Reverie

 

 "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."--Chesterton 

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Michael Pearson, an air traffic controller for 27 years who is suing the FAA, said, “A group within the FAA, including the human resources function within the FAA — the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees — determined that the workforce was too white.” A Republican-controlled Congress during Obama's second term cut a deal allowing the FAA to hire half of new controllers based on race.

“Since the early 2000s, employers have mostly embraced high-deductible health plans” on the theory “that requiring workers to shoulder more of the cost of care will also encourage them to cut back on unnecessary spending.” However, many families could not afford the deductibles and “studies show that many put off routine care or skipped medication to save money” – meaning “illnesses that might have been caught early can go undiagnosed, becoming potentially life-threatening and enormously costly for the medical system.” Now, “some employers are beginning to have second thoughts,” with “a handful of companies” planning “to reduce deductibles or cover more care before workers are exposed to the cost.” --from an article in Bloomberg

Heather MacDonald is a writer who believes that police, fearful of criticism, have become acquiescent toward criminal behavior; She had this funny observation in a interview:  

"There's a co-dependency between the exploding diversity bureaucracy and these narcissistic, delusional students who act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity bureaucrats." (The interviewer asks, "Psychodramas of oppression?")
"Do we believe in objective reality?" she replied. "These students ... are among the most privileged human beings in human history. To be at an American college with educational resources available to them that the Renaissance humanists would have killed for. (Yet they) think of themselves as victims. That, to me, is a very sad state of delusion."

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Also puzzling is the constant refrain about China producing more than it needs. Even if this overcapacity were a boon for China, it would still be to the benefit of millions of American consumers. It lowers costs for thousands of small U.S. manufacturers and steel consumers. But in reality, this “overproduction” is a tragedy for the Chinese people because their government’s subsidization of steel production inevitably diverts resources from other areas of the Chinese economy. I don’t hear Americans and Europeans complaining about all the stuff China isn’t producing because its government stupidly wants to produce a lot of steel.--de Rugy

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Langbert breaks down the faculty Democrat-to-Republican ratio by academic department, and there are not many surprises. Engineering departments have 1.6 Democrats for every Republican. Chemistry and economics departments have about 5.5 Democrats for every Republican. The situation is especially bad in anthropology departments, where the Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratio is 133-to-1, and in communications departments, where the ratio is 108-to-zero. Langbert says, "I could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies, Africana studies, and peace studies."

Later on in the study, Langbert turns his attention to Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratios at some of our most elite colleges. At Williams College, the Democrat-to-Republican ratio is 132-to-1. At Amherst College, it's 34-to-1. Wellesley's is 136-to-1. At Swarthmore, 120-to-1. Claremont McKenna, 4-to-1. Davidson, 10-to-1. Only two colleges of the top 66 on U.S. News & World Report's 2017 list have a modicum of equality in numbers between Democratic and Republican faculty members. They are the U.S. Military Academy, aka West Point, with a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 1.3-to-1, and the U.S. Naval Academy, whose ratio is 2.3-to-1.
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Who is....William Gladstone?

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Food and Drug Administration is urging medical device manufacturers and healthcare providers to improve their cybersecurity and the agency intends to establish a dedicated investigative team to look at incidents when they arise. Hacking pacemakers?




A 65-year-old couple retiring in 2018 will need about $280,000 to cover health care and medical expenses throughout retirement, according to Fidelity Investments’ annual cost estimate.

Oliver Stone, making his first-ever visit to Iran, says the United States is a global "outlaw" that has made a mess of the Middle East. The director of "JFK" and "Platoon" spoke at a press conference Wednesday during his visit to the country, where he attended an international film festival.
Stone reprised his criticism of the 2003 Iraq war and suggested the U.S. has acted similarly in Libya and Syria, saying: "We are outlaws, we're doing something that is outlawed internationally, we had no permission to invade Iraq from the U.N., we did it, and we continue to do this."

He went on to say that "national security has trumped artistic freedom," claiming "you cannot make a film critical of the United States' foreign policy." (from an internet news)
The maker of the insane/idiotic "JFK" takes, unasked, the high ground.
 
About one-quarter of parents living with a child in America in 2018 are unmarried, up from 7% five decades ago, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data released Wednesday.
Non-traditional families now also outnumber traditional two-parent families.
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Sanders wants the government to provide guaranteed jobs at $15 an hour, plus benefits. His office did not  yet have cost estimates for this proposal. Some estimates: With two weeks of paid vacation, each worker would make roughly $31,000 a year. Adding, conservatively, about $10,000 for benefits, would bring the total cost to about $40,000. The United States has between 25 million and 50 million workers making less than this total compensation package. Millions more are unemployed or fully out of the labor force. Assuming most of them did the rational thing and signed on, that would make for a $1 trillion to $2 trillion annual program — rivaling spending on Social Security and maybe Medicaid. Private business would have to raise wages to compete and, of course, raise prices.

The idea of creating work and then hiring people to do those jobs seems to be reversed without much questioning.

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Hit-and-run crash deaths are rising nationwide, and pedestrians and bicyclists account for close to 70% of the victims, according to a new report, as more people cycle to work and motor-vehicle fatalities are at a near-decade-high level. (wsj)

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In 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

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Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/03/blue.html

Astronomers have just discovered what may become the largest thing in the modern universe: a giant cluster of at least 14 galaxies, set on a massive collision course.
This is the absolute first time that scientists have ever detected an astronomical event of such colossal proportions, ScienceDaily reports.

In 1940, only one-quarter of American adults had completed high school, and only 5 percent had a college degree.

There are no limits to health care, right? There is no rationing, right? A new wave of genetic-based therapies for treating cancer for the drugs and related care for a single patient can run up close to a million dollars.

When negotiating collective-bargaining agreements or deciding whether to strike, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association don’t have students in mind any more than the United Automobile Workers has car buyers in mind.--Riley

AAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph:

Source: Economic Cycles Research Institute

Testing--and Not

An interesting perspective, especially in the light of Caplan's book on the low value of education.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act banned pre-employment tests that were not “a reasonable measure of job performance.”

In 1971, the US Supreme Court decided a case called Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. The subject was employment requirements. Duke had an intelligence test it gave to its job applicants. They were sued on the argument that such tests are racially discriminatory. Duke lost.

The court ruled that Duke’s tests were too broad and not directly related to the jobs performed, which made them illegal.

Furthermore, the court said employers had the burden of proving employment tests were necessary for business purposes and not racially discriminatory. That’s hard to prove, so many US companies stopped using pre-employment tests at all.

Now what do they do? How does Duke test its employees for competence? They turned to college degrees. They decided that it would be a good indicator of intellectual competence and grit.

Fascinatingly, colleges test for admission, something Duke was not allowed to do. Colleges essentially became a proxy--government approved--for testing.

And this created the college gold rush where every potential employee felt he had to take out a loan and go to college--and he did.

For want of a nail....

Is Civic Virtue Taught?

Is civic virtue taught? The Greeks thought so. "Ethos" and "ethics" are both from the Greek work "habit;" they believed the qualities of  personal responsibility--and social responsibility--were learned from childhood, practiced and developed. Learned--and therefore taught.

 

If civic virtue is taught--and schools are not teaching it--someone else is.

 

Education is curious in this country as it is focused upon continuing on in testing; it has no real social arm. And it is taught by people obsessed with balance, with evenhandedness. Imagine a school system where ethics was a course like geometry, a course you could fail. Imagine the different breed of teacher that would require. What would happen if that grade followed you through life.

 

This would be a revolution in the West. Imagine the crisis that would occur if social and personal behavior had a societal net where every citizen had a basic, school taught foundation. Such a system would, of course, require a general agreement on what the basic social requirements would be. That is an easier task in ancient Greece or contemporary Japan with the obvious homogeneity advantage. But how would such an idea be implemented in the U.S.? What basic, stripped down behaviors would be encouraged as correct?

 

And how would diversity fare? What element in such a system can not be diverse? (Keeping in mind that much of current social and economic thought views diversity as a crucial component of the creative, experimental process that all economies and societies unconsciously undergo.)

 

In a diverse culture, is such a system of accepted ethics even possible? Or, in the other view, in an ethical culture, how much diversity is possible?

Reverie

 "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."--Chesterton 

Why the Americans put up with the American bashing U.N. is quite a mystery. The distortions we as Americans fund would be laughable were it not for the animosity it engenders. But every once in a while it is worth it. Read this grousing lament the U.N. recently put out: "The $1.5 trillion in tax cuts in December 2017 overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality. …The tax cuts will fuel a global race to the bottom, thus further reducing the revenues needed by Governments to ensure basic social protection and meet their human rights obligations. …There is a real need for the realization to sink in among the majority of the American population that taxes are not only in their interest, but also perfectly reconcilable with a growth agenda." The U.N. wants the Americans to love taxes more. And there seems to be a risk if they don't: Other nations might have to start cutting taxes in response. That would be a real disaster for cultures where production is not a primary concern.

Here's another: "Successive administrations, including the current one, have determinedly rejected the idea that economic and social rights are full-fledged human rights." Well, the Americans recognize "aspirations," but do not think all aspirations are or should be enforceable. But the Europeans have never quite gotten away from their admiration of successful tyrants. And the idea of "Liberty" that the Americans so prize has always run in second place in Europe to the unachievable "Equality" of the French Revolution.

And it has never exported well.

When predictions of apocalyptic resource shortages repeatedly fail to come true, one has to conclude either that humanity has miraculously escaped from certain death again and again like a Hollywood action hero or that there is a flaw in the thinking that predicts apocalyptic resource shortages. The flaw has been pointed out many times. Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.--Pinker

Perry asks: "Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., refused — as a matter of moral conviction — to serve the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on Friday night. Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Co., refused — as a matter of moral conviction — to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. For his refusal, Phillips paid a serious price: He was prosecuted and penalized by government officials, and subjected to protracted litigation that ultimately went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Should Wilkinson pay a similar price? "

A new Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it. The main portion of the Pew study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set.
But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Only about one in four Americans (26%) surveyed were able to correctly identify all five factual statements and only about one in three (35%) could correctly identify all five opinion statements.

Under Republican guidance, the federal deficit will be roughly double what it was in the final year of the Obama administration.

Did Trump and Stormy have a "relationship?" Or was it more of a "transaction?" And there are more women, apparently. What exactly is the point? I remember an interview that George Clooney had where he was asked if he would run for office and he said, "No. Too many women."

#NoneOfTheAbove

What is...The Rational Bible?

The Justice Department’s inspector general referred its finding that ex-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe repeatedly misled investigators who were scrutinizing leaks to the media to the US Attorney’s office in Washington, arguing that he should be prosecuted, multiple reports said.

The monks were primarily responsible for the preservation of wine-making (and wine drinking) through the Dark Ages.

Former Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders has backed rapper Cardi B’s plea for America to strengthen social security. Our thought leaders are all on the same page.

North Korea’s fingerprints have appeared recently in some surprisingly sophisticated cyberattacks, including on central banks and cryptocurrency exchanges. Pyongyang is cultivating elite hackers much like other countries train Olympic athletes. (wsj)

Historian and author Jerry Muller of Catholic University, in his latest book, The Tyranny of Metrics, argues that public policy and management are overly focused on measurable outcomes as a measure of success. This leads to organizations and agencies over-focusing on metrics rather than their broader mission. The conversation includes applications to education, crime, and health care.

This has been a growing opinion recently. One wonders what subjective endpoints will be favored. We did have a lot of this in the last century and it did not go well.

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According to a report from IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science released Thursday, the number of opioid prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies dropped 10 percent in 2017, “the steepest drop in the amount of painkillers dispensed to patients in 25 years.” The NYT took a typically half-empty view of this, asking if this meant people were now being undertreated.

Stanton has struck out in 38.7 percent of plate appearances this season (29 in 75 trips).

New York City has an eight-cent 'bagel-cutting tax." For some reason, unsliced bagels are not taxed. California has a 33% tax on fruit bought through a vending machine.
Maine imposes a one-and-a-half-cent per pound tax on blueberries shipped out of state.
(from a new book, "How Do I Tax Thee? A Field Guide to the Great American Rip-Off.")

British actress Rachel Weisz announced in a New York Times profile released on Friday that she is pregnant and expecting her first child with husband Daniel Craig. 
“I’ll be showing soon,” the 48-year-old actress shares in the interview. “Daniel and I are so happy. We’re going to have a little human. We can’t wait to meet him or her. It’s all such a mystery.”
Weisz is already the mother of 11-year-old Henry with her ex, director Darren Aronofsky, while Craig, 50, is dad to 25-year-old Ella with his actress ex Fiona Loudon.

Anita Sethi, a British writer, slammed Prince Charles for a comment he made  to her during their brief interaction at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting this week. In an article about the experience for The Guardian, Sethi writes that when she had a chance to meet Charles after speaking during the Commonwealth People’s Forum, he asked her where she was from. When she responded Manchester, a city in northeastern England, he reportedly responded: “Well, you don’t look like it!”
Sethi, who is of Indian descent, said she was “stunned” by the remark.

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The human brain has 86 billion cells and axons and trillions of synapses. A universe.

 Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-unnatural.html

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steeleydock: The Unnatural steeleydock.blogspot.com The West has been indulging an orgy of self-recrimination of late. One element that seeps into this self-loathing is a strange hatred of technology and a fear of progress.

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The new tax law makes local taxes non-deductible and there is evidence that some are leaving high tax states as a result.

The new "Westworld" is back. It is a collection of ambiguities, unfollowed leads, unanswered hints and suggestions, and inaudibility at crucial moments. They learned a lot from X-Files. And they have raised the level of male nudity, I suppose as a paean to equality and anti-science.

The "Rational Bible" is number two in national sales--but not on the NYT best seller list.

The U.S. pays 22 % of the U.N. costs, 28% if you include peacekeeping.

I saw an interview with the two guys who wrote Russian Roulette, a book on the Russian efforts to influence the election. It has not received favorable reviews as it sounds mostly chatty. One of the authors said during the interview, "And that's when Trump invaded Crimea." Not an insignificant slip.

Ashville is in a county that totals about one million people. Asheville itself has over 10 million tourist visitors a year.

Wise corporation makes great potato chips. They have been sued for putting too much air in their chip bags.

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AAAAAaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a graph:

Image: taxnotes.com

Liberte Egalite and Fraternite

I recently quoted the assessment of Krauthammer which included his quote, repeated by Will: "America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It’s founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world;"

It sounds much like Margaret Thacher's  “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

It was countered that Liberte Egalite and Fraternite of the French Revolution were similar. I think not.

First, the architects of the American Revolution were students of the Enlightenment and the revolution was a planned and debated event. True, the leaders were pushed a bit by the public but nothing like the French Revolution which was not really led until the killing began to slow and the murders had to be more targeted. The Americans were guided by Locke and his belief in natural rights, rights people were born with. There was a merger that individuals made with those rights in what he called the social contract. This was an organizing structure. The Americans found that structure in the suggestions of Baron de Montesquieu who believed in a separation of powers into three branches (executive, legislative, and judicial). Montesquieu believed they should hold equal power, a crucial idea in the Americans' separation of powers and checks and balances. The French Revolution, unplanned and spontaneous, had the qualities of Voltaire, who was a free speech and anti-church writer, and Rousseau, who was really an anti-Enlightenment thinker who believed in an esprit that united a people, as opposed to a modern social or religious hierarchy. The French Revolution was less a structured event than the outburst of resentment and anger toward a suppressive political and religious system. Both the Americans and the French were angry at a hierarchy but the Americans wanted to build a country afterwards, the French mainly wanted revenge.

And, true to form, after a decade, they got Napoleon.

This points to a crucial difference between the Americans and most other political systems, a distinction that may harm them over time but is nonetheless real. The Americans really believe what they say. No one believed equality and liberty because they are contradictory notions; equality is possible only with restriction of liberty. There is no other option. But the Americans built an edifice that defended liberty, that worked and continues to. It is also very difficult to change. It is conceivable, for example, that technology will make gun ownership a difficult freedom to defend--but it will be debated and argued over in its proper venue, at least for Americans: Liberty. When that lynchpin goes away, when it surrenders to comfort or practicality or superficiality, that idea that made America will go too.