Gender, Science and ...

This week the University of California, San Diego’s prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography is holding an academic conference. This is a conference on Biology. Biology. And this is from their website, a virtually crazy tautology that seems to have been so obviously anti-scientific and anti-scholarly that they eventually crossed some of it out. But they did think this was reasonable.  

During the first day of this event, leading researchers will present on the emerging science of the Urobiome and its recently discovered implications for human health, including common conditions such as urinary tract infection, urinary incontinence and bladder overactivity.

The following two days will feature high-impact presentations on the latest discoveries in microbiome sciences, with sessions on topics ranging from the microbiome in human disease and wellness and the metabolome, to primate microbiomes, to environmental and ocean microbiomes.
For this first edition, we have decided to demonstrate that it is possible to have a large representation of women presenters in a scientific meeting by inviting only women speakers.
 

The Tree of Knowledge.

 In a project run by Chinese scientist He Jiankui, the embryos of seven couples had their genes "edited" using a tool known as CRISPR. By removing a gene called CCR5, Jiankui sought to create a natural immunity to HIV - which requires CCR5 to enter blood cells. 

Based on new research, however, Jiankui may have also left the twins, Lulu and Nana, with improved memory and enhanced cognition, according to MIT Technology Review. They may also enjoy some degree of protection from Alzheimer's Disease and other maladies which are rapidly being linked to chronic inflammation, as some groups of mice without CCR5 - or who have been given CCR5 inhibitors, experience less severe dementia or Alzheimer's symptoms.

UCLA neurobiologist Alcino J. Silva had earlier discovered a link between CCR5 and the brain's ability to form new connections. 

"The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins," says Silva, adding that the exact effect on the girls' cognition cannot be predicted, which is "why it should not be done."

Silva told the MIT Technology Review "because of his research, he sometimes interacts with figures in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who have, in his opinion, an unhealthy interest in designer babies with better brains." 

When word of Jiankui's experiment went public, Silva says he immediately questioned whether enhanced cognition was the real goal of the experiment. 
"I suddenly realized—Oh, holy shit, they are really serious about this bullshit," said Silva. "My reaction was visceral repulsion and sadness."

There are Viking ships on the intellectual horizon. Hide the women.

Reverie

Comparing the figures for 2017 to those for 1980 – the year Ronald Reagan was first elected president – we find that in 2017 smaller percentages of American households earned lower- and middle-incomes than earned such incomes in 1980. But we find also that the percentages of American households earning high incomes in 2017 were much larger than in 1980. For all annual-income categories of $100,000 or more, the percentages of American households earning these high annual incomes are greater than were the percentages earning these high incomes in 1980. (Remember, these figures are adjusted for inflation.)

So,we cannot listen to Michael Jackson music but we can wear Che Guevara shirts?

https://babylonbee.com/news/nations-wealthy-privileged-lecture-nation-on-evils-of-wealth-privilege/



The ruling group attempts, to the extent that it is possible, to create fiscal illusions, and these have the effect of making taxpayers think that the taxes to which they are subjected are less burdensome than they actually are. At the same time, other illusions are created that make beneficiaries consider the values of public goods and services provided them to be larger than may actually be the case. The various institutions of taxing and spending are so organized as to create this set of illusions.--Buchannan


Higher marginal tax rates on profits and investment would reduce savings, lower rates of investment, and thereby reduce the stock of productive capital, and therefore wage growth.Capital investment and total factor productivity (TFP) growth are essential components of the productive potential of the economy. Robert Barro decomposed the growth rate of real GDP from the growth rates of capital, labor, and TFP and found that for the period 1947–1973, TFP growth accounted for 34 percent of GDP growth, while capital accounted for 43 percent of GDP growth. (deRugy)


It's tough to find references to the "Covington" story now. It's just too revealing about the culture and the culture can't stand the mirror. Remarkable that adults could be placed in such relief. Almost a metaphor for problems in the culture. This is an interesting effort at analyzing it: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/


Another arrest for lying to investigators. If there is any lesson that Americans did not learn from Martha Stewart, it should be learned now: Never, ever talk to a law official without a lawyer.

Very good women's Australian final. Osaka is a beast, Kvitka's recovery from her savage injury is a real tribute to the human spirit.

The Republicans assess themselves: “We’re in a demographic death spiral,” said Republican consultant John Weaver, a top aide to former Ohio GOP Gov. John Kasich. “If we were Coca-Cola or Delta or any product on the market, would you be happy that your customers, your base of support, were old, white and closed-minded?”

On the other side of the aisle, Congresswoman Maxine Waters is the new head of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. She will be able to influence our financial decisions. Waters announced this week that the Committee will form a new subcommittee on diversity and inclusion. Committee members Carolyn Maloney and Gregory Meeks are pushing for legislation forcing all public companies to annually disclose the racial, ethnic and gender composition of their boards. Probably the first step toward quotas. Maxine Waters!

Notre Dame is covering up its Columbus murals. Don't ask why. A commentator writes, " In what is now Peru, children were sacrificed by the Incas in a practice known as Capacocha. Should any positive depictions of the Incas be covered up, in light of this heinous practice?"
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The Japanese Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision that transgender people must be sterilized before filing gender changes on official documents. The 4-0 ruling backs the law as constitutional as its initial intention was to curtail confusion among society. Are these leaders becoming frightened?






"Jupiter Ascending" makes "Godzilla" look like "King Lear."


On the Parkway East, a Good Samaritan stopped for a disabled car near the Oakland exit. Two men looking at the car were then hit by a third car and knocked over the railing to the roadway below where they were hit and killed by a fourth car.


There is an 85% 5 year survival rate in pediatric cancer in the U.S., with a 1% annual decline in deaths. There is a 30% infertility rate in kids after therapy. There are remarkable fertility efforts at work.

https://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/square-man-in-round-nature.html

Should Prince Philip should be allowed to continue to drive? Is that a closed-minded view reached through a small sample size?

29 Trillion dollars are in retirement plans hungrily viewed by government thieves.


A new study thinks they have found some really important information: "But even as two new surveys confirm the public’s growing awareness of global warming, they also indicate that the issue is still not a front-burner concern and that taxpayers don’t want to pay very much to rein in the greenhouse gases that are at the root of the problem." The conclusion is that people are concerned abut global warming but do not want to pay for it's cure. But there are certainly other interpretations. People may not believe the problem is as severe as advertised, they may be cynical about the government's ability to do anything meaningful, like Margaret Meade's subjects they might hate the pollster. Narrative is all.


There has been a shift away from minimum wage hikes to tax credits as a poverty reduction policy tool because policy wonks became convinced that in-work top-ups were better targeted and encouraged work, while minimum wage hikes risked rendering low-skilled workers unemployable. Despite a major academic back-and-forth in the literature, many academic economics still believe that. A study of the federal minimum wage hike from $5.15 to $7.25 in 2009 by economists Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither estimated the hike cost 800,000 low-paid jobs.
Thus, policies that have debatable outcomes are confidently implemented.



There is some academic debate over the value of parental leave. The overwhelming majority of employers find that paid leave has no effect or a positive effect on productivity, profitability, turnover, and morale. See above


The recent 70% tax suggestion has been defended by being, in the context of history, not so extreme. So we defend a bad idea by claiming we have had bad ideas before.


What economists call rent-seeking, in the context of politics, means bending government power for private advantage, either by conferring advantages on oneself or imposing disadvantages on competitors. This is not capitalism, it is influence-peddling.


"There is excellent health care on Cuba — just not for ordinary Cubans. …there is not just one system, or even two: There are three. The first is for foreigners who come to Cuba specifically for medical care. This is known as “medical tourism.” The tourists pay in hard currency… The second health-care system is for Cuban elites — the Party, the military, official artists and writers, and so on. In the Soviet Union, these people were called the “nomenklatura.” And their system, like the one for medical tourists, is top-notch. Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use".--from Nordlinger's 2007 study


Sullivan on the grown-up failure in D.C.: "What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general. If you ignore or downplay the nastiest adult bigotry imaginable and focus on a teen boy’s silent face as the real manifestation of evil, you are well on your way to creating a new racism that mirrors aspects of the old. This is the abyss of hate versus hate, tribe versus tribe. This is a moment when we can look at ourselves in the mirror of social media and see what we have become. Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us. This process is greater than one president. It is bottom-up as well as top-down. Tyranny, as Damon Linker reminded us this week, is not just political but psychological, and the tyrannical impulse, ratcheted up by social media, is in all of us. It infects the soul of the entire body politic. It destroys good people. It slowly strangles liberal democracy. This is the ongoing extinction level event."

A financial article called Facebook "the Digital Age’s Enron."

More than 200 prominent men have lost their jobs in the recent #MeToo movement, and nearly half of them were succeeded by women. But companies seeking to minimize the risk of sexual harassment or misconduct appear to be simply minimizing contact between female employees and senior male executives. Last February, two online surveys by Lean In and SurveyMonkey on the effects of #MeToo in the workplace found that almost half of male managers were uncomfortable engaging in one or more common work activities with women, such as working one on one or socializing.


Only four industrialized countries — France, Norway, Spain and Switzerland — currently levy a "wealth tax" on their citizens. One reason it is unusual is that it is confiscatory, a quality that most people recognize as and associate with tyrannical governments.


Saez and Zucman supported the AOC high tax proposal in the NYT and offered a novel justification for their proposal. They do not seek additional revenue; they seek to discourage and penalize the accumulation of wealth itself. They actually admit the destructive, ineffective and regressive nature of taxation, touting it instead as a moral tool, beyond judgment.


In the past 17 years, Pew Research has found, the percentage of Democrats who described themselves as liberal jumped from 30% to 50%. This is reflected in issue positions. In 2008, the percentage of Democrats who agreed that immigrants here illegally should be permitted to become citizens was 29%. That increased to 51% in 2018. Between 2010 and 2017, the portion who said "racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks can't get ahead these days" rose from 28% to 64%.


The New York Times' Walter Duranty was given a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 even though he lied in his reports to promote Stalin’s homicidal regime. He even covered up Stalin’s holocaust of the Ukrainian people. Even though Duranty’s acts are now public knowledge, the Pulitzer Prize Board has not revoked the award. The New York Times at least has acknowledged that Duranty lied to promote Stalin’s savage dictatorship. In our new age of retrograde reassessment, we all await the Pulitzer retraction.

In 1948, the unemployment rate for 17-year-old black males was just under 10%, and no higher than the unemployment rate among white male 17-year-olds. The rates soon diverged; Sowell says because of minimum wage.


Murray Kempton said that the similarity between American politics and professional wrestling is the absence of honest emotion. These new politicians seem to be bringing honest, if stupid, emotions to the arena.

The AP Course in Victimhood

From an Elder article:

"Last year, in a span of a few weeks, three black motorists claimed they were victims of racism by the white cops who pulled them over. One, a reverend, was the president of a local branch of the NAACP. He posted on social media a long, detailed description of the alleged interaction with the cop whom he claimed racially profiled him and made harassing comments.

A black female motorist took to social media to say she had a "traumatic experience" in Virginia when she was pulled over for speeding and "threatened" by a "white cop, who "degraded" her "as an African-American."

And a viral post by a civil rights "activist" claimed a Texas trooper sexually assaulted another black woman following a traffic stop and then arrested her for DUI.

But they were all unaware that they were being recorded. The tapes show all three were lying. The cops involved were courteous, polite and respectful. The black motorists lied about the white cops. But if not for the recordings, who knows what might have happened to the careers of the officers."

Elder points out that "In a nation of 330 million people, bad actors abound. After all, one survey in 2017 found that 7% of adult Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That works out to over 17 million adults. And a 1997 Gallup poll found that 4% of Americans believed Elvis was still alive." The bell shaped curve for 300 million people leaves a lot of room for wackos. But he concludes with this: "If white people spent as much time thinking about how to oppress black people as black people think they do, white people wouldn't have enough time to oppress black people."

"The Tempest" at The Public

The Bowdlers changed Shakespeare in the belief that his genius need pruning if it was to be enjoyed by women and children. We look at this--Bowdlerism--with distain. It is a distortion of art, a modification of its truth-- albeit for a good cause. You could argue that there is an obverse to this distortion: The effort to update the play to make it more relevant to the changing times. There is an undeniable parochial quality about this. Thus we have gangs in the New York streets where Romeo courts Juliet, a black actor plays the classic English King, Hamlet's father rules a commercial kingdom.

The poetic "Tempest" is an especially  malleable form and last weekend I saw a performance done where the play was a dream of a terminally ill woman, "Prospera," as she came to grips with old relationships. The play is twisted so that all the characters, even Caliban, are women--and the bridegroom Ferdinand is ambiguously, and confusingly, played by a woman. The burden on the audience is considerable and some of the drama, of course, makes no sense. If Caliban is a woman, how does she sexually threaten Miranda? What is actually happening with Ferdinand and Miranda? (That said, the Arial actress--a part which has been increasingly played by women--was terrific.) 

It is not uninteresting but, like all Bowdlerism, it is less than its original form and a paler version of the vison of a poet/playwright of exceptional quality. 

After all, his was a universal vision.

The Canon

One of the strangest social constructs is that AOC's ideas are bizarre, off-the-wall-and-charts ideas. The Green New Deal is an aberration, a goofy drainage from  high-pressure youthful enthusiasm.

Nothing could be further from the truth. They are typical of the Progressive Fantasy. Outrageous, idiotic notions are characteristic of these people.

Marx described a world where, after the killing time, there would be no laws. Laing offered a philosophy based upon the idea that the family was an active evil. Sartre envisioned a world without borders or states.

What is important here is not that such ideas are impossible and unworkable but rather that there are so many stupid, violent people who accept and try to implement them.  Outrageous, destructive and stupid ideas should not be met with derision, they should be met with fear.

Aspirations of Victimhood

The Smollett sham is a mere reverberation of the victimhood epicenter. And if previous such reverberations are an indicator, there will be little consequence. Here is another such reverberation, this from the past.

"The news reports at the time, in the late 1980s, were horrific. Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl from the New York City area, was said to have been abducted and repeatedly raped by six white men. She was found with “KKK” written across her chest, a racial epithet on her stomach and her hair smeared with feces. She was so traumatized, according to reports, that at the hospital she answered yes-or-no questions by blinking her eyes. Making the crime even more vile, if that were possible, she and her lawyers later claimed that two of the rapists were law enforcement officials.

Ms. Brawley’s spokesman was the Rev. Al Sharpton — a dapper television personality and political commentator these days, but a fiery street activist back then. At a news conference, he named suspects.

“We have the facts and the evidence that an assistant district attorney and a state trooper did this,” Mr. Sharpton said. He called Gov. Mario M. Cuomo a racist and warned that powerful state officials were complicit. When asked whether Ms. Brawley would speak with the state attorney general, Robert Abrams, Mr. Sharpton said that would be like asking someone in a concentration camp to talk to Hitler.

But, as the meticulously researched Retro Report points out this week, it was all a hoax. After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way, the report concluded."

This is a summary of the Brawley/Sharpton fraud from the NYT. And this is the title of the article, a virtual microcosm of our times: "Revisiting a  Rape Scandal That Would Have Been Monstrous if True."  An astonishing title for a thinking people.

They think the Brawley lie and character assassination, despite its cruelty and calumny, as representative of an overarching true narrative and, as such, is worthy of intellectual consideration.

Sunday/Mount

Today's gospel is the Sermon on the Mount.
Here are two minority reports:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
--Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 75–77

PERHAPS too far in these considerate days
Has patience carried her submissive ways;
Wisdom has taught us to be calm and meek,
To take one blow, and turn the other cheek;
It is not written what a man shall do,
If the rude caitiff smite the other too!

Land of our fathers, in thine hour of need
God help thee, guarded by the passive creed!
As the lone pilgrim trusts to beads and cowl,
When through the forest rings the gray wolf's howl;
As the deep galleon trusts her gilded prow
When the black corsair slants athwart her bow;
As the poor pheasant, with his peaceful mien,
Trusts to his feathers, shining golden-green,
When the dark plumage with the crimson beak
Has rustled shadowy from its splintered peak,--
So trust thy friends, whose babbling tongues would charm
The lifted sabre from thy foeman's arm,
Thy torches ready for the answering peal
From bellowing fort and thunder-freighted keel!                         
--Oliver Wendell Holmes

And Blake's summary of unresolved conflict:

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.                         
--William Blake

Reverie

It is no longer profitable, with few exceptions, to ask people what they think, for you will be told what they wish, instead.

CBO's "Extended Alternative Fiscal Scenario" predicts that the deficit as a percentage of GDP will rise from 78% last year to 105% in 2028, 148% in 2038, and an astonishing 210% in 2048. America's average over the last half century was just 41%; only during World War II and in its immediate aftermath did the federal debt exceed 70%, peaking at 106% in 1946. With larger deficits and debts, interest rates likely would be higher and GDP growth lower.

For the first time in years, U.S. carbon dioxide output rose last year, a new report says. in 2018, U.S. carbon dioxide output jumped by 3.4,  according to Rhodium Group, a research firm.

There's a connection with Trump: since Trump entered office, the number of manufacturing jobs has jumped by close to half a million. Once-moribund industrial areas around the country  are coming back to life. Minority unemployment rates are at or near record lows. Meanwhile, wages rose 3.2% last year, the fastest in a decade. And with that activity comes energy use. And CO2 emissions.
Everything is Trump's fault.

Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a new satellite that will search the stars.

Over the next two years, NASA’s TESS will monitor about 200,000 nearby stars for evidence of orbiting exoplanets. TESS is expected to find thousands of new planets, which will give astronomers a better understanding of how worlds like our own form—and how common watery, temperate, life-filled orbs like Earth might be. Compared to its predecessor, Kepler, TESS will search an area of the sky 400 times larger, and for less than half the price: just $337 million.

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.

[Young-back] Choi argues that [Joseph] Schumpeter and [Israel] Kirzner agree on three points, (1) that there exist in the economy unexploited opportunities, (2) that the role of the entrepreneur consists of exploiting them, and (3) that traditional economic theory is flawed in leaving out the existence of unexploited opportunities and thereby overlooking the very force that moves the economy….(from Storrs)

There is a view of capitalism that sees profit as a "tax" on the purchasing citizen. As such it would be 15 to 20 percent. But socialism's tax is 60 to 90 percent.

We should all know this. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is officially the fastest thing ever made by humans, reaching a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour as it makes its 7-year mission in the sun’s outer corona. The probe, which launched in August, will orbit the sun, getting closer than any spacecraft ever has before. Despite encountering temperatures north of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the probe’s four sensitive instrument suites will remain a cool 85 degrees. This is thanks to an eight-foot-wide, 160-pound heat shield made of carbon foam 4.5 inches thick and coated with a layer of superheated carbon. The foam is so light that, here on Earth, 97 percent of the mass was occupied by air—that doesn’t leave much solid matter for the Sun to heat, keeping the craft cool.

We can't just drill our way out of high oil prices.--Obama

The American Psychological Association has, in its words, issued "its first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys." These guidelines "draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage."

So guys are inherently pathological; half the species is unwell. Hide the women.

Tony asked if Gresham's Law applied to people? There are different dynamics, I suppose. The driving out of good money by bad is actually inaccurate. Good money comes out of the circulation because it is recognized as more valuable and, consequently, is hoarded. But in the marketplace of ideas and people, bad thinking--and people--provide easier--and less real--solutions. Good ideas do not disappear because they are cherished, they disappear because they are hard. One of the things that annoys me about Trump is that he allows the debate to be so silly. Strangely, Cortez might be accidentally raising the bar regarding public debate because her suggestions are so threatening.

A paper out of Harvard proclaims the benefits of tax cuts to businesses over the last 50 years.  In terms of cumulative effects, the full cut in the tax wedge, τ, from 1968 to 2018 is estimated to have raised economy-wide productivity by 3.7%. Thus, this cumulative effect is substantial. Moreover, in the model, this change corresponds to reduced distortion and, hence, to a gain in efficiency. However, in terms of annual productivity growth, the contribution from this 50-year accumulation of cuts in tax wedges—and the resulting shifts in legal form of organization—would be only around 0.1 percentage points per year.

A lot of factors these people  assume.

This was in the WashPo: "The newly solidified conservative majority on the court will inevitably decide more cases in line with the society’s ideals — which include checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning." The next part of the paragraph said this: "In practice, this could mean fewer regulations of the environment and health care, more businesses allowed to refuse service to customers on religious grounds, and denial of protections claimed by newly vocal classes of minorities, such as transgender people." So, does that mean these modern aspirations are opposed to the nation's ideals?

A New York City Hospitality Alliance survey of 574 restaurants showed that 75 percent of full-service restaurants reported plans to reduce employee hours this year in response to the latest mandated wage increase. Another 47 percent said they would eliminate jobs in 2019. Eighty-seven percent of respondents also said they would increase menu prices this year. These types of cost-cutting moves coincide with a U.S. Labor Department report released last Friday showing full-service restaurants in December raised prices the most since 2011, to cover soaring labor and food costs. Intentions are not connected with results.

The United Nations devotes more resources -- time, money and votes -- to the Palestinian issue than to the claims of all the other oppressed groups combined. Nonetheless, the NYRB can run an article on its front page titled: "Time to Break the Silence on Palestine."

Tempest

The Tempest is a play of knowledge, power, authority, forgiveness and reconciliation--a large canvass--where, in the first scene, a storm-threatened ship's Master abandons the bridge. Those Paley-conscious members of the audience will worry for five acts whether he will ever return. But we can not make too much of it. After all, at the time, the ship is trapped in the grasp of an even higher power.

The Tempest is said to be Shakespeare's last play. Its first recorded performance was All Hallows Day, November 1611 and it was performed at court in 1613 during the marriage celebration of James I's daughter, Elizbeth, the future "Winter Queen" of Bavaria.

The play was first published in the First Folio of 1623. It is one of five plays whose particular characteristics in stage digestion, punctuation, speech prefixes and the like were held in common and believed to be characteristic of the work of Ralph Crane, a clerk, scrivener and minor poet. He worked for The King's Men, nee The Lord Chamberlain's men during Elizabeth's time, where Shakespeare appears in the royal commission in 1603 along with Fletcher and Burbage and where Shakespeare worked most of his life.

The play's the thing, of course, but there are some interesting sidelights to it. When The Tempest was released, England was captivated by the story of an incredible adventure involving a ship which broke up under a horrific storm off the coast of Bermuda in 1609, The story was recounted by one of the survivors, William Strachey, in True Reportory, the short-title of a 24,000 word narrative that describes an astonishing effort to survive and eventually to form the a pivotal event in the New World's success..

A 300-ton merchant ship, the Sea Venture, was the flagship of a fleet of nine ships that was to bring the largest group of colonists and cargo yet to Jamestown. Among those aboard were Christopher Newport, captain; Sir Thomas Gates, lieutenant governor of Virginia; Sir George Somers, admiral of the fleet; William Strachey, future secretary of the Virginia Company in Jamestown; John Rolfe who eventually became the first planter of tobacco. The fleet left England in June of 1609, the third resupply voyage to the Jamestown colony, and took a slightly different and faster route than the original 1607 voyage to avoid the Spanish in the West Indies. Only a week from Virginia, the fleet sailed into a  huge storm, probably a hurricane, which tossed the ships about on the open ocean. The Sea Venture became separated from the rest of the fleet; another ship was lost.  

Most of the passengers and crew alike believed they were doomed. Nevertheless, all the men on board worked hard to save the dying vessel, pumping out water and even throwing their possessions and cargo overboard. On July 28, 1609, the fourth day of the storm, Sir George Somers spied land. Captain Newport sailed the limping ship as close to the islands as possible and, as he was unable to anchor, wedged the ship between two large rocks. All of the men and women aboard, about 150 in total, survived the wreck and escaped to the shores of Bermuda, known to the English as “The Devil’s Islands.”

Such a disaster on Bermuda was not new. A Portuguese vessel had wrecked on the dangerous reefs in 1543 and a French vessel was grounded in 1594.

After salvaging all they could from the wreck, the group began to construct two small new ships, the Patience and the Deliverance, to carry the survivors the final distance to Jamestown. It took nine months. The Patience was slightly larger than the Godspeed, one of the three ships that brought English colonists to Virginia in 1607, and the Deliverance was slightly larger than the Discovery, smallest of the 1607 ships.  At last, on May 10, 1610, the two new ships set sail for Virginia, laden with supplies and all of the survivors but two, mutineers who remained on Bermuda and allowed the English to maintain a claim to the islands. Ten days later the ships sailed into the Chesapeake Bay and made their way toward Jamestown.

They arrived in Jamestown in May 1610 and found a disaster. Famine and Indian attacks had reduced the 600 colonists to fewer than 70. It is known as the “Starving Time.” The Bermuda survivors soon decided that the situation was futile and chose to abandon Jamestown along with the few surviving Jamestown settlers. On June 7, 1610, they fired a final salute and sailed down the James River to make their way home to England. Before they could make open water, they met the newly arrived military governor, Lord de la Warr, with his three ships of new settlers and supplies. With new hope, everyone returned to Jamestown. That sequence, initiated by the Sea Venture--then de la Warr, was the real start of the Jamestown experiment.

Strachey stayed in Virginia and wrote his memoirs of the trip. His narrative was not published until 1624 but a version was available in England in 1610, or so it is said. That version--and the story of the wreck--is said to have been part of the stimulus of "The Tempest."

The wreck and the Strachey story has another small but fun implication: The authorship debate. Over the years several arguments have been made offering, sometimes passionately, alternative authors for the Shakespeare plays. Bacon, Derby and Marlow have all been put foreword as candidates. But the most interesting, and the most intense, of the campaigns have been in favor of the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. But The Tempest is the rub: Oxford died in 1604.

The Oxfordians have claimed The Tempest was performed earlier under another name. One of their imaginative supporters, with the unfortunate name of Looney, gave up the argument and campaigned that Shakespeare did not write The Tempest at all. The commonest claim is that the Tempest's scenes are generic shipwreck accounts; some argue that Strachey plagiarized much of his description from earlier wreck stories

One adherent offered this outline from the description of a previous wreck narrative with:

1. A voyage to Italy within the Mediterranean.
2. Discord among the participants; the crew against the passengers.
3. The ship driven by a ‘tempest’.
4. Loss of hope.
5. A spirit visits the ship.
6. Desperate maneuvers to avoid the lee shore of an unknown island.
7. Detailed description of nautical techniques.
8. The ship runs aground and splits.
9. Passengers and crew swim ashore on loose or broken timbers; (versus Stephano coming ashore on a butt of sack.)
10. The island has barbarous inhabitants.
11. Supernatural involvement.
12. A seeming miracle.
13. A safe trip to Italy after a stay on the island.
(From St. Paul's shipwreck in the Acts)

From Pencils to Lighthouses

The world of economics and politics are fascinating, from pencils to...lighthouses.

There is constant debate over the proper venue of government. One often offered is market failure. Sometimes market failures occur because certain goods are plagued by free rider problems (i.e., people do not pay for the benefits they extract from the goods) and thus will be underproduced. This is a market failure associated with public goods where, they believe, the goods cannot be provided by markets in sufficient quantities. The best example is the lighthouse. As the light it produces is seen by all, the lightkeepers can never know who uses the light. This makes it hard to exclude free riders. Thus, if markets are left to produce lighthouses, there will be too few of them provided, increasing the occurrence of shipwrecks. State action is thus warranted to correct a market failure.

Munger wrote an article objecting. First, though markets can fail, governments can fail too. It may be that markets are unable to produce enough lighthouses, but states may do a worse job. This means that we need to accept the lesser imperfection.
Second, market failures are costly, which means that they generate strong profit opportunities for those who find solutions. For example, not having enough lighthouses may incentivize the development of different safety mechanisms such as repositioning software. Thus, market failures sow the seeds of their own solutions.

Geloso writes "two British entrepreneurs in the 18th century discovered a way to build “floating lighthouses” (i.e., lightships) that were quite cheap and charged significantly lower prices than other, stationary lighthouses. They opened a first lightship at the opening of the Thames River, which leads to London, to the delight of coal merchants and other shipowners. Their success was wild enough that they announced the launch of two other floating lighthouses in other places in England.

To mitigate the free rider problem, they used a variety of different mechanisms. They charged different prices to different people so that the price reflected each individual’s personal valuation of the service. They used subscriptions to incite people to finance production before they built the lighthouse. They also relied on certain informal organizations (such as the coffeehouses where coal merchants congregated) to ostracize non-payers. This rich combination of solutions was only brought to an end because the state-mandated monopoly sued the two inventors, prohibiting them from operating their lightship. The crown acquiesced, and that was the end of it."

 

He concludes, "There was nothing inherent to the lighthouse that made it a public good. It was a public good because government regulation made it so.

This is an important example. It speaks to how the lore of economics errs. The example used to justify state action was created by state action. Thus, justifications of state intervention on the grounds that there is a public good market failure actually may be getting the whole relation backward."

 

But there does seem to be that pesky shipwreck learning curve.

High School

Here is a surprising graph but how it is compiled, for example when they dropped out, was not explained:

Interstitial

This is from de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Chapter IV:

"Despotism which by its nature is suspicious, sees in the separation among men the surest guarantee of its continuance, and it usually makes every effort to keep them separate. No vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as selfishness: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love one another. (Italics mine)He does not ask them to assist him in governing the state; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves. He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community; and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves.
Thus the vices which despotism produces are precisely those which equality fosters. These two things perniciously complete and assist each other. Equality places men side by side, unconnected by any common tie; despotism raises barriers to keep them asunder; the former predisposes them not to consider their fellow creatures, the latter makes general indifference a sort of public virtue.
Despotism, then, which is at all times dangerous, is more particularly to be feared in democratic ages. It is easy to see that in those same ages men stand most in need of freedom. When the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests and snatched at times from self-observation. As soon as a man begins to treat of public affairs in public, he begins to perceive that he is not so independent of his fellow men as he had at first imagined, and that in order to obtain their support he must often lend them his co-operation."

If this reminds you of Anne Applebaum's observations that both the Nazis and the Stalinists in Eastern Europe attacked the right of association above all the perceived individual rights as the most important to crushing a people, it should. This is a serious observation and deserves some thought. Does a culture's integrity depends upon the bonds among its individuals? And if it does, does the technique of  something like identity politics destabilize the nation?. And favor the despot?

Charen on Murphy

Mona Charen has an article on Meghan Murphy, a feminist journalist who was recently banned from Twitter for writing "men are not women." One of  Murphy's thought crimes consisted of asking, in response to someone else, "How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?" That challenge, not an epithet, earned her a warning. She also referred to a trans-identified male as "he" — that is the forbidden practice of "misgendering." She also was guilty of so-called "deadnaming" — using the former name of a person who transitioned to the other sex.

According to Charen, "Murphy, along with many feminists and some conservatives, resists the trans movement's efforts to permit people who are born male to enter women's restrooms, locker rooms, prisons and other environments where, as Murphy puts it, 'women feel uncomfortable seeing a penis.'" And, "Murphy's website, Feminist Current, has questioned the science and ideology behind transgenderism, and Murphy is indignant that people with XY chromosomes can compete in women's sports." 

The usual suspects in arbitrary and opinion-driven personal infringements are  governmental and/or bureaucratic; here it is a private company. And what is involved is how we manage, in Charon's phrase, "this sudden reimagining of what it means to be human ." The nature of man has been considered and debated for as long as man has thought. What is new here is not the curiosity but rather the furious acceptance of a marginal and arbitrary position that is both imposed and beyond appeal.

Smith and Lenin

In 1762 Voltaire in 1762 wrote that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.”  The list of bright minds from this small land is long: The Adams brothers in architecture, Hugh Blair in rhetoric,  the poets James Thomson, Allan Ramsay, and  Robert Burns, the playwright John Home--and this does not include the men of  the sciences. 
This is from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith is not a capitalist apologist but a true philosopher, an integral part of the Scottish Enlightenment that included Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. His Moral Sentiments was viewed at the time as being more important than his economic writings.

"The violence and injustice of great conquerors are often regarded with foolish wonder and admiration; those of petty thieves, robbers, and murderers, with contempt, hatred, and even horror upon all occasions. The former, though they are a hundred times more mischievous and destructive, yet when successful, they often pass for deeds of the most heroic magnanimity. The latter are always viewed with hatred and aversion, as the follies, as well as the crimes, of the lowest and most worthless of mankind. The injustice of the former is certainly, at least, as great as that of the latter; but the folly and imprudence are not near so great. A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves."

"A wicked and worthless man of parts often goes through the world with much more credit than he deserves." So we learn in school of warriors, warlords, followers of homicidal philosophies--the vicious and heartless man of parts and influence--and not the thoughtful, learned man of good will striving for a noble life. And, in any culture, what good can come of that?

Gestures, Jesters and Mendacity

Copying is not much fun....unless what is being copied is a lot of fun. From Will:

"The Green New Deal has no practical importance but much significance. First, it underscores the rise of the politics of gestures that are as flamboyant as they are empty: Donald Trump has his wall, the left has its Green New Deal. Second, it reprises the progressive desire to militarize everything but the military, to conscript everyone into vast collective undertakings that supposedly justify vast excisions from personal liberty and the setting side of pesky constitutional impediments. See Franklin Roosevelt's call in his first inaugural address for power "as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

Third, the Green New Deal reveals progressives' embrace of Trump's political style, a stew of frivolity and mendacity. Remember his campaign boast that he would erase the national debt — not just the budget deficit, the then $19 trillion debt — in eight years, meaning by more than $2 trillion a year? This was ludicrous, but not more so than the GND, which is not the only example of the Trumpification of the left. The Wall Street Journal's James Freeman notes that last year Elizabeth Warren said this on NBC:

"My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma. My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped."
"Bitterly"? Because of the mother's Native American "part"? Which could not have been much more than Warren's still-hypothetical miniscule part? As Freeman writes: "If Native American ancestry was so distant on her mother's side that the senator has never been able to name any native relatives — and even now her own DNA expert cannot rule out the possibility that she has no such relatives at all — how would her father's family have known enough to object?"
What a tangled web we weave ... . It is now reasonable to conclude that Warren has made "birther" claims for self-serving reasons that remain opaque, claims that are no more factual or unimportant than the birther fabrications Trump concocted for use against Barack Obama. What explains Trump and his progressive emulators? No doubt many things, but begin with the leakage of reality from American life."

Amazons Against Amazon

“After much thought and deliberation, we’ve decided not to move forward with our plans to build a headquarters for Amazon in Long Island City, Queens,” Amazon announced Thursday in a statement.
It added, “While polls show that 70 percent of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project we and many others envisioned in Long Island City.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who has denounced the deal repeatedly, reacted to Amazon's decision to pull out of New York this way:
"Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world".

This is amazing. We'll probably see more interviews with Stormy, though.

 

The Lady and the Tiger

This is the headline of the NYT editorial from 2/14/19.

The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like


Now I see only two assessments of this. One, it is true and we are doomed. Two, it is false and a beacon of intelligent and thoughtful public discussion has lost its mind.

Buying the Dip VS. DCA

Timing doesn't work.
 
 

 
 
 
Here’s a graph of the performance of "buying on market weakness" versus "Dollar Cost Averaging:" 

Inequality: Cause and Effect

The inequality of income and fortunes is essential to capitalism; it is its source and its outcome. Diversity --variety--provides the impetus for competition. And some sorting out of value results. So inequality is both the unperceived cause the perceived effect of competition.
So competition reveals the truth.
Remember the observation by deTocqueville: I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.

The effect in the U.S. is curious:

Authentic Food and Lives

Gordon Ramsey is getting a lot of flack for opening what he called an "authentic Asian restaurant." Apparently one cannot be an authentic Asian restaurant and serve Asian food without being Asian. The mind just swims with the potential of this great breakthrough.

Imagine what items will have to come off the menu depending who owns the restaurant or cooks the food. French onion soup. Stir-fried anything. Eggs Benedict. And will the restaurant need specific sub-sets in the kitchen? Will Normand food require a western French chef? Could a mulatto serve soul food?

And we could not tolerate pretenders, the cultural appropriators like Elizabeth Warren. We would need  proof of authenticity and certification. A bureaucracy could emerge--a good jobs program--to ascertain the righteousness of the kitchen and truth in advertising.

We could live in a kosher-like world.

The "Green New Deal"

The Green New Deal has been introduced to Congress in the form of a non-binding resolution laying out a series of goals. ( Symbolism is important to these [people.) The specifics were in an online FAQ that appeared on Ocasio-Cortez’s website (but was later taken down.)  The website is instructive, offering an insight as to how these people think. (These are the non-environmental plans--the environmental plans are extensive and expensive...and extra).
Some of the objectives:

1. “a job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security”
2. “high-quality education, including higher education and trade schools”
3. “high-quality health care”
4. “safe, affordable, adequate housing”
5. “economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work"

A rough cost estimate — which doesn’t include all of the promises listed in the FAQ (and, remember, does not include the environmental costs) --adds up to about $6.6 trillion a year. $6.6 TRILLION. That’s more than three times as much as the federal government collects now in tax revenue, and equal to about 34 percent of the U.S.’s entire gross domestic product. And that’s assuming no cost overruns. Total government spending already accounts for about 38 percent of the economy, so if no other programs were cut to pay for the Green New Deal, it could mean that almost three-quarters of the economy would be spent through the government. And this all without the promise that any of it would work. (Remember, for example, that the environmental plans, which are mainly "good intentions," all depend upon technologies we do not have or use and are funded by taxation upon people who do not exist.)

One of the dangers of the modern political scene is personified by Trump himself: Americans have become increasingly numb to the political declarations. While Trump is silly and loquacious, he is relatively philosophy-free; the Left is not. And, on occasion, the Left has the bad judgment to write their plans down.

These are arrogant, dangerous people with horrible, dangerous notions masquerading as ideas.

Sunday/Fisherman

In today's gospel, Christ preaches from a boat off the shore, then says to Simon the gospel's famous quote: "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." Commentators love the symbolism of it but, after the catch, Simon says something puzzling. He says, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."

Why would he say that?

Certainly, as the analysts say, Simon Peter, as a fisherman, may have been rightfully impressed. But enough to make a public confession?

Whatever happened, Simon Peter was more than impressed.

The Children of Mother Nature

The children of Mother Nature:

and

Aristotle's basic question of the nature of anything was "What is it for?"

The Deficiencies of Want

There is an old joke:
A:  Do you play the piano?
B:  No. But I would have done anything to learn.
A: Clearly not.



We are inundated with compilations of our preferences, what pollsters call our "wants," as if "wants" were not mere "desires." In most instances, such wants are wishes.

I want to fly first class; i.e. I wish I could.

I want a Mercedes CLS 53; I wish I could get one.

So the question, Do you want to build a wall on the border of Mexico? or, "Do you want Universal Health Care?" has one answer if you are paying for it, another if you are not.

Only the free market reveals genuine wants.

Realization

The number pi, a constant in math and, like the Pythagorean theorem, an example of the universality of forms, was not arrived at by insight.

The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer approximation.

In the Rhind Papyrus (ca.1650 BC) the Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by a formula that gave the approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.

And from the Old Testament: "Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." (II Chronicles 4:2) Some authors claim this passage as evidence that the ancient Hebrews used a value of 3 for pi. This passage occurs as part of a description of the building of Solomon's temple, and all the measurements in it are very round numbers, so perhaps this was not meant to be more than a rough estimate.

Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world, approximated the area of a circle by using multiple polygons of known areas and circumference. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.

A universal truth was found step by step, approximation after approximation, over millennia. Yet, even at the beginning, its existence was known.

Gender Bias

Women have been the majority on U.S. college campuses for about 40 years. At the University of Michigan, women dominate in 17 out of 21 fields of study, with business and engineering being the only areas where women are underrepresented. Yet more than 50 programs at UM discriminate based on gender in favor of women.




So…..the reason for preferential treatment for women is....what?

% GDP

Carol asked about comparative government spending and GDP numbers.

In evaluating these countries, it must be kept in mind that the U.S. has a very significant military budget that others do not have.
Here are the ratios of government spending to GDP in some major economies:

Germany: 43.9% (2017)
Britain: 41.1% (2017)
Canada: 40.8% (2017)
Australia: 36.2% (2015)
Switzerland 34.0% (2015)


Government spending in the United States was last recorded at 37.8 percent of GDP in 2016 . Government Spending To GDP in the United States averaged 36.57 percent from 1970 until 2016, reaching an all time high of 43 percent in 2009 and a record low of 33 percent in 1973.

In fiscal 2017, the federal government spent $4 trillion. Of that, 40 percent — $1.5 trillion, or 8 percent of our gross domestic product — went to Social Security and Medicare.

Carol was asking specifically about Federal outlays.

Total Federal outlays are a net figure, consisting of gross payments minus the amount of business-like collections and intragovernmental transactions, in a given fiscal year. (excluding trusts like social security)