The Borg

"The goal of socialism is communism." - Vladimir Lenin

Discussions over Socialism are rare. Emotions and Hopes do not withstand much scrutiny. One element that has always been interesting is the Socialist's view of the Group, the Collective. The group seems to be an ideal but it is always the enemy in Socialism. Socialism always must overcome it, defeat it. That's what a revolution is.

So the decisions by the Group rarely support Socialism. Socialism must supplant the Group; then the new Group is created. But, like the first group, that new Collective is hard to trust; it might elect someone like Trump. So the Group needs a filter, a real control should the Group not fall in line and the ideals waver. Therefore, Red Guards. Gulags. And the new group can only be so accommodating; efficiency is important. So the actions of the group must be streamlined, sometime pruned. The very first thing that suffers under collectivism is deviation from the norm.

"In theory Socialism may wish to enhance freedom, but in practice every kind of collectivism consistently carried through must produce the characteristic features which Fascism, Nazism and Communism have in common. Totalitarianism is nothing but consistent collectivism."--Hayek

Trade, Oil Production

According to a January 2018 report by the Pew Research Center, “in the four decades since the current system for budgeting and spending tax dollars has been in effect, Congress has managed to pass all its required appropriations measures on time only four times: in fiscal 1977 (the first full fiscal year under the current system), 1989, 1995 and 1997.”
So the Congress seems to be unable to perform its basic functions, functions essential to the running of the State. So, why should we have confidence they can improve complicated things?

In 2017, the value of international U.S. exports of services amounted to 780.8 billion U.S. dollars.  In 2017, U.S. exports amounted to 1.55 trillion U.S. dollars. So the  service-sector outputs account for nearly 80 percent of U.S. GDP and 34 percent of U.S. exports.

Some charts:

The record is clear that when America’s total trade is increased, American jobs have also increased, and when our total trade has declined, so have the number of jobs


Two startling charts on the growth of U.S. oil production:

Magic Medicines for the Ills of Centaurs and Mermaids

One quality the recent Covington High School fiasco highlighted about the country is how much of the intense reactions in the country are to intense problems that do not exist. A silent, stoic (and probably confused) teenage boy becomes not a symbol but rather a Rorschach Test. The Great American Problem is.....(you fill in the blank).....

But there are some truths, regardless of belief. The country has 3.9% unemployment; that is astonishingly good. Poverty has been declining and middle incomes have been increasing since 2013. Jobs are everywhere. Median household income reached $61,372 in 2017, which is higher than comparable countries like Canada, Germany, France, Britain and Denmark, and exceeded only by a handful of tiny oil-rich or banking nations like Norway, Switzerland and Lichtenstein. U.S. median household size, meanwhile, has declined, so individual wealth has increased even more than the income numbers reflect.
Economic revolution, regardless of how satisfying to one's bloodlust, does not make much sense.
On the other side of the popular alarmism, immigration apprehensions at the border are at an eighteen year low, illegals have a lower crime rate than native or naturalized citizens, immigration has not caused job loss but automation has, and globalization has diverted some low-level jobs overseas but supplied cheap goods which has raised the standard of living even further.
But there are problems. We have had mediocre leaders--some heartfelt, some cynical--but all mediocre. Our political debates rest on fantasies so our solutions are fantastic, too. We will turn to technologies that do not exist by taxing people who do not exist. We have fueled a lot of our success with unsustainable debt. For a people with suspicions about domestic government built into our constitutional DNA, we are remarkably confident in our ability to create benign and powerful governments for foreign nations. And our sensibilities have followed our technology: All our beliefs have progressed from analog to binary. Everything is Black or White.
We have become an intense, incautious people.

Make Government Great Again

A common criticism of modern liberalism is that it brings an increasingly centralization of power to complex systems, another way of saying concentrating decision-making to deal with unknown causes and effects. But there is a significant practical concern as well: The world is becoming more and more decentralized, more diffuse and diverse. The model of the centralized power having its will ripple through the community pyramid from the top down may not be an adequate reflection of the world as it now is. For example, powerhouse governments are having a hard time managing the resistance of small, disparate guerilla groups. Large but fragmented  entrepreneurial drug cartels are as impervious as Tupperware parties to the powerful Washington hand.
We may be dealing with modern problems with outmoded techniques.

Sermon/Theophilus

Today is the beginning of "Ordinary Time" in the Church. There is something funny about that. The Old Testament reading is a long review of the history of Israel and reads like  history of Man  with war, slavery, abuse and resilient recovery. The average guy stumbles through his life in the Old Testament as the Sport of Kings.

The Gospel is the opening of Luke's letter to the "most excellent Theophilus" (Lover of God). After explaining that he is writing down the results of his research into the life of Christ, Luke writes of Christ's initial entry into his public life (presumably after his mother pushes him into a miracle at the marriage at Cana.) This is what Luke writes after Christ in the synagogue opens a scroll of the writings of the prophet Isaiah:

He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
"Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing."

Laconic. The world's shortest sermon. And hardly the beginning of "Ordinary Times."

Reverie

Malkin has a funny article arguing that The Dreaded Wall is the only infrastructure project that Democrats don't like. "Boston's Big Dig black hole, the nation's most expensive highway project, burned through $25 billion and was plagued by deadly engineering incompetence, endless cost overruns, leaks, lawsuits and debt. California's high-speed rail boondoggle is a $100 billion bullet train to nowhere. Gov. Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown promised a 2020 completion date for the miracle transportation system. The latest estimates predict it won't open until at least 2033, and the costs keep rising. Seattle's ill-fated Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement topped out at $4 billion in local, state and federal funds for a two-mile bored road tunnel that will finally open next month — nearly four years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget."

Happy birthday, Kampuchea. On January 5, in 1976, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announced a new constitution changing the name of Cambodia to Kampuchea. Ah, the People!                       

The Saudis Arabia government, the people who arranged the murder of Khashoggi, are now demanding justice and the death penalty for the men who did the killing. Imagine their mindset. Imagine what they must think of themselves--and the public. Governments are fun.

In a similar vein, Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp. hired former Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was the Democratic party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000. He is conducting an "independent assessment" of what concerns members of Congress, the executive branch and U.S. businesses have about national security risks that ZTE’s products may pose, according to a disclosure form filed by his firm. Like O.J. hunting the killer. Incredible. American politicians in the employ of China intel. Politics is the willing suspension of disbelief.

Total federal outlays — not counting state and local expenditures — represent roughly 20 percent of gross domestic product.

 Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan – told supporters regarding Trump: “We’re going to go in and impeach the motherf***er."

She's probably not mad at his crassness.

The first thing the new House started  to talk about was raising taxes. The next is the promise that the investigations will begin. The political shoe is now on the other stupid foot.

Populism. This is a word that is being thrown around as if it means something definitive. It has become pejorative, "anti-elite" as if that meant anti-educated. My understanding of the word comes from its original meaning in the late 1800s in the U.S., monetary and agricultural. It's become an insult the establishment uses to defend itself. Expect to see it in discussion of Trump's decision to leave Syria. Trump is a jerk, but that does not mean our decisions in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Somalia have been well thought out. The real risk with Trump is that he is so incompetent he will make the return of the original idiots look like an upgrade.

An interesting article in the HuffPo, which is beginning to take itself seriously, viciously attacked Romney's anti-Trump article in the WashPo, continuing the policy of Wack-a-Mole aimed at any non-Dem who might start to emerge. No one will be allowed to take advantage of anti-Trump rhetoric except them.

60% of the return of stocks is buy-backs. Apple pays the equivalent of 9.5%.

In 1800, 75% of [an American's] working man's expenditures went for food alone. By 1850, that had dropped to 50%. Today it is a little more than 11%. --The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 1996

37 percent of all American adults now say they prefer socialism to capitalism. A 2016 Harvard University survey revealed that 51 percent of Americans aged 18 and 29 say they reject capitalism outright. If anyone was looking for evidence of a failure in American education, this It.

The CEO of Apple just said in a interview that the greatest contribution of Apple in the future will be in the field of health. These major companies see that health care is where the money is.

(DXCM--the winner of the JPMorgan Health Conference presentation-- is developing a product with Verily, due 2020.)

Whoa! BP made a massive 1 billion-barrel discovery at its Thunder Horse field off the tip of Louisiana. Executives are crediting their investment in advanced seismic technology and data processing for speeding up the company’s ability to confirm the discoveries at Atlantis and Thunder Horse. BP says it once would have taken a year to analyze the Thunder Horse data, but it now takes just weeks. Whoa.

Remember the settled science of Peak Oil?

With no progress in the much ballyhooed Wall, White House officials said an increasingly likely option is for President Trump to declare an emergency. They always default to the assumption of power.

Americans donated $410 billion to charity last year.

 

AOC's pronouncements point to the essence of all politicians, the promise of social happiness through the hard work and sacrifice of others.

A civil rights institute in Alabama has withdrawn an award for Angela Davis, the longtime radical political activist, author and academic. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's board of directors had chosen Davis to receive its "Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award" at its annual gala next month. But the institute decided to withdraw the award and cancel the annual gala at which Davis, a Birmingham native, would have been honored. It is said the award was withdrawn because of her opposition to Israel. Apparently being a supporter of the homicidal Communists and the Black Panther Party was ok.
"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."       
 Sooo,if beauty is a virtue, is ugliness a vice?

Ocasio-Cortez suggested that the wealthiest Americans ought to pay a marginal tax rate of as high as 70% to fund a “Green New Deal.” “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security. If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”  Shallow, illogical, and silly.  That statement is as dumb as anything Trump has said.  Voting rights for dolphins is radical too.   

Explorers and producers are finding themselves in the midst of an increasingly heated debate in Norway on the future of fossil fuels, with calls for cuts to incentives, more drilling restrictions and higher taxes.

Mueller #2

Both the pro-Trump and anti-trump suspicions, like Caesar's wife, have implications not because they are true but because they might be believed. So we debate proving negatives. (Angels are invisible; nobody has ever seen an angel; therefore, angels exist.) But innuendo can be very powerful.

From Hanson's article filled with "apparents,' "likelys," "probablys," and "seems:"

"The Mueller team’s modus operandi starts with the assumption that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for Russian collusion. Or he must at least be found guilty of something or other from his past decades as a wheeler-dealer, high-profile Manhattan provocateur.

Given that starting point, the special counsel then tries to prove his particular charge by rounding up those who have worked for Trump, examining in detail their personal history, discovering that they were imperfect, and threatening to ruin them (or their family members) with long prison sentences or crippling legal bills unless they aid what are becoming his Captain Ahab–like obsessions.

Far worse, Mueller has overlooked dozens of likely tangential felonies related to his investigations — they are not deemed useful to his zealous pursuit of Donald Trump.

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe probably lied to federal investigators. He faces no charges.

James Comey, the former FBI director, probably misled a FISA court and likely lied under oath to a congressional committee by claiming 245 times that he did not know or did not remember various important facts. It’s also likely that Comey broke the law by deliberately leaking secret and confidential FBI memos to friends and the press for his own particular agendas. Comey’s FBI team knew as early as July 31, 2016, that the Steele dossier was an unverified, biased product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research, and yet he helped to send it to the FISA court as the primary evidence used to justify surveillance of Carter Page — in order to look for something on Trump.

Comey earlier had warped the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and emails by his own admission that he assumed she was going to be president and therefore deserved special treatment rather than a process that followed the letter of the law. He apparently faces no criminal liability on any of these issues.

Comey — and later, after his firing, his lieutenants — apparently conducted a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump. The likely illegal move was based on the ridiculous notion that Trump had colluded with Russia, either as a dupe and fool or as a canny and treasonous Russian operative. These fantasies were the pretext for using Clinton opposition research to prompt their investigations.

Worse still, the FBI later was apparently terrified that a President Trump would eventually demand the release of documents disproving the FBI canard that it was generically investigating “collusion” rather than Trump himself. Recall that Comey, according to his sworn testimony, assured Trump three times that he was not the object of a FBI official investigation.

Yet just such an investigation of the president of the United States was under way. It occurred in a landscape in which Comey himself, later Mueller team members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and recently journalists as diverse as Michael Isikoff and Jonathan Karl have admitted either that there is likely to be no proof of collusion, or that the Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion, or that the Steele dossier was mostly inaccurate and made up — or all that and more.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s blue-chip prosecutor, was briefed in August 2016 by Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Obama Department of Justice, that the Steele dossier was unverified, that it was a campaign opposition hit piece paid for by Hillary Clinton, and that Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele on it.

Those facts about the prior role of Weissmann seemed of no interest to Mueller. Nor did Mueller seem bothered by the fact that the DOJ and the FBI went to a FISA court on four occasions to use that very dossier to obtain surveillance on Carter Page, who was to become a subject of Mueller’s own investigation."

Mueller #1

The Mueller investigation has gone on a long time and we have been treated to a blizzard of guesses, tea-leave readings and conjecture as to its progress. Despite the time, we have little idea what is really happening. This used to be an advantage; the investigation presumed innocence. But in current times, delay and secrecy just allow for more discontent and rumors of war, doing damage to the thinking and the spirit of both sides.

A worthwhile if slanted summary on the Mueller investigation from Hanson in the National Review (not a Trump fan:)

"In sum, one result of the entire Mueller inquest is that we are now witnessing one of the greatest political scandals in U.S. history, given that

1) the FBI conducted a secret investigation of the sitting president of the United States and kept it from all oversight, based on nothing other than unfounded accusations from untrustworthy sources and the FBI’s policy differences with candidate and later President Trump;

2) presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the middle of the 2016 campaign hired a foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to conduct opposition research on her rival Donald Trump, and she hid her use of campaign funds to pay for the ensuing dossier by funneling the payments as “legal fees” through both a law firm and an opposition-research firm;

3) members of Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI deliberately and repeatedly misled FISA courts by presenting a dossier as evidence without disclosing that it was unverifiable, paid for by Hillary Clinton, used circularly for “corroborating” news accounts, and authored by a fired FBI informant — all of which was previously known to the top echelon of the FBI and DOJ;

4) key members of the U.S. government in the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department took great pains in the midst of a presidential campaign to spread knowledge of the unverified dossier among top government officials and to ensure leaks of the dossier to the media;

5) few involved in any of these felonious acts are currently under investigation, and fewer are apt to be subject to criminal prosecution, given the hysteria over the supposed Trump collusion;

6) Mueller’s top lieutenant, Andrew Weissmann, by intent or default, probably had a role in the deception of a federal FISA court that was deliberately misled by fellow DOJ attorneys who withheld information that they knew would impugn their own evidence.

Again, the reason Mueller is not interested in such lawbreaking seems to be that it does not serve his interests. He shows little concern that both former FBI director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — figures who have popped in and out of his investigation — have lied under oath to Congress and probably have also lied about their knowledge of the Fusion GPS dossier compiled by Steele and the leaking of its contents. These lies of the nation’s three top intelligence officials — Brennan, Clapper, and Comey — are of far more importance to the sanctity of the republic than whether George Papadopoulos got his stories straight."

Government Confidence

The collapse in confidence in government from 77% in the 50s and 60s to 18% is one of the most striking changes in public philosophy of the last half century. Where that optimistic view of the government came from is up to debate. Likely Roosevelt. Confidence in governments is not part of the revolutionary changes of early America, not part of the division still persisting between America and Europe that could even be called a schism. Europe is a land of hereditary and military coercion aimed against its own citizens. Curiously, rather than drifting toward the American cynicism about government,  European philosophies seem to emerge to support these dangerous power-centric notions, rewriting them to justify these tyrannies in some new iteration.
The U.S. has been treated to these crazy ideas that have immigrated here in the person of displaced, unhappy revolutionaries, bringing European solutions to American non-problems. But now we have home grown national discussions supporting those ancient European pathologies. Interestingly, the young and dynamic AOC, sort of the Left's Trump, has thrown her considerable youth and energy behind those ancient fossils of hierarchical European thought.
But centralization will be a hard sell in a country where confidence in government is 18%.

Corporate Tax Cut

This is from a recent Krugman article disparaging the corporate tax cut.

After arguing that the "repatriating" of profits is mostly actuarial--which is true--he writes this:
"...a lot of any country’s corporate sector, our own very much included, is actually owned by foreigners, either directly because corporations here are foreign subsidiaries, or indirectly because foreigners own American stocks. Indeed, roughly a third of U.S. corporate profits basically flow to foreign nationals – which means that a third of the tax cut flowed abroad, rather than staying at home. This probably outweighs any positive effect on GDP growth. So the tax cut probably made America poorer, not richer.
And it certainly made most Americans poorer. While 2/3 of the corporate tax cut may have gone to U.S. residents, 84 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. Everyone else will see hardly any benefit."

Had Trump said that he was opposed to the profits of foreigners, he would have been eviscerated as hyper-nationalistic and maybe racist. And these people are like Scrooge McDuck; they never take their eyes off the money. The intent is always who gets the money, the assumption is that some deserve money more than others regardless who earns it and the State, somehow, manages money better than its citizens do.

Tiger, Tiger

The Left is balanced in their imbalance.

Sanders' universal health care comes in at $32 trillion in government spending over 10 years. Add to that free college, student loan forgiveness, and a guaranteed jobs program and the tab totals $42.5 trillion, according to the Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl, formerly a Senate Finance Subcommittee staff member.
The federal government currently collects $44 trillion in tax revenues over 10 years. The current progressive agenda would require doubling that. The 70%  tax hike on the rich would raise, at most, $720 billion over 10 years, according to Mark Mazur, a former Treasury Department official now at the centrist Tax Policy Center. That sounds like a lot of money, but $720 billion is a mere sliver of the $42.5 trillion cost of the progressive agenda. There just aren't enough rich taxpayers.

These people historically have solved technological problems--like global warming--with technologies that don't exist. Now they are going to pay for fixing problems by taxing people who don't exist. A fearful symmetry.

Dr. Watson Presumes

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

This rather astonishing quote is from Darwin's Descent of Man. It has been dissected to death in an effort to give it context, successfully, I think, by those that argue he was trying to show the episodic behavior in evolution and an apparent confusion between biologic and cultural evolution, the prejudice of a Eurocentric man. I think of this having read an interview with the 90 year old James Watson who, with Crick, developed the theory of the double helix. He has always had a cloud over him, originally from the supporters of Rosalind Franklin, the abrasive expert in X-ray crystallography whose photography allowed Watson to finish his calculations of the helix. Her supporters think she was excluded from credit because she was a woman. (Watson did not like her and did diminish her but she had been dead four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick, an award given only to the living.)

But it is Watson's racism that has ruined his life. He has lost his teaching positions, cannot speak on campuses and is the only man in history to sell his Nobel Prize for money he needed to live. His infamous interview in 2007 with the Sunday Times did the damage.  He said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa," because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." He added that while he hoped everyone was truly equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

Racism brings diversity full circle for diversity is a means of change, not enjoyment. Diversity allows for differences to be weighed and measured on the scales of evolution. Advantageous diversity moves on, disadvantageous diversity drops off. So differences among us may be charming, but may be lethal. As difference is a means of advancement, it seems that disparities--the flowering of differences--are inevitable. And even if there were no differences between groups, there would be differences among men. Should we not admit the differences between Ghandi and Himmler? Lincoln and Ted Bundy?

What is probably at the heart of this anxiety is the unspoken notion that some differences are irremediable, are handed down to children and leaves an identifiable portion of man as forever dependent upon others' charity and forbearance. But that area is more obtuse than ever. No one knows what IQ means now (a big portion of Dr. Watson's bigotry.) Nurture has an apparently sizable impact on Nature. And there is the fascinating implication of epigenetics which makes all geneticists sound Lamarckian now.

The truth of the matter is, testing is a poor measurement of man.


 

Gillette/Tucker Carlson

Re the recent ad campaign by Gillette using the #MeToo theme: Generalizing from small numbers in science is called "bad science." In social analysis it is called "bigotry." Any company asking its customers to identify with Harvey Weinstein is called "stupid."

**
"Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They're what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared."
These are the sensitive and heartfelt words of Tucker Carlson, a guy I had to Google, who is the FOX replacement for O'Reilly at the 8:00 pm weekday slot. They are worth reading again. Carlson, a self--declared conservative, seems to believe that the government is responsible for citizen integrity and the betterment of interpersonal relationships. These are family, social and religious qualities, not political. Fortunately, Gillette wants to help too.

Expanding the congregation is one thing, expanding access to the pulpit is quite another.

Assimulation

 

**

The average black family has been in America longer than the average white family. Why then should blacks be hyphenated as African-American when they are more centuries removed from Africa than most Europeans are from Europe? Does anyone speak of European-Americans? How long should a hyphen persist?--Sowell

This is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly on the problem of Central American immigrants:
"They’re not MS-13… . But they’re also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They’re overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don’t speak English; obviously that’s a big thing. … They don’t integrate well; they don’t have skills."

The vast majority of Central American immigrants do not speak English when they arrive in the United States. In 2016, according to data from the American Community Survey, 82 percent of Central American immigrant adults over the age of 25 who arrived that year spoke English “not well” or “not at all,” but length of residence does appear to result in greater language acquisition, with nearly three quarters knowing English after three decades or more in the United States.
With less than a year in the United States, already nearly half of Central American adults had found employment in 2016. Employment rates increase with the length of residence in the United States. Those with more than five years in the United States had an employment rate over 70 percent, more than 10 percentage points higher than the rate for all U.S. adults.
Poverty among Central American adult immigrants who have lived in the United States in 2016 drops substantially, and those with 30 or more years experience in the United States had a lower poverty rate in 2016 than all U.S. adults.
English language assimilation continues even faster into the second generation. There is an impressive difference between first-generation immigrants with Central American ancestry and their descendants born in the United States (i.e. “natives”). 91 percent of Americans with Central American ancestry speak English “very well” with another 6 percent speaking it “well”. Only 3 percent speak it poorly or not at all. This compares with 49 percent in the first generation.
Central American immigrants have little formal schooling—half had dropped out of high school, and just eight percent had a college degree in 2016. Adults with Central American ancestry who were born in the United States had the exact same level of educational attainment as all other natives—30 percent had a college degree, and only 10 percent dropped out of high school.
Central American native-born adults have no fall-off in terms of finding jobs either. In 2016, 78 percent of them were employed—a higher rate than Central American immigrant adults and nearly 20 percentage points higher than all other adults born in the United States.
American adults with Central American ancestry were more than twice as likely to be an active duty member of the military than other U.S.-born American adults

Kamala Harris vs. James Madison

There have been some hearings on judicial nominees. On December 5, Kamala Harris posed a series of written questions to Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee for district court in Nebraska. The third question reads as follows:

Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?

Her follow-ups included “Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization?” and “Have you ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights?”

Buescher, a Nebraska native and graduate of the Georgetown Law Center, replied that he joined the Knights when he was 18 years old; that his involvement includes charitable work; and that his job as a judge is to apply the law regardless.

Article Six, Section Three, of the Constitution states, “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or Public Trust under the United States.” But these people are above all that. The foundations of the law must not hamper the righteous. This is a virtual teaching moment as to why the limits of government were designed as they were by the geniuses that formed the American Constitution.

Sunday/Baptism

Today is the Baptism of Christ, where Christ joins human ritual and symbolism and is baptized by John. There is a tolerant, understanding quality about his joining; one can see a smiling condescending Christ among us as he agrees to the event. But it is more, a peculiar, complex scene where Christ--a mosaic himself--is caught in a moment as part of a larger mosaic, where Christ is both complete and part of something larger, a scene to drive Arians mad.

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
(Seamus Heaney)

Reverie

The first thing the new House started  to talk about was raising taxes. The next is the promise that the investigations will begin. The political shoe is now on the other stupid foot.

Populism. This is a word that s being thrown around as if it means something definitive. It has become pejorative, "anti-elite" as if that meant anti-educated. My understanding of the word comes from its original meaning in the late 1800s in the U.S., monetary and agricultural. It's become an insult the establishment uses to defend itself. Expect to see it in discussion of Trump's decision to leave Syria. Trump is a jerk, but that does not mean our decisions in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Somalia have been well thought out. The real risk with Trump is that he is so incompetent he will make the return of the original idiots look like an upgrade.

An interesting article in the HuffPo, which is beginning to take itself seriously, viciously attacked Romney's anti-Trump article in the WashPo, continuing the policy of Wack-a-Mole aimed at any non-Dem who might start to emerge. No one will be allowed to take advantage of anti-Trump rhetoric except them.

60% of the return of stocks is buy-backs. With dividends and buybacks, Apple pays the equivalent of 9.5%.

In 1800, 75% of [an American's] working man's expenditures went for food alone. By 1850, that had dropped to 50%. Today it is a little more than 11%. --The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 1996

 

Some very tough teams in the playoffs last weekend.

The Chargers played against the Ravens with three safeties at linebacker.

A number of stories on the Internet suggesting the Steelers will get rid of Brown.

And tough shows on Netflix too. Bodyguard. The Last Kingdom, from the Cornwell book, has raised species brutality to an art form. I had to take some time away from it. Fortunately there are some crazy silly funny options.

The recently departed--and sainted--Khashoggi seems to have had a more complicated background. Text messages between Khashoggi and Maggie Mitchell Salem, an executive at Qatar Foundation International and a former State Department official during the Clinton presidency, show she "at times shaped the columns he submitted to The Washington Post, proposing topics, drafting material and prodding him to take a harder line against the Saudi government." The Post added, "Khashoggi also appears to have relied on a researcher and translator affiliated with the organization."

Qatar? Former State Department?

Researchers found those who gave up booze for a month reported drinking less, even seven months later. Even more striking, the participants reported a range of other lasting benefits: 70 percent reported improved overall health, 71 percent slept better, 67 percent had more energy, 58 percent lost weight, and 54 percent had better skin.

What does it mean that Bohemian Rhapsody is thought to be the best movie of the year?

A civil rights institute in Alabama has withdrawn an award for Angela Davis, the longtime radical political activist, author and academic. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute's board of directors had chosen Davis to receive its "Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award" at its annual gala next month. But the institute decided to withdraw the award and cancel the annual gala at which Davis, a Birmingham native, would have been honored. It is said the award was withdrawn because of her opposition to Israel. Apparently being a supporter of the homicidal Communists and the Black Panther Party was ok.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.       
 Sooo,beauty is a virtue?  And ugliness a vice?

 Ocasio-Cortez suggested that the wealthiest Americans ought to pay a marginal tax rate of as high as 70% to fund a “Green New Deal.” “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she said. “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security. If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”  Shallow, illogical, and silly.  That statement is as dumb as anything Trump has said.  Voting rights for dolphins is radical too.   

Explorers and producers are finding themselves in the midst of an increasingly heated debate in Norway on the future of fossil fuels, with calls for cuts to incentives, more drilling restrictions and higher taxes.

If you had a perfect ability to predict how far the market would fall and when it would bottom out, it would make sense to move money in and out. But you do not.

Gunmen opened fire in a crowded bar in the Mexican resort city of Playa del Carmen, killing seven people, authorities and media reports said Monday.

 

Bordeaux summarizing McCloskey: "While reasonably secure private property and contract rights, and reasonably free markets, are necessary for capitalism to operate, they are not sufficient. An openness to innovation and (for lack of a better term) a culture that accepts economic change are also necessary. If fear of innovation and opposition to change are widespread throughout a society, that society cannot and will not be capitalist. And the typical denizens of that society cannot and will not be as materially prosperous as are even the poorest denizens of capitalist societies."

Like all these goofy government programs created to subvert the laws of economics, the tariffs will be shouldered by the usual people, the hard working average guy. Some vague character or industry will eventually have some symbolic benefit but it will be the result of the usual transfer from the working guy to the connected guy. For some reason this lesson has to be relearned and relearned, like some problem of recurrent social amnesia.

While Carol was ill last year, we started a writing project during hospital visits. The idea was this: If Kevin O'Leary on Shark Tank says that 95% of wine in the U.S. sells for $13.95, then all those people are enjoying average wine without the need for greatness. So it might be with novels; not everything has to be To The Lighthouse or Moby Dick. So the plan was to write a novel with Mondovi, not Petrus, intent. Two novellas and a short story have emerged. Now the question is what if anything to do next. 

Malthus anticipated that population would soon outstrip the food supply. His thinking was mathematical: Food production was linear, population growth logarithmic. It made a lot of sense. Was that settled science?

The anxiety over losing Ginsberg from the Supreme Court is impressive. She must be as smart as Bork.

If we are looking for topics to worry us, try this: A Wall Street Journal reconstruction of the worst known hack into the nation’s power system reveals attacks on hundreds of small contractors. The hackers then worked their way up the supply chain. Some experts believe two dozen or more utilities ultimately were breached.
 

Last year the Republican Party approved a deficit approaching $779 billion. The Congressional Budget Office figured the president's 2019 budget will push the deficit to nearly $1 trillion, and the numbers will continue to rise, to $1.527 trillion in 2028.This debt increase would be accompanied by rising interest rates. CBO figured "net interest," which disguises federal costs by subtracting interest paid to Uncle Sam, will rise from $315 billion last year to $819 billion in 2028.

 

37 percent of all American adults now say they prefer socialism to capitalism. A 2016 Harvard University survey revealed that 51 percent of Americans aged 18 and 29 say they reject capitalism outright. If anyone was looking for evidence of a failure in American education, this It.