Madison on Mars

The crucial disadvantage of aggression, competitiveness, and skepticism as national characteristics is that these qualities cannot be turned off at five o'clock--Margaret Hasley

A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a path to a cleaner, greener planet.--Ridley

Preclinical studies and clinical trials have shown that intermittent fasting has broad-spectrum benefits for many health conditions, such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and neurologic disorders. Animal models show that intermittent fasting improves health throughout the life span, whereas clinical studies have mainly involved relatively short-term interventions, over a period of months. It remains to be determined whether people can maintain intermittent fasting for years and potentially accrue the benefits seen in animal models. Furthermore, clinical studies have focused mainly on overweight young and middle-age adults, and we cannot generalize to other age groups the benefits and safety of intermittent fasting that have been observed in these studies.--nejm

Second Sleep is very good but it is tough.

It’s a very important and mostly overlooked point that a key difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism is a “system” that necessarily requires a top-down “consciously created system manipulated by it creators” — elected officials and government bureaucrats — and free-market capitalism is an unplanned, organic, anti-systematic, bottoms-up form of economic organization directed by spontaneous order and impersonal market forces. And the main difference between socialism and capitalism? Capitalism works. --Perry

                                 Madison on Mars

The talk about a Mars colony is beginning to warm up. The motives are many between NASA and SpaceX, some wildly optimistic, some just crushingly depressing. But a common theme is, how to govern the colony. Of course, everyone feels obligated to make their own improvement on the U.S. Constitution--which contains the always-welcome opportunity to bash the Americans. But, despite the profound philosophical and practical appeals of the U.S. founding documents, the source for inspiration has drifted toward unintended communities in the past and what we can learn from them. I.E. Shipwrecks. Shipwrecks! Nothing better than setting up a political structure using as a blueprint an unplanned catastrophe. The elites probably see anything done without their control is exactly that. 

Acting as if these events have a lot of commonalities other than disaster, these people are dissecting these events for clues. In a recent article by Michael Shermer in Quillette,
"lessons from the Federalist Papers may be less useful than lessons from what may be called unintentional communities, such as shipwrecked sailors stranded on remote islands. These are explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society ."
"At the core of all good societies, theorizes Christakis, is a suite of eight social characteristics, including: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity; (2) Love for partners and offspring; (3) Friendship; (4) Social networks; (5) Co-operation; (6) Preference for one’s own group (“in-group bias”); (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism); and (8) Social learning and teaching.

To test this hypothesis, Christakis analyzed a database of shipwreck survivors over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from four to 500, with a mean of 119. (The number of rescued survivors ranged from three to 289, with a mean of 59.) The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from two months to fifteen years, with a mean of twenty months."

"Some of the survivors killed and ate each other, while others survived and flourished. What made the difference? 'The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of co-operation and altruism,' Christakis concludes. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy…While onboard their ships, officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land, successful castaways integrated everyone in a co-operative, egalitarian and more horizontal structure."

An inviting one is The Bounty mutiny and its aftermath.

Shermer continues. "Arguably the most famous of these unintentional communities began taking form in the early morning hours of April 28, 1789, when Fletcher Christian, a Master’s Mate and acting lieutenant on the HMS Bounty, seized control of the ship from Captain William Bligh. Christian released the captives into a 23-foot launch (all but one of these men would survive), and sailed the Bounty into the mists of history. A decade later, when the only surviving mutineer, John Adams, was found on Pitcairn Island, he would relate a cautionary tale for future Martians about how not to set up a new society.

The Bounty originally had departed Portsmouth on December 23, 1787. Ten months and 27,010 miles later, it arrived in Matavai Bay, Tahiti, where it was anchored for five months, plenty of time for the young male crew members—along with Christian, the leading mutineer—to become romantically involved with native women. After departing Tahiti, a number of the smitten men grew restless without their love interests, and bristled under the discipline imposed on them by Bligh for relatively minor offenses. This is what led to the explosive response that fateful April morning in 1789.

After seizing the ship, Christian and his followers returned to Tahiti (folllwing a brief and bloody attempt to settle on the island of Tubuai). But on September 23, 1789, they left Tahiti for good, knowing that death awaiated them when the Royal Navy tracked them down. At this point, the Bounty was carrying a total of nine male mutineers, six Tahitian men, and eleven Tahitian women. On January 15, 1790, they arrived at one of the remotest rocks in the Pacific, Pitcairn Island. There, they unloaded the ship, and later torched it in a final gesture of commitment to their new life on this far-flung outpost.

A 1790 painting by Robert Dodd depicts mutineers casting off Captain William Bligh and 18 others.

The seeds of failure already were apparent in the sex ratio: 15 men, 11 women. Not good. After three years, the woman living with mutineer John Williams died, so he took the wife of one of the Polynesian men, leading to jealousy, violence and, on September 20, 1793, retribution. Five of the mutineers ended up dead, including Christian, along with all of the Polynesian men. In the years after the massacre, one mutineer committed suicide, another was murdered, and another died of asthma. By 1808, the only male survivor was Adams, who told the tale of the Bounty’s fate and the horrors of Pitcairn Island in the years following his discovery by American sealers in 1808. (He lived until 1829, and eventually was granted amnesty for his role in the mutiny.)

The mutineers failed to find the right balance between hierarchy and egalitarianism. Both Bligh and Christian were products of the Royal Navy, very much steeped in its rigid protocols. On the Bounty, it was the hierarchical tensions between Bligh and Christian that led to the mutiny. And on Pitcairn island, corresponding tensions between Christian and the mutineers, and between the mutineers and the male Taitians, when added to the sex-ratio imbalance and accompanying jealousy and violence, led to almost everyone’s demise.

The lessons from Pitcairn are clear enough: Start off with a balanced sex ratio, structure a political system more horizontal than hierarchical, eliminate bigoted attitudes, and accentuate co-operation and attenuate competition."

So, the sociologists and amateur kingdom-builders are leading the way to new and better human associations, using as models, calamities. It is hard to believe anyone takes these people seriously. But they have an ace. We've got a lot of confidence in models. But as Charles Krauthammer wrote, “You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

Beyond Price

The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

Arrived in Key West. Slept through the Ohio State game. And the Steeler game was not broadcast yesterday.

Travel can be clarifying for a culture. Sleepless, jangled by coffee, everyone fends for themselves with even the elderly and cripples lugging luggage along. The only people for whom there is any consideration are service personnel and nursing mothers. And outliers. The ticket counters are slanted for some unsaid benefit to the handicapped so the unwary place their coffee there and it slides onto him and the floor.. You are then issued a ticket with a lot of information but landing time conspicuously absent. Then through the obnoxious screening; I was selected for specific bomb evaluation. As we sat in the waiting area the urgent announcement came that there was a passenger with a peanut allergy in the area. We were then issued appropriate instructions on our behavior. We all looked about anxiously, like a 2 a.m. Amber Alert.

That said, it's really beautiful here. 

And the activist Pope Francis said something profound. He said the Christchild was not born in a hotel or a manger, He was born in a family. It makes the inclusion of Joseph more important than on first impression. 

A lot of coaches look to be in trouble in the NFL but their failures correlate well with disappointing quarterbacks. The Press really looks  stupid asking the poor guys about it, though.




                         Beyond Price

A recent WSJ article commented on a dichotomy between price and value. Infection is a common health problem and it’s important that antibiotics are affordable. Amoxicillin, azithromycin, ciprofloxacin and doxycycline cost a few dollars and treat a wide array of nasty infections. But Western manufacturers make little profit, if any, from making most antibiotics because of low prices. As a result, they either do not make the products at all or outsource production to companies in emerging countries with the lowest costs, notably China and India.

But quality does not necessarily follow. Typically cheap medicines are formulated in India, often with slipshod production, with Chinese ingredients, often made in even worse conditions. The products are sold under a myriad of banners (some western, some Asian), which do not always work. When the antibiotics don’t function as expected they endanger the receiving patient and can drive population-level resistance to even properly made versions. Ironically, the savings on “cheaper” antibiotics result in patients using more expensive products, sometimes with more side effects.

So, while many drugs are hugely overpriced, some are too cheap.  

Gas Charts

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~mathematician Blaise Pascal, 1670


A day behind.                       

Between now and 2050, CO2 emissions are projected to decrease by 4% in the OECD countries and increase by 36% in the non-OECD countries. To combat rising CO2, perhaps Greta Thunberg is lecturing the wrong people.

Where did the Russian oligarchs come from? Bill Bowder has some explanations in his book Red Notice. Voucher privatization was supposed to be a system in which every Russian citizen—all 150 million—would receive a privatization certificate exchangeable at public auctions for stock in one of the new companies. It turned into a scramble among insiders to “acquire” these vouchers by any means. This included, according to Browder, the hedge fund manager and the largest foreign investor in Russia at the time, the closure of regional airports to prevent employees and rival elites from getting to the auctions in Moscow. With competition suppressed, the value of each voucher did not exceed $20. As Mr. Browder notes: “Since these vouchers were exchangeable for roughly 30 percent of the shares of all Russian companies, this meant that the valuation of the entire Russian economy was only $10 billion! That was one-sixth the value of Wal-Mart!” 

This is how the oligarchs were born.

Kunstler, (from W.E.): "A trial ..[impeachment].. would be a rich spectacle for sure after subjecting the nation to three years of malicious, perfidious sedition. But other gusts of rumor intimate that senators on the Republican side would prefer to not open any cans of Ukrainian worms in a trial, since money laundered through the Ukrainian oligarch mills may have found its way into their pockets as well. Who knows…?"

On this day in 1688, William of Orange makes a triumphant march into London as James II flees.

                                Gas Charts

Thanks to their enterprising innovations in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, domestic petroleum output has tripled over the past decade to more than 12 million barrels per day, while supplies of natural gas have surged 60% to a daily 113 billion cubic feet. The biggest overall beneficiaries have been everyday Americans—who now pay $100 billion less per year for fossil fuels. And because gas burns far cleaner than coal (which has lost a third of its market share), our national carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 15% from the 2007 peak. 

Rules of Behavior

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)

Pitt was part of a historic game last night with a dramatic comeback win topped off by their opponent's QB punching a ref.

An interesting article recently argued against "Capitalism" being a philosophy. It is, rather, an emergent order.

The ever-expanding powers and pretenses of the presidency have become a menace to America’s Madisonian balance of separated powers. The powers and pretensions of presidents should long since have become an embarrassment to the public. Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great? The presidential office has fattened on the exigencies of a sprawling, intrusive government and on the (somewhat consequent) childishness of its citizenry.--Will

Of the 50m children currently learning the piano worldwide, as many as 40m may be Chinese.--The Economist

From the St. Louis Fed(!): The college income premium—the extra income earned by a family headed by a college graduate over an otherwise similar family without a bachelor’s degree—remains positive but has declined for recent graduates. The college wealth premium (extra wealth) has declined more noticeably among all cohorts born after 1940. Among non-Hispanic white family heads born in the 1980s, the college wealth premium is at a historic low; among all other races and ethnicities, it is statistically indistinguishable from zero [emphasis added]. ...our estimates of the value added by college and a postgraduate degree fall by 30 to 60 percent. Taken together, our results suggest that college and post-graduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.

Wages for the typical worker—nonsupervisory employees who account for 82% of the workforce—are rising at the fastest rate in more than a decade, a sign that the labor market has tightened. (wsj)

Paris Opera dancers have a bespoke pension plan dating back to the 17th century. It includes the right to retire on a full pension at the age of 42, two decades earlier than the average worker. They stand to lose those benefits if Macron pushes ahead with a planned overhaul of a convoluted pension system that he says will be fairer, incentives workers to stay in the labor force until 64 and balance the pension budget.

On this day in 1968, Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, returned safely to Earth after a historic six-day journey. On December 21, Apollo 8 was launched by a three-stage Saturn 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and William Anders aboard. On Christmas Eve, the astronauts entered into orbit around the moon, the first manned spacecraft ever to do so. During Apollo 8‘s 10 lunar orbits, television images were sent back home and spectacular photos were taken of the Earth and the moon from the spacecraft. In addition to being the first human beings to view firsthand their home world in its entirety, the three astronauts were also the first to see the dark side of the moon. On Christmas morning, Apollo 8 left its lunar orbit and began its journey back to Earth, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean on December 27.

                       Rules of Behavior

From an old O'Sullivan article:
Robert Michels — as any reader of James Burnham's finest book, The Machiavellians, knows--was the author of the Iron Law of Oligarchy. This states that in any organization the permanent officials will gradually obtain such influence that its day-to-day program will increasingly reflect their interests rather than its own stated philosophy. To take a homely example, congressmen from egalitarian parties somehow end up voting for higher pay and generous expenses for congressmen. 

My copy of the current Mother Jones (well, it's my job to read that sort of thing — I take no pleasure in it) contains an advertisement for Amnesty International. Now, AI used to be a perfectly serviceable single-issue pressure group which drew the world's attention to the plight of political prisoners around the globe. Many people owe their lives and liberty to it. But that good work depended greatly on AI's being a single-issue organization that helped victims of both left- and right-wing regimes and was careful to remain politically neutral in other respects. Its advertisement in Mother Jones, however, abandons this tradition by calling for an end to the death penalty.

The ad itself, needless to say, is the usual liberal rhubarb. "In American courtrooms," it intones, "some have a better chance of being sentenced to death." That is true: the people in question are called murderers. But Al naturally means something different and more sinister — namely that poor, black, and retarded people are more likely to face the electric chair than other murderers.

Let us suppose this to be the case. What follows? A mentally retarded person incapable of understanding the significance of his actions cannot be guilty of murder or of any other crime. A law that punishes him (as opposed to one that confines him for his own and society's safety) is unjust and should be changed — whether or not he faces the death penalty. On the other hand, someone who is guilty of murder may be executed with perfect justice. His race or economic circumstances do not affect the matter at all. The fact that other murderers may obtain lesser sentences does not in any way detract from the justice of his own punishment. After all, some murderers have always escaped scot-free. Would Amnesty have us release the rest on the grounds of equality of treatment? Finally, Amnesty's argument from discrimination could be met just as well by executing more rich, white murderers (which would be fine with me) as by executing no murderers at all. Significantly, Amnesty's list of death-penalty victims" does not include political prisoners. America does not, have political prisoners, let alone execute them. Why, then, Amnesty's campaign on the issue?

That is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.

Is there any law which enables us to predict the behavior of right-wing organizations? As it happens, there is: Conquest's Second Law (formulated by the Sovietologist Robert Conquest):

The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies. 

A Christmas Icon

"It is dismaying that most of the binding law in Britain comes from the European Commission in Brussels. But why, with its primacy at stake, did Parliament punt one of the most momentous decisions in British history to a referendum? The bedrock principle of representative government is that "the people" do not decide issues, they decide who shall decide. And once a legislature sloughs off responsibility and resorts to a referendum on the dubious premise that the simple way to find out what people want is to ask them, it is difficult to avoid recurring episodes of plebiscitary democracy." --Will

_{^{I am in the third week of the flu, but it seems to be declining. I am still sick and it is surprising how cloudy my thinking has been. Chris seems to have it full-bore now. Mom seems a bit better but is still sick. 
The meals were terrific at both the McGraws and Muellers.
Some great efforts at gifts.}}

A Minsky Moment is a sudden collapse of asset prices after a long period of growth, sparked by debt or currency pressures. The theory is named after economist Hyman Minsky.

Guggenheim Partners' Scott Minerd warned in a new market outlook titled "From the Desk of the Global CIO: Risk and Reward of Successful 'Mid-Cycle' Rate Cuts" that recent 75bps rate cuts by the Jerome Powell–run Federal Reserve had created a similar environment today to 1998 when central banks created a "liquidity-driven rally that caused the Nasdaq index to double within a year before the bubble finally burst."

The 1998-scenario has already been playing out through 2019, as shown in the chart below, with global central banks plowing liquidity into financial markets. 

(Look at 2018.)

Lindsey Vonn proposed to P.K. Subban on Christmas Day.

The Indian Mughal emperor Akbar was interested in and tolerant of many religions and in 1579 invited Portuguese Jesuits from Goa to his court. They brought with them paintings illustrating the European style, which influenced Indian artists of the day including in this piece from Bijapur circa 1600. From the V&A.
Amidst all the populist talk about trump , one curiosity is overlooked: One of the great ironies is the so-called populist Trump election was made possible by one of the Constitution's most anti-populist rules, the Electoral College.

In 2004 on this day, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia set off a tsunami causing death and devastation across the Indian Ocean coastline. The quake was the second strongest ever recorded and the estimated 230,000 dead made this disaster one of the 10 worst of all time.


                A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"
Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Christmas

To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place."---Olaudah Equiano

The McGraws outdid themselves last night with a wonderful dinner. 
Chris is newly sick. Mom is sick again.
Ned went with Liz and me to Starbucks wearing his pajamas this morning. We may be trending.

Some Christmas economic observations:

Baron de Montesquieu wrote, “Peace is the natural effect of trade.” He then gave his reason: “Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling: and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.” In this century, two economists who examined a large number of trading nations, produced evidence for his view. Solomon W. Polachek and Carlos Seiglie of Rutgers University wrote, “[T]rading nations cooperate more and fight less. A doubling of trade leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence.”

And,"It is not from the benevolence of the Butcher, the Brewer or the Baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."--Smith, Wealth of Nations

"Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."-- Smith,  Moral Sentiments

Not exactly Christmas messages. But Smith did not think himself a prophet. But he did think himself a moralist.

And a spiritual advancement via technology: A Roman Catholic church in rural Louisiana hoping to maximize its blessings has come up with a way to do it: filling up a crop-duster plane with holy water and letting the sanctified liquid mist an entire community.

                                       Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene. The Creator joins the creation.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful, one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

A study of National Merit Scholarships finalists found that among finalists from five-child families, the first-born was the finalist more often than the other four siblings combined. Firstborns were also a majority of the finalists in two-child, three-child, and four-child families. If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected—or assumed—when conditions are not nearly so comparable?--Sowell  


Here's a study worth some reflection: results show that teen childbearing leads to lower educational attainment, lower income, and greater use of welfare for individuals who come from counties with better socioeconomic conditions. However, there are no significant adverse effects for individuals who come from counties with worse socioeconomic conditions. Across race, teen childbearing leads to negative consequences for white teens but no significant negative effects for black or Hispanic and Latino teens. Read that again.

It seems the Senate Dems want the Senate to prove the Dems' House impeachment case. What if they call Biden? Have no fear: They all want to diminish this. Everyone s dirty.


 America’s 19 million public employees come at a very high price for the people – nearly $1 trillion. In many cases, taxpayers generously fund these employee salaries.

Some examples:

• Tree trimmers in Chicago made $106,000.
• New York City school janitors made $165,000 while out earning the principals at $135,000.
• Lifeguards in Los Angeles County, California, made up to $365,000.
• In the small school district in Southlake, Texas (8,000 students), the school superintendent earned $420,000.

There is a whole database that has collected the pay of these people. It's really amazing.

High-powered shootouts are not unusual in Brazil. Despite tighter gun regulations than the U.S., in the poorer neighborhoods of many Brazilian cities, armed gangs and police trade fire with high-caliber assault rifles, machine guns, pistols, and sometimes even grenades and rocket launchers. Rio averages 24 shootouts per day. Large hours-long gun battles often don’t even make the headlines......
Perhaps it is no coincidence that a country with poor arms controls and transparency also happens to have an out of control homicide problem — 51,589 dead in 2018 — and a dismally low rate of solved homicide cases, about 20.7 percent nationwide and an abysmal 11.8 percent in Rio alone.--Intercept

Is the only thing that is driving that 2.1% increase in GDP consumers spending borrowed money and the government spending borrowed money?

Silicon Valley needs to dream big, but America needs to dream big. And part of the history of Silicon Valley hasn’t simply been these people doing it by themselves. Even though the brilliance of the Valley is that they believed they did it by themselves. I mean, that’s part of the magic — belief in entrepreneurial inventiveness and ingenuity, and the brilliance of individual business leaders and technologists. But, this is an America problem, an America-dreaming problem. This goes back to Eisenhower at his desk, to John Kennedy shooting the moon, Ronald Reagan declaring that the American Revolution is on a tiny microchip.--Margaret O'Mara

Since the mid-1960s—really since the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island—no major new piece of public infrastructure has been built within the five boroughs of New York City......
For anyone convinced that government is an indispensable tool in the progressive mission to improve peoples’ lives, Penn Station is a monument to conservatism. If public officials can’t even clear the way for a serviceable facility at the nation’s busiest transit hub, why give them any more authority?--Dunkelman on Penn Central in NTC

                                          Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted every year until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

Separation of Powers

The only commercial activity the Left seems to have any regard for is prostitution.--me

According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.

By comparison, the second-largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.

Halcyon, n. and adj.

1.‘In classical mythology: a bird, usually identified as a kingfisher, which brooded around the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, charming the wind and waves into calm. In later use also (chiefly poetic): a kingfisher, esp. the common kingfisher, Alcedo atthis.’

2. A period of calm, happiness, or prosperity; (as a mass noun) calm, tranquillity. Also: a period of calm or pleasant weather; spec. = halcyon days n. 1. Usually in plural.

On December 23, 1783, following the signing of the Treaty of Paris, General George Washington resigned as commander in chief of the Continental Army and retired to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

                       Separation of Powers

For a while now, the Press and the Dems have been excoriating Rep. Nunes with personal attacks. I have not been paying very close attention to these Whack-A-Mole, revolving impeachment hearings because they are so obviously insincere but, when the Dems deny smoke, there is usually fire. This is from the hard-eyed Kim Strassel in the WSJ (from Clarkey):

On Feb. 7, 2018, Devin Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to Judge Collyer informing her of its findings in his probe of the FBI’s Page application. He wrote that “the Committee found that the FBI and DOJ failed to disclose the specific political actors paying for uncorroborated information” that went to the court, “misled the FISC regarding dissemination of this information,” and “failed to correct these errors in the subsequent renewals.” Mr. Nunes asked the court whether any transcripts of FISC hearings about this application existed, and if so, to provide them to the committee.

Judge Collyer responded a week later, with a dismissive letter that addressed only the last request. The judge observed that any such transcripts would be classified, that the court doesn’t maintain a “systematic record” of proceedings and that, given “separation of power considerations,” Mr. Nunes would be better off asking the Justice Department. The letter makes no reference to the Intelligence Committee findings.

Mr. Nunes tried again in a June 13, 2018, follow-up letter, which I have obtained. He told the court that Congress “uncovered evidence that DOJ and FBI provided incomplete and potentially incorrect information to the Court,” and that “significant relevant information was not disclosed to the Court.” This was Mr. Nunes telling FISC exactly what Inspector General Michael Horowitz told the world—18 months sooner. Mr. Nunes asked Judge Collyer to “initiate a thorough investigation.” To assist her, the same month he separately sent FISC “a classified summary of Congress’s findings and facts” to that point. The letter was signed by all 13 Republican members of the Intelligence Committee.

Judge Collyer blew him off. Her letter on June 15, 2018, is four lines long. She informs Mr. Nunes she’s received his letter. She says she’s also received his classified information. She says she’s instructing staff to provide his info to “the judges who ruled on the referenced matters.” She thanks him for his “interest” in the court.

Indeed, the Separation of Powers in the Constitution is an ingenious creation but it implies several things, integrity and honesty among them. If the entire system is too stupid or too dishonest to abide by the high ideals created in that astonishing document, the Constitution probably doesn't matter much. This is especially true if incompetence and mendacity is in the very marrow of the entity whose job it is to interpret and enforce the Constitution itself.

Trump's importance in history may not have anything to do with what he does in office but rather the mind-blowing revelations about government itself that his election has stimulated. We now seem to be subject to the same self-importance, arrogance, short-sightedness, and mendacity that would have made the 18th Century  Royal Court proud, a system of government and bureaucracy whose raison d'être is itself and whose loyalty goes no further. The original Constitution was a blueprint created by men with high aspirations for others. Unfortunately, today the ship of state has smaller men at the wheel.

Sunday/SOLSTICE

"Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I'm capping greenhouse gases.  Coal power plants, natural gas, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money onto consumers."--Obama

At Costco yesterday I got a delicious hotdog and was engaged by the guy who sold it to me in a conversation over the Oxford Comma. Full employment.

The search for unbiased truth-seeking apolitical justice continues. From The Daily Mail: "House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has declared war on Vice President Mike Pence, barely a week after his panel finished its hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

As an impeachment vote loomed Wednesday, Schiff demanded Pence’s office declassify documents that he claims could show the vice president knee-deep in the Ukraine scandal that has brought Trump to the brink."

Like rust, the Left never rests.

In a recent survey conducted by the Danish Ministry of Foreigners and Integration (Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet), 48% of descendants of non-Western immigrants in Denmark said that they think it should be forbidden to criticize religion, according to Kristeligt Dagblad. Forty-two percent of immigrants who had lived in Denmark for three years agreed with the statement, while only 20% of ethnic Danes agreed with it.

From the Economist in 2014:

Throughout recorded history, humans have reigned unchallenged as Earth’s dominant species. Might that soon change? Turkeys, heretofore harmless creatures, have been exploding in size, swelling from an average 13.2lb (6kg) in 1929 to over 30lb today. On the rock-solid scientific assumption that present trends will persist, The Economist calculates that turkeys will be as big as humans in just 150 years. Within 6,000 years, turkeys will dwarf the entire planet. Scientists claim that the rapid growth of turkeys is the result of innovations in poultry farming, such as selective breeding and artificial insemination. The artificial nature of their growth, and the fact that most have lost the ability to fly, suggest that not all is lost. Still, with nearly 250m turkeys gobbling and parading in America alone, there is cause for concern. This Thanksgiving, there is but one prudent course of action: eat them before they eat you.

Boeing Co’s Starliner astronaut spacecraft landed in the New Mexico desert on Sunday, the company said, after faulty software forced officials to cut short an unmanned mission aimed at taking it to the International Space Station. 

The 7:58 a.m. ET (1258 GMT) landing in New Mexico’s White Sands desert capped a turbulent 48 hours for Boeing’s botched milestone test of an astronaut capsule that is designed to help NASA regain its human spaceflight capabilities.

The landing will yield the mission’s most valuable test data after failing to meet its core objective of docking to the space station. 

On December 22, 1849 writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was led before a firing squad and prepared for execution. He had been convicted and sentenced to death on November 16 for allegedly taking part in anti-government activities. However, at the last moment, he was reprieved and sent into exile. 
The government can be such a kidder.

                                     SOLSTICE

SOLSTICE: either of the two times during the year when the sun is farthest from the equator, about June 21st when the sun is farthest north of the equator and about December 22nd when it is farthest south: The summer solstice has the longest days, and the winter solstice has the shortest.

Saturn is the Roman Chronos, an early Titan in the history of the evolution of the gods and man, the son of the Earth and Sky. He defeats his siblings and, in fear of a prophecy that he will be overthrown by a son, eats his children. One child, Zeus, is hidden by his mother and grows to rescue his siblings and overthrow his father.

Saturn is the original fertility symbol in mythology, preceding Persephone in chronology and hierarchy. He does not quite fit the popular notion of a historical evolutionary progression away from female fertility goddesses to the more combative male deities. As the second layer of the gods, supplanted by Zeus and his siblings, he is much less active but had a significant old mythological following.

Saturnalia originated as a farmer's festival to mark the end of the autumn planting season  (satus means sowing). It started as a two-day celebration but grew longer and later; it was seven days around the winter solstice in the third century A.D., when numerous archaeological sites demonstrate that the cult of Saturn still survived. The poet Lucian of Samosata (AD 120-180) has the god Cronos (Saturn) say in his poem, Saturnalia:

"During my week the serious is barred: no business is allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping...an occasional dunking of corked faces in icy water--such are the functions over which I preside."

A public holiday with gifts, masters and slaves swapping clothes, the strange election of a temporary house "monarch." A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees.

By that time, with Christianity well established, it is difficult to determine which gave and took. 

And...a little on solstice:

The seasons have nothing to do with how far the Earth is from the Sun.  If this were the case, it would be hotter in the northern hemisphere during January as opposed to July.  Instead, the seasons are caused by the Earth being tilted on its axis by an average of 23.5 degrees (Earth's tilt on its axis actually varies from near 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees).  Here's how it works:

The Earth has an elliptical orbit around our Sun.  This being said, the Earth is at its closest point distance wise to the Sun in January (called the Perihelion) and the furthest in July (the Aphelion).  But this distance change is not great enough to cause any substantial difference in our climate.  This is why the Earth's 23.5 degree tilt is all important in changing our seasons.  Near June 21st, the summer solstice, the Earth is tilted such that the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude.  This situates the northern hemisphere in a more direct path of the Sun's energy.  What this means is less sunlight gets scattered before reaching the ground because it has less distance to travel through the atmosphere.  In addition, the high sun angle produces long days.  The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere, where the low sun angle produces short days.  Furthermore, a large amount of the Sun's energy is scattered before reaching the ground because the energy has to travel through more of the atmosphere.  Therefore near June 21st, the southern hemisphere is having its winter solstice because it "leans" away from the Sun.

Advancing 90 days, the Earth is at the autumnal equinox on or about September 21st.  As the Earth revolves around the Sun, it gets positioned such that the Sun is directly over the equator.   Basically, the Sun's energy is in balance between the northern and southern hemispheres.  The same holds true on the spring equinox near March 21st, as the Sun is once again directly over the equator. 

Lastly, on the winter solstice near December 21st, the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south latitude.  The southern hemisphere is therefore receiving the direct sunlight, with little scattering of the sun's rays and a high sun angle producing long days.  The northern hemisphere is tipped away from the Sun, producing short days and a low sun angle.

What kind of effect does the earth's tilt and subsequent seasons have on our length of daylight (defined as sunrise to sunset).  Over the equator, the answer is not much.  If you live on or very close to the equator, your daylight would be basically within a few minutes of 12 hours the year around.  Using the northern hemisphere as a reference, the daylight would  lengthen/shorten during the summer/winter moving northward from the equator.  The daylight difference is subtle in the tropics, but becomes extremely large in the northern latitudes.  Where we live in the mid latitudes, daylight ranges from about 15 hours around the summer solstice to near nine hours close to the winter solstice.   Moving to the arctic circle at 66.5 degrees north latitude, the Sun never sets from early June to early July.  But around the winter solstice, the daylight only lasts slightly more than two hours.  There becomes a profound difference in the length of daylight heading north of the arctic circle.  Barrow, Alaska at slightly more than 71 degrees north latitude, lies just less than 300 nautical miles north of the arctic circle.  Barrow sees two months of total darkness, as the Sun never rises for about a month on each side of the winter solstice.  On the other hand, Barrow also has total light from mid May to early August.  And what about the north pole, or 90 degrees north latitude?  The Sun rises in the early evening near the spring equinox and never sets again until just after the autumnal equinox, or six months of light.  Conversely, after the Sun sets in the mid morning just after the autumnal equinox, it will not be seen again until the following spring equinox, equating to six months of darkness.  

(NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE)