Reverie

“There are certain harms that are nonactionable and offense is one of them. If I say something that you find duly offensive, you may protest, you may speak—but what you may not do is to sue me in order to silence me, or to get compensation from me.” Counterspeech is “the appropriate ‘remedy’ under these circumstances; suppressing speech is not.”--Richard Epstein

An observation by Lemeiux on mass killings. Commenting on restraint of individuals in history, he writes, "Losers were humble. There is no doubt that today moral constraints have been weakened, if only through the decline of religion. There were exceptions to losers' restraint. In 356 BC, Herostratus burnt the temple of Artemis at Ephesus in Greece in order to immortalize his name. He succeeded, at the cost of torture and execution."

At the G-20, Obama said he spoke to Putin about cyberwarfare, amid revelations that Russian hackers have been interfering in our political campaigns. We are more technologically advanced, both offensively and defensively, in this arena than any of our adversaries, said Obama, but we really don’t want another Cold War–style arms race. Instead, we must all adhere to norms of international behavior.

It makes you want to weep. This KGB thug adhering to norms? He invades Ukraine, annexes Crimea, bombs hospitals in Aleppo — and we expect him to observe cyber-code etiquette? Rather than exploit our technological lead — with countermeasures and deterrent threats — to ensure our own cyber safety?

We’re back to 1929 when Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down a U.S. code-breaking operation after it gave him decoded Japanese telegrams. He famously explained that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

Well, comrade, Putin is no gentleman. And he’s reading our mail.

— Charles Krauthammer

This investigations over the Russians' influencing the election may reveal something. But some things are already undeniable. It appears that a huge wide hunt of national enemies has been initiated by a fake political  report created by one of the American political parties and this  may have been enhanced by a federal police force. This terrible disruptive and anxiety proving investigation was initiated on very thin information. And it has played upon a national fear, the fear of Russians, the likes of which has not been seen since McCarthy's Red Scare.

Who is...British Commander in Chief Sir Douglas Haig?

And....Democrats plan to question Attorney General Jeff Sessions about whether he was truthful in previous testimony about the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Meanwhile, he has directed federal prosecutors to evaluate other Russia-related issues concerning Hillary Clinton.

On a sort-of-similar topic, a major turning point in The Americans was the assassination attempt of Reagan when Haig said "I am in control." I remember this and the liberals were very upset although most sensible people were not. The Russians in the storyline suspect it forecasts  a military coup.

According to federal data, “veterans are twice as likely as non-veterans to die from accidental overdoses of the highly addictive painkillers, a rate that reflects high levels of chronic pain among vets.” Drug overdoses killed more than 64,000 Americans in the prior 12 months ending last January, a 21 percent increase over the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In one year that is more than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

One element of medical science is reproducibility of results. We demand a study be proven right with multiple corroborating tests. But is it ethical to do such a study when the first study shows an optimum therapy?
China now claims 202 systems within the Top 500 of the Top 500 Supercomputer List while the United States -- once the dominant player -- tumbled to second place with 143 systems represented on the list.

Many Americans insist on “reciprocity” — that U.S. tariffs and other import restrictions and export subsidies should be removed only if other governments remove theirs. Why stop at trade? The same logic can be extended indefinitely. For example, U.S. cops should not stop murdering residents of the USA until cops in other countries stop murdering people there.--Higgs
Here's a surprise. The FCC reports that in 2015 payphones made $286 million.

Even if only a few people are capable of living this life to the full, we all benefit from its results, in the form of knowledge, technology, legal and political understanding, and the works of art, literature and music that evoke the human condition and also reconcile us to it. Aristotle went further, identifying contemplation (theoria) as the highest goal of mankind, and leisure (schole) as the means to it. Only in contemplation, he suggested, are our rational needs and desires properly fulfilled. Kantians might prefer to say that in the life of the mind we reach through the world of means to the kingdom of ends. We leave behind the routines of instrumental reasoning and enter a world in which ideas, artefacts and expressions exist for their own sake, as objects of intrinsic value. We are then granted the true homecoming of the spirit. Such seems to be implied by Friedrich Schiller, in his Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). Similar views underlie the German romantic view of Bildung: self-cultivation as the goal of education and the foundation of the university curriculum.--Roger Scruton on the purpose of culture.

As an aside, schole is the origin of our word school and is founded in the meaning leisure.

A theater critic recently wrote that he could not think of a case of stage fright in the theater that was not modern, contemporary--as if it is a new cultural and not a strictly personal problem. How is that?

An undercover FBI informant in the Russian nuclear industry who was made to sign an “illegal NDA” by former AG Loretta Lynch, claims to have video evidence showing Russian agents with briefcases full of bribe money related to the controversial Uranium One deal – according to The Hill investigative journalist John Solomon and Circa‘s Sara Carter. The informant, whose identity was revealed by Reuters as William D. Campbell, will testify before congress.
This is all going to be fascinating, if they have the guts to do it.

When British Commander in Chief Sir Douglas Haig called a halt to his army’s offensive near the Somme River in northwestern France, he ended the epic Battle of the Somme  after more than four months of bloody conflict. The initial advance was a disaster, as the six German divisions facing the advancing British mowed them down with their machine guns, killing or wounding some 60,000 men on the first day alone. In one day the British lost more men than the Americans did in the entire Vietnam War. Over the course of the next four-and-a-half months and no fewer than 90 attacks, the Allies were able to advance a total of only six miles in the Somme region, at the cost of 146,000 soldiers killed and over 200,000 more injured. (from history)
Periodically we need to be reminded of these kinds of things and how vulnerable the average believing citizen is to idiots.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2016/10/some-problems-require-meatcleavers.html

Some Problems Require Meatcleavers steeleydock.blogspot.com A guy named Charles Hugh-Smith has a book called Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform and has a thesis: There are perverse incent...

The current narrative is that Franken will create more problems for Trump. Franken himself does not come up. That is really good because he is such a great leader, a great thinker and a profound positive influence on the culture we could not continue were we to lose him. What will occur is that gradations of abuse will appear with Franken. That will be messy because we now do not demand due process.


The basic idea behind tax cuts is to decrease the distortion the government brings to the national management of money; people simply spend their money better. So...why is anyone saying that the tax cuts have to be offset somewhere by increasing them elsewhere and why is the resulting increase of tax revenues that tax cuts create a good thing?

“The FBI says its investigation identified ‘13 total mobile devices’ associated with Hillary Clinton's ‘two known’ phone numbers, both in the D.C. area code 212.
“All 13 of those devices ‘potentially were used to send emails’ through Clinton's personal email server, but the FBI was unable to acquire or examine any of those devices, at least two of which apparently were smashed by a hammer.”--cns

"Gulag" has appeared in reference to Western institutions recently, the result presumably a poor understanding of history and the present.

The term “GULAG” is an acronym for the Soviet bureaucratic institution, Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps), that operated the Soviet system of forced labor camps in the Stalin era. Since the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, the term has come to represent the entire Soviet forced labor penal system.

Concentration camps were created in the Soviet Union shortly after the 1917 revolution, but the system grew to tremendous proportions during the course of Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture in the early 1930s.
Gulag camps existed throughout the Soviet Union, but the largest camps lay in the most extreme geographical and climatic regions of the country from the Arctic north to the Siberian east and the Central Asian south. Prisoners were engaged in a variety of economic activities, but their work was typically unskilled, manual, and economically inefficient. The combination of endemic violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps.

AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a graph: