Reverie

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock. -Margaret Halsey, novelist (13 Feb 1910-1997)






From an article in the WSJ, "First, They Came for the Biologists: "Diversity offices, the very places that were supposed to address bigotry and harassment, have been weaponized and repurposed to catch and cull all who disagree.....Despite the benevolent-sounding label, the equity movement is a highly virulent social pathogen, an autoimmune disease of the academy.......The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left."


Investigators of the Vegas shooting  are "puzzled" by two discoveries: first a charger was found that does not match any of the cellphones that belonged to gunman Stephen Paddock. Second, garage records show that during a period when Paddock's car left the hotel garage, one of his key cards was used to get into his room.


Who is...Jose Altuve?


Why did Las Vegas dancer Kijuana Nige post video of what appears to be Dolphins assistant coach Chris Foerster snorting a white powder before going to a meeting? Social injustice. At least that was the explanation she gave on social media. The New York Daily News has the goods: "The white people mad at me like I forced blow down this mans nose and like I recorded it on tha low," Kijuana Nige wrote in now-deleted Facebook post. "No those are his habits and he recorded himself and sent it to me professing his love. So quick to make excuses for him but will roast a minority player over an athem, dog fights, weed, domestic issues etc. But y'all keep saying ALL LIVES MATTER STFU‼️ (Yahoo)

Illegal drugs account for 0.7% of the death rate; murder, about 0.6%. So what is the big killer? Disease. And why do we emphasize these tiny elements in the nation's health when the diseases could be so readily attacked by better information, diet and behavior? Is it because there is no political/social reward, no self-congratulatory flush?

Jose Altuve is 5'5". He should be the AL MVP. There is an argument that his small size is a hitting advantage.

Has Antifa become the new zika?

From a review of Rethinking Capitalism: "In 1947, the future Nobel Laureate Franco Modigliani wrote that “stasis and routine are the only true danger of a socialist economic system.” A sympathizer with socialism, Modigliani thought nonetheless that there was a potential trade-off between centralized direction of the economy and a society hospitable to innovation. To hear these authors tell it, no such trade-off exists, and most of the innovation that we have in a capitalist society is due to government intervention." And: "Rethinking Capitalism is but the latest example of a notable stream of literature blaming capitalism for not accommodating the desires of its authors as quickly and comprehensively as they would like. Make no mistake, though, it is in its own way an important work. Arguments such as the ones I've explored won't convince an educated layman who comes to the book with no predisposition on the matter. But they are a formidable device to strengthen the convictions of those who already support big government. They would have us believe that the state is good in precisely those circumstances where even most interventionists have typically accepted that it is not: in prompting innovation."

Jeremy Corbin of the Labour Party is apparently a rising star. He is not an academic. (He left the equivalent of high school with two Grade ‘E’ A levels.) He has had a peculiar affinity for the T-shirt heroes of the Left; he has kindness for the IRA, Castro (whom he called “a champion of social justice”), Chávez (“he made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world”), Trotsky, and Islamists. If he ends up as PM he may overshadow Trump in weirdness.

In late February, concerns about a potential nuclear "incident", reportedly in the vicinity of the Arctic circle, emerged when trace amounts of radioactive Iodine-131 of unknown origin were detected in January over large areas in Europe, according to a report by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the French national public expert in nuclear and radiological risks. And while Norway was the first to measure the radioactivity, France was the first to officially inform the public about it.

Today the French nuclear watchdog ISRN reported that another spike in airborne radioactivity has been detected in the air in Western and Central Europe: "Ruthenium-106 has been detected by several European networks involved in the monitoring of atmospheric radioactive contamination, at levels of a few milliBecquerels per cubic meter of air." According to IRSN calculations, based on the concentration levels measured in several European countries and on the meteorological conditions of the last few days, the contaminated air could have been generated from southern regions of Ural or located close to those.

Vincent of Beauvais was a thirteenth-century Dominican friar who wrote “The Great Mirror,” an eighty-book compilation that attempted to summarize all practical and scholarly knowledge accrued up to that time, along with all history, beginning, like Genesis, with God and the creation of the world.

Teresa Ghilarducci is a labor economist at The New School, specializing in retirement security. Here’s what she told the Washington Post last month: “There is no part of the country where the majority of middle-class older workers have adequate retirement savings to maintain their standard of living in their retirement.” And this horrifying bar graph:

Image: Washington Post

This is an insightful observation by Buchanan on Marx: We must, I think, appreciate the rhetorical genius of Marx in his ability to convert arguments advanced in support of market organisation into what could be made to appear to be support for a particular distributional class, the capitalists. By clever substitution of emotion-laden terminology, the market system became ‘capitalism’, and the search of every persons for his own advantage became the profit-seeking of the greedy capitalists. This rhetorical genius, coupled with totally erroneous economic analysis embedded into pseudo-scientific jargon about the laws of history, was highly successful in elevating the distributional issue to centre stage, to the relative neglect of the allocational and growth elements that were central in the classical teachings. And, further, the whole Marxian- socialist challenge was introduced into the political arena in the middle of the post-Hegelian epoch, during which the state was conceptualised only in a romantic vision completely divorced from the observable reality of politics.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/cab-thoughts-72413.html

Cab Thoughts 7/24/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a c...

In the Gospel, Christ updates the landowner and the vineyard parable in Isaiah. The New Testament is usually seen as a softening and broadening of the Old Testament; not so in this instance.


Boris Becker may have lost a substantial portion of his roughly €50 million fortune in part because of questionable investments in the Nigerian oil industry.

According to the Times, Becker is left with assets of only €540,000 (£481,483), based on reports in the German press. The money he earned on the court was spent on a divorce, an extravagant lifestyle, failed business projects and settling unpaid tax bills. He now works as a commentator for the BBC and other media. Details of Becker’s financial predicament are included in a report by the accountants appointed to administer his affairs after he was declared bankrupt, when he failed to repay a loan to the London private bankers Arbuthnot Latham & Co. His debts were said to include €38.4 million owed to Hans-Dieter Cleven, a Swiss businessman and his long-term business adviser.

Cato the Censor, in ancient Rome, moved a nation to undertake the final conquest of its rival, Carthage, by tacking on ‘Carthago delenda est‘ — ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ — to every public statement and private encounter. So the major concern of the day--at least Cato's--was prominent in every public official act.
So what statement today should be so applied?

Tim Murphy has a perfect 100% score with National Right to Life, having voted with the organization on five key pieces of legislation, including the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act." We would be better served governed at random.

AAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....something: