to hear it--I say such a man should be worth at least $1,000,000 in any properly ordered civilization. One of the first acts of justice of the Communist dictatorship will undoubtedly be to give such a man a task which is not an insult to his powers. . . .--Frank H. Knight in "The Case for Communism: From the Standpoint of an Ex-Liberal."

Who could have imagined that Russian disinformation efforts would be more successful exposed than clandestine?

In 1967, Timothy Leary told Allen Ginsberg to drop out. "What can I drop out of?" Ginsberg asked. "Your teaching at Cal," Leary said. Ginsberg chuckled. "But I need the money."

 
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.--Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

AAAaaaannnndddd....a funny line: