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

The peasants fleeing Ireland had a shorter life expectancy (19 years) than slaves in the U.S. (36 years), many of whom enjoyed healthier diets and better living quarters. Most slaves slept on mattresses, while most poor Irish peasants slept on piles of straw. The black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that freed slaves were poor by American standards, “but not as poor as the Irish peasants.”
In 1847, 19% of the Irish emigrants died on their way to the U.S. or shortly after arriving. By comparison, the average mortality rate on British slave ships of the period was 9%. (from a wsj article)

We have some sort of affinity with the Neanderthal, some eagerness to defend and uphold him. Perhaps there is some love of the underdog there but there might be more. There are those who hate the arrogance of success and turn their distain to success itself.

From Lincoln's "House divided" speech: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”

What can be done about the education system and its relationship to Black students? My personal take is that it has two parts, one, what does education do for a student and, two, why are Black students doing so badly in America's? This is a huge question with cascading implications. "Virtue" stems from the Latin word meaning "manliness" but, of course, the Greeks had a better word, "arête," which meant "excellence." This was a practical word for them and they taught it in school; a young citizen was taught excellence. A citizen's responsibility to himself and to his fellows in society was taught. If this is true--and it may not be--the educational system has a lot more of a burden on it--and the society a lot more vulnerability to it--than is let on. And the relationship between the educational system and the Black community itself may be more important than anyone is letting on.
The basic question is, Can--or must--civic virtue be taught?

The National Park Service is the protector of some of America’s greatest environmental and cultural treasures. Yet a huge funding shortfall means that the strain of America’s passion for its parks is showing. Trails are crumbling and buildings are rotting. In all there is an $11bn backlog of maintenance work that repair crews have been unable to perform, a number that has mostly increased every year in the past decade.--from The Guardian, worried about American parks
The Europeans are so worried about us.

Hawking on the dangers of AI:

“Intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has, because surviving and having more resources will increase its chances of accomplishing that other goal,” he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything forum in 2015. “This can cause problems for humans whose resources get taken away.” His solution? We should all leave the planet and find new lives in outer space.

So everything is out of our hands, we should run and hide and wait for the inevitable. But, will they let us?

Amazon.com, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase are forming a company to figure out how to reduce health-care costs for their hundreds of thousands of U.S. employees. (wsj)
This will be interesting. Can a bureaucracy of private enterprise out produce a government bureaucracy?

In its 2017 budget, the Trump administration proposed a $1.2 billion cut — a full 17 percent — to the CDC, the agency on the front lines of the national response to the flu outbreak. Trump was held personally responsible for this in a news article. 

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Apple is slashing planned production of the iPhone X for the three-month period ending March 31 in a sign of weaker-than-expected demand for the pricey handset.


A curious scientist wondered if he could build a smallpox virus that was immunologically new, unhindered by current immunologic developments both natural and pharmacological. You will be pleased to learn he was successful. 

From Read's "I, Pencil:" “Producing pencils is a task of gargantuan complexity. No one can know more than a minuscule fraction of all that there is to know about how to achieve this outcome. To get a steady supply of pencils requires that each person throughout the globe whose creativity, knowledge, and effort might prove useful in the production of pencils be encouraged to contribute this creativity, knowledge, and effort in a coordinated way. We know from vast amounts of experience that the market calls forth and coordinates this creativity, knowledge, and effort far more reliably than do government regulators. Therefore, if you want a steady supply of high-quality pencils, you’d better avoid the simplistic ‘solution’ of turning the task over to the state.”

In Wisconsin, the price police have gone after Meijer, a superstore that sells everything from groceries to electronics to pharmaceuticals. In 2015, when it opened its first two stores in the Badger State, the greeting Meijer received was far from “Wisconsin nice.” Rivals filed complaints accusing it of pricing 37 items—including bananas, dog food, ice cream and Cheerios—below cost. Meijer, which runs 200 stores in five states, says this was the first time it had ever been accused of hurting consumers by charging too little. Nonetheless, Wisconsin’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection sent the superstore a letter explaining the requirements of the state’s Unfair Sales Act.--from an article in the WSJ

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Aly Raisman said the 175 year sentence of Nassar was "not enough." She's right.

An interesting quote: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."
​I'm not sure this entirely works.
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The wonderful thing about accusing people of "dog whistle" signals is that nobody can hear them. It's like a guy with visions; no one can say for certain he is wrong. That is what the anti-Trump press has: Visions. That said, there is a lot wrong with the stuff Trump says and does but the Press seems too obsessed or dense or reticent to discuss those real problems.

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"I’ve never met an immigrant delivering fast food on a bicycle in the middle of winter in New York City who wouldn’t rather be home in the village where he was born and raised—if it offered him a future. The most humanitarian thing people like Mr. [Cory] Booker could do is to support U.S. policies that encourage more Norways and fewer Haitis. That is to say, policies that promote open markets, limited government, low taxes and reliable legal systems.
The secret to this is not something that can be bottled and exported, and nation building has a dismal record. But rich countries like the U.S. might help if they would take a Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm."--O'Grady in the WSJ


The word "Democracy" does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Clinton's defeat in 2016 is attributed to the undemocratic Electoral College which gives small states equal and hence unproportional votes in deciding the president. But there is more here to scrutinize. 51 senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. Sooooooo........
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The response to the memo released that accuses the investigative and judicial arms of the government of political partisanship--a third world government trait--has been met with very cautious response. The bureaus say it is inaccurate and contains omissions. This is a very bad thing, a sort of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" question for which only suspicion and chaos can emerge.

The essence here is that the leaders in this country should move away from "dog whistles" and embrace the serious problem we face: People voted for T-rump because they thought, and mostly still think, that he was better than the usual political leader. That must be solved.

The Nassar debate might end up casting a shadow on the U.S. Olympic infrastructure. I can not imagine how. With the doping scandal, the noble history of the Olympics dating back to the 1936 Games, what could be the problem?

Lurking in the background is the terrible fear that this guy was allowed this terrible behavior because no one wanted to rock the boat.

U.S. hiring was solid in January as the unemployment rate hovered at its lowest level in 17 years and wage growth rose to its strongest pace since the recession. Nonfarm payrolls increased by 200,000; the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%, and average hourly earnings climbed 2.9%. (wsj)

A stat from Don: In Germany, 47% of Muslims believe Sharia is more important than German law. In Sweden, 52% of Muslims believe that Sharia is more important than Swedish law.
Now that has some nuance. For example, how would a Christian answer the question civil vs. sacred law? An additional distinction is that Western religion fits a bit better with Western political thinking.


iHeartMedia Inc. could file for bankruptcy protection as early as this month. Toys r Us is gone. These are small earthquakes but earthquakes nonetheless. A children's company that has used TrU as an outlet now must develop its own.

Douglass opposed radical Republicans’ proposals to confiscate plantations and distribute the land to former slaves. Sandefur surmises that “Douglass was too well versed in the history and theory of freedom not to know” the importance of property rights. Douglass, says Sandefur, was not a conservative but a legatee of “the classical liberalism of the American founding.” His individualism was based on the virtue of self-reliance. “He was not,” Sandefur says, “likely to be attracted to any doctrine that subordinated individual rights — whether free speech or property rights — to the interests of the collective.”--from Will's review of Sandefur's new bio of Fredrick Gouglass

AAAaaaaannnnndddddd.....a graph: