"Goethe says somewhere that there is no such thing as a liberal idea, that there are only liberal sentiments. This is true."--Lionel Trilling
Will, on Lyell Asher's observations last April in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Asher noted, a majority of the academic bureaucrats directly involved with students, from dorms to "bias response teams" to freshman "orientation" (which often means political indoctrination), have graduate degrees not in academic disciplines but from education schools with "two mutually reinforcing characteristics": ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards for degrees in vaporous subjects like "educational leadership" or "higher-education management."The problem is not anti-intellectualism but the "un-intellectualism" of a growing cohort of persons who, lacking talents for or training in scholarship, find vocations in micromanaging student behavior in order to combat imagined threats to "social justice." "
- global temperatures have increased overall since 1880
- humans are contributing to a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations
- Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet
There is a great deal of debate about the following:
- whether the warming since 1950 has been dominated by human causes
- how much the planet will warm in the 21st century
- whether warming is ‘dangerous’
- whether radically reducing CO2 emissions will improve the climate and human well being
Many confuse the consensus over the first three points as covering all climate change science.
Who is...Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
As late as 1770, nearly twice as many Africans were in bondage throughout the colony of New York as within Georgia, although slaves were a much larger percentage of Georgia’s population.
Tony Gwynn hit .335 with two strikes on him for five years in a row. Mookie Betts is hitting .317, .397 when behind in the count. (You begin to think like this when the Pirates are this bad.)
The real question in the pursuit of equality is, "Which distinctions should be suppressed?"
The No. 4 House Democrat, Joe Crowley, 56, had not faced primary opposition since 2004. He outspent his opponent, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was tending bar a year ago, by 10 to one. 10-term incumbent Crowley had aspired to succeed Pelosi and become speaker of the House.
Ocasio-Cortez ran as a Latina, a person of color, a millennial and militant socialist who lived in her district, and painted Crowley as a white male with lots of PAC money who had moved to D.C. and sent his kids to school in Virginia.
“The Democratic Party takes working-class communities for granted; they take people of color for granted,” railed Ocasio-Cortez. The party assumes “that we're going to turn out no matter how bland or half-stepping (their) proposals are.”
A Democratic Socialist, endorsed by MoveOn, Black Lives Matter and People for Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez favors Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, free tuition at public colleges, federal jobs for all who want them, and abolishing an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that runs “black sites” on the Mexican border where “human rights abuses are happening.”
A majority white district when Joe Crowley first ran, the Bronx-Queens district he now represents is only one-sixth white.
"The title, Radical Markets, is a 180-degrees head-fake. What they actually advocate is radical despotism. That is, rather than try to improve markets by going out as entrepreneurs and doing things better, they play the role of fantasy despot. They want to back their experimental notions not with “skin-in-the-game” entrepreneurship but with state power."--From a review of the book.
State power is anything but "radical." It is as old as the war chief.
There is a lot of revisionism goin' around, not the least of which is aimed at the American Revolution. This is from Caplan:
“Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for?… [W]hen you ask about specific libertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, it’s hard to get a decent answer. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, independence had two massive anti-libertarian consequences: It removed the last real check on American aggression against the Indians, and allowed American slavery to avoid earlier—and peaceful—abolition.”
Caplan is a Libertarian!
Garrulous has a more negative connation than loquacious. Garrulous means excessively talkative (being talkative in a trivial, tiresome manner) whereas loquacious means talkative in a free, fluent manner. They are very similar but slightly different.
Watched "The Mountain Between Us", an awkward and predictable movie until the very end when a real story broke out.
The woman who climbed up on the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth is from the Congo. She has come from a starving, disease-ridden, savagely violent, barbaric, colonial country to this country and has a lot of complaints about us.
Generation Five technology is closer than I thought. This is being planned by governments worldwide and entails booster-repeaters placed every 250 meters with relay capacity. There are the usual fascinating capitalist problems like if a relay is attached to a wall or a post, should rent be paid? But it is coming. Now, a cautionary note: Every relay, every single one, has more than audio capability, it has video. So no more crime novels. And always wear a bathrobe.
Two goofy studies:
- Researchers found that “use of ICSI to facilitate conception was associated with a 47% higher risk of prostate cancer as compared with men who conceived naturally.”
- A study presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology finding that “eating nuts could boost a man’s fertility.” The study included “119 healthy young men aged between 18 to 35” who were randomly assigned to “add 60 grams per day of walnuts, almonds, or hazelnuts to their diets, or continue as they were.”
Some people have very insightful minds: "Though we have ceased to assume the infallibility of our theological beliefs and so ceased to enact them, we have not ceased to enact hosts of other beliefs of an equally doubtful kind. Though we no longer presume to coerce men for their spiritual good, we still think ourselves called upon to coerce them for their material good..."---Spencer
A tariff update: Farmers are being hurt by the European, Mexican, Canadian and Chinese governments that have imposed retaliatory export restrictions on U.S. farm products. It is so bad that the entire Iowa congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump on June 25 in which it called the tariffs "catastrophic for Iowa's economy."
Japan executed the former leader of a doomsday cult and six other members of the group that carried out a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 13 people
4.5% US Real GDP Growth in Q2 2018, according to the Atlanta Fed. This is incredible. Do you remember the depressing estimates the government was offering a few years ago.
The impact of income transfer payments: The bottom quintile, which earned only 2.2% of all earned income, had virtually the same share of spendable income as the second quintile, lower-middle-income Americans. This equality is despite the fact that lower-middle-income workers earned more than three times the share of income and worked 21/2 times as much, measured by comparing each group’s number of full-time workers relative to its working-age population.
Is that good--or bad?
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/02/gibran.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
The Prophet , by Kahil Gibran, was first published in 1923; it remains at or near the top of the all-time best-seller lists in both the Ara...
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Between 2007 and 2013 Mexico state-owned oil and gas company Pemex received over $7 billion in loans backed by American taxpayers to buy U.S. goods. Thanks to Uncle Sam, this discounted borrowing power gives Pemex a leg up on its competition with domestic oil and gas companies.
The case with the unfortunate name of "Janus" was decided in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the plaintiff, Mark Janus, in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At the heart of this case rests the question of whether or not government employees can be forced to pay agency fees to unions of which they are not members. Prior to this ruling, the courts had dictated that while state employees could not be forced to join unions, they could be forced to pay the union agency fees. It was argued that since collective bargaining is done on behalf of all workers, regardless of their union membership status, it was unfair to let non-members get a “free ride.”
In the case of Mark Janus specifically, he opposed having $45 forcibly taken out of his monthly paycheck and given to AFSCME. Not only was he paying for a service he did not want, but AFSCME was also giving a healthy portion of its funds to political causes of which Janus stood morally opposed.
Scarlett Johansson facing criticism for signing on to play a transgender man in “Rub & Tug,” declined the role.
David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital has lost billions, and is now losing investors.
Aaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....three graphs:
A surprising chart--surprising because this is not what is popularly said:
And this is even more surprising.
Yes, the “middle-class is disappearing” as we hear all the time, but it’s because middle-income households in the US are gradually moving up to higher income groups, and not down into lower-income groups:
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