Trouble in France

If you board the wrong train, it's no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.--Bonhoeffer

Florida  today. Ned is coming in tonight.

It seems as if Google blocks the email if I send it as a link, but won't if I don't link it or if I put a benign subject in.

The law has always had an ambiguous view of women, both excluding and exalting them. Kara Dansky, media director of the Women’s Liberation Front, says The Equality Act would eliminate “women and girls as a coherent legal category worthy of civil-rights protection.” It would do so by redefining the category of “women” to include “women and those who say they are women”—which means women and people who aren’t women at all.

I wonder if Mueller is colluding with the Russians.

Smollett's lawyer is considering suing the City of Chicago. He and the lawyer continue to insist he has been a victim. These guys just look you in the eye and lie.

Hundreds of thousands of people are in need of food, water and shelter after Cyclone Idai battered Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. As of Wednesday, at least 713 people had been reported killed by the storm, the flooding it caused and heavy rains before it hit. Hundreds of thousands of people!

I heard a guy say yesterday that the FBI tried to put one of their informants on the Trump election team for the expressed purpose of linking up with the Russians so as to make the "collusion" accusations valid. If that is true, this country is in a lot of trouble from its own operatives.


Stormy report: Attorney Michael Avenatti, who seized the spotlight last year as a lawyer for Stormy Daniels, was arrested and charged with bank fraud and attempting to extort more than $20 million from Nike. Sleazier than a porn star.

From a paper on lower gas prices and winter mortality: "To put the estimated elasticity of all-cause mortality with respect to the price of heating of 0.03 in context, the price of natural gas relative to electricity fell by 42% between 2005 to 2010. Our findings imply that this price decline caused a 1.6% decrease in the winter mortality rate for households using natural gas for heating. Given that 58% of American households use natural gas for heating, the drop in natural gas prices lowered the US winter mortality rate by 0.9%, or, equivalently, the annual mortality rate by 0.4%. This represents more than 11,000 deaths per year."
According to The Economist “Few business people have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell,” the father of fracking who pioneered the economic extraction of shale gas.  One writer wanted to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the world and saving tens of thousands of lives from lower energy costs saying, "The Father of Fracking has saved infinitely more lives that past Nobel Peace laureates like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Al Gore."



As the lawsuit against Harvard makes clear, the universities aren’t about to climb down voluntarily from what they have become. They’re determined to be purveyors of a never-defined model of social justice, no matter how much inevitable cynicism it breeds among parents, professors and increasingly students. (wsj)

A British Airways flight destined for Düsseldorf in Germany has landed in Edinburgh by mistake, after the flight paperwork was submitted incorrectly.

Henderson gives this example of government intrusion: "Consider this scenario: Say a million of us have gardens; instead of spending our money to maintain our gardens, we are forced to give that money to the government so that it can decide how the money should be spent on our gardens. Ridiculous, right? We know that most of our gardens would be less well maintained and that the tax cost to many of us would be higher than the cost of simply maintaining our own gardens. But somehow, many of us think differently when it comes to health care or education or any of the hundreds of other things that government does."
But that is not really the point of the absorption of gardens or health care. The stated purpose is righteous, the control of gardens and health care so that those without one can be given one. The real reason is power, so that those with the true knowledge of gardens and health care can do a better job of it.

The Coercive Acts were enacted on this day in 1774.


                                         Trouble in France

“The Gilets Jaunes” took to the streets November 17, 2018, and they have not gone home since. Their basic complaint is the insane amount of taxes they pay. These guys aren’t upper class; they are the people who have until now supported the policies that are inevitable when you have the government providing so many services and involved so deeply in so much of the economy. They are essentially working people complaining about policies they originally supported, policies they thought would benefit them.

All of these policies make the lives of lower and middle-class people harder, unemployment is high (24.5 percent for young French people) and economic growth has been anemic for decades. These are some numbers from the WSJ:

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its annual Revenue Statistics report this week, and France topped the charts, with a tax take equal to 46.2% of GDP in 2017. That’s more than Denmark (46%), Sweden (44%) and Germany (37.5%), and far more than the OECD average (34.2%) or the U.S. (27.1%, which includes all levels of government).

France doesn’t collect that revenue in the ways you might think. Despite the stereotype of heavy European income taxes on the rich, Paris relies disproportionately on social-insurance, payroll and property taxes. Social taxes account for 37% of French revenue; the OECD average is 26%. Payroll and property taxes contribute 3% and 9%, compared to the OECD averages of 1% and 6%.

Then Europe adds a regressive consumption tax, the value-added tax. In France, VAT and other consumption taxes make up 24% of revenue, and that’s on the low side compared to an OECD average of 33%. Consumption taxes often fall hardest on the poor and middle class, who devote a greater proportion of their income to consumption.

All these ideas stem from some basic misconceptions about life, that the insertion of a middleman does not add to costs and does not decrease the amount of money that can be redistributed and that a hierarchy of decision-making middlemen can anticipate the wants, needs and changes in an economy consisting of tens of millions and can, by fiat, adapt to them. It comes from a refusal to accept the messiness of life and a willingness to run national experiments to overcome that messiness, even if those experiments are fatal to the very people the middlemen purport to want to help.
This is a nightmare, waking.

Common Language Guide

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.--Crichton

Regarding the Collusion of Mass Destruction: The reaction that people have to these results should be a litmus test for citizenry. A real Yankee should be thrilled that the Presidency has not been compromised by foreign interests.

So far, wind, solar, and batteries—the favored alternative to hydrocarbons—provide  about  2% of the world’s energy and 3% of America’s. Nonetheless, a bold new claim has gained popularity: that we’re on the cusp of a tech-driven energy revolution that not only can, but inevitably will, rapidly replace all hydrocarbons.
95% of private-sector R&D spending and the majority of government R&D is directed at “development” and not basic research. If policymakers want a revolution in energy tech, the single most important action would be to radically refocus and expand support for basic scientific research.

43% of the people on the Forbes richest  list in 2018 were not on it 10 years ago. 

From Milton Friedman: The essential notion of a capitalist society is voluntary cooperation and voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is fundamentally force. If the government is the master, you ultimately have to order people what to do. Whenever you try to do good with somebody else’s money, you are committed to using force. How can you do good with somebody else’s money unless you first take it away from them? The only way you can take it away from them is by threat of force. You have a policeman, a tax collector who comes to take it away from them. Whenever you use force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions.
Voluntary vs coercion. Hmmmm.

A fast food restaurant manager in Tulsa was arrested after she allegedly shot and killed a man who threatened her and spit on her, police say.

In 1905 on this day, Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London were robbed and murdered. Fingerprinting led to the arrest and conviction of  brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, the first conviction for a capital crime using fingerprints.

                               Common Language Guide

Amherst College’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion last week issued a 40-page glossary of terms officials said they had created to spell out a common agreement on how to define words and phrases often used at the small liberal arts campus. 40 pages.

The “Common Language Guide,” emailed to the roughly 1,900 undergrads at the private college, broke down pages of terms under categories such as “isms,” “race and ethnicity, “gender identity,” “class,” “politics and policy,” “global power and inequality” and “disability.”

“This project emerged out of a need to come to a common and shared understanding of language in order to foster opportunities for community building and effective communication within and across difference,” the guide states.

Within a day, the school quickly rescinded the document, replacing it on the Amherst website with a statement from college President Biddy Martin claiming she had no prior knowledge that the guide was going to be drafted and circulated.

The document defines “capitalism” as an economic system that “leads to exploitative labor practices, which affect marginalized groups disproportionately.” It criticizes white feminists, declaring “white feminism” is “predicated upon the erasure of women of color and the ways in which racism and sexism converge and compound one another.”

"Equality:" “An equality emphasis often ignores historical and structural factors that benefit some social groups/communities and harm other social groups/communities,” the document reads, seeming to dissuade students from treating each other equally.

 “Race:" a “social construction (not a biological phenomenon) developed by European (white) scientists intended to rank humans based on perceived biological differences rooted in appearance, skin tone and ancestral homelands.” The entry explains the “idea of race is intricately linked with the practice of white supremacy, which continues to have damaging impacts on communities of color globally.”

“Homonationalism” – A concept introduced by Jasbir K. Puar to name the political deployments of certain kinds of LGBTQ+ people in the service of U.S. nationalist and imperialist agendas. Used to explain the ways in which cis-gay and lesbian veterans of the Iraq War were celebrated as proof of American exceptionalism in contrast to racist/orientalist discourse about Iraqi combatants and other people in Central Asia racialized outside of U.S. understandings of whiteness.

“Heterosexism” – A pervasive system of beliefs and practices that manifest across societal/cultural, institutional and individual domains that centers and normalizes heterosexuality. Enacts violence against all other sexualities through their erasure, pathologization and invalidation. Provides various advantages to heterosexual/straight folks.

“Cissexism” – The system of belief that cisgender individuals are the privileged class and are more natural, normal or acceptable than transgender, genderqueer, nonbinary and/or gender-nonconforming people. This belief manifests as the systematic denial of rights to trans and nonbinary people and their routine mistreatment.

It costs over $73,000 a year to attend Amherst.

Three Graphs

You can't outrun your DNA--sports analyst on a player in March Madness

Collusion of Mass Destruction: So, no treasonous collusion with the dreaded Russians. My bet is that we will not be treated to domestic relief and peace but, in the true mindset of the socialist, we will just try harder, in this instance to get Trump on something. Anything. It is hard to believe that these people were so invested in this clearly politically motivated mugging, regardless of how unattractive the victim. Why does anybody take these guys seriously?

One curious problem that seems to be recurring in the complex world  is the problem of failure. Freedom does not encourage failure but it does permit it. A recent article used the increase of drug addiction as evidence of failure of the free market. Much of the problems with government seems to be the difficulty many have with this evidence of individual bad choices; they call these the "collateral damage of capitalism" when really they are personal failures in a free context.
Incidentally, many of those failures would not happen were there religious, cultural or family guardrails in place.

I saw this Peterson guy that is getting so much press on a couple of YouTube clips and understand why he is so upsetting to the Left: He is thoughtful, reflective and comfortable with ambiguity. He is a radical's nightmare and they become frantic when they encounter him. He also, despite a large library of knowledge, does not wander off point.

Ned sent a fascinating Harvard Case Study of a student uprising at Wesleyan.

A New Mexico archbishop is renewing his call for Catholics to stop worshiping the skeleton folk saint known as La Santa Muerte, or "Our Lady of Holy Death," saying he fears some mistakenly believe the Grim Reaper-like figure is a Roman Catholic Church-sanctioned saint. there  are a lot of symbols and symbolic colors. Here is an all-purpose one: 

     

Parents are spending $500 billion a year supporting their adult children—more than twice the amount they’re saving for retirement.

Politicians are not pilots of a ship of state, and yet public rhetoric makes them appear to be just that. Actually, there is little politicians can do actively to promote human flourishing other than secure peace, keep taxes low, and administer justice tolerably well. If they stick to this recipe, they will avoid inserting harm into society. That is the best situation any society can attain.(Wagner)

If that is indeed a description of the charge of government, it is a giant one. And imagine how lovely our world would be if the government actually tried to achieve these delegations.

Apple became a tech colossus by pioneering a mobile phone that transformed technology, but can no longer count on it for growth. That’s why CEO Tim Cook is making a dramatic pivot to services—an area filled with risks and competition. On Monday, it will announce revamped video- and news-subscription services.(wsj)

On this day in 1979, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a historic peace agreement, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties. For their efforts they won the Nobel Prize and Sadat got assassinated.

                                             Three Graphs

Here's an interesting comparison between New York and Florida from somewhere.






And here is an unfair graph assuming all sorts of causes and effects:





Putting recent stock market moves into perspective

One Man....

America is the only country where you must be sensitive to the sensibilities of atheists.--J.D. Roark

Chris took the dog to an emergency room. The wait was as long as for people. He had a UTI.
Mom has had a great time with the Kanes.

Somebody described the "collusion" search as this generation's WMD.

A study shows that the majority of Americans polled are in favor of stricter gun control. That might change tomorrow--and that is one reason why the constitutional protection exists.

The U.S. is now an net exporter of energy.

Am I right? Did the woman of New Zealand really adopt a symbol of women's suppression to show solidarity with the people of their attacked mosque?

Bernard-Henri Levy describes his new book as a reminder of America's origin and values. A Frenchman feels he needs to do this. Like Tocqueville? He thinks that the Europeans should replace the American troops in Syria to protect the Kurds but doubts the populist movement will allow it. His book offers the thesis that there are "five kingdoms"--Turkey, Iran, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia/Sunni Terrorists--who are not afraid of war and who will fill any vacuum that the Americans allow to occur with their withdrawal from engagement with the world. 

There is a story that Russian troops have landed in Venezuela.

On this day in 1774, British Parliament passes the Boston Port Act, closing the port of Boston and demanding that the city’s residents pay for the nearly $1 million worth (in today’s money) of tea dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. The Boston Port Act was the first and easiest to enforce of four acts that together were known as the Coercive Acts. The other three were a new Quartering Act, the Administration of Justice Act and the Massachusetts Government Act.

                                                   One Man.....

In Pittsburgh, another policeman accused of an unreasonable shooting of a black suspect was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. Those who hoped for violent outrage were not disappointed. I was not there and know little of the testimony. (The victim was fleeing a drive-by shooting and was unarmed when he was fired on and killed by a pursuing policeman. He was shot in the back.) 

I'm sure there were nuances and legal points. I'm sure, while there are many such events with similar appearances, those events have their own distinguishing particulars. But all these events have a unifying element they share with the infamous Simpson trial: They are all jury trials. And, in our modern world with its eagerness to expand individualism and populism at the expense of representative forms--e.g. Brexit and uprooting the Electoral College--is there any better example of democracy in action than a jury trial?

Sunday/Wages of Sins

"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a genuine workers' state in which all the people are completely liberated from exploitation and oppression."--North Korea's official  website. Well, that's good to know. I actually thought it was a soulless, homicidal kleptocracy run with all the competence of a Bulgarian farm commissar and without any regard for human value or decency. Oh, wait.  

Mom is visiting the Kanes. They are planning to sell their Pittsburgh house and move to Florida permanently.

Slate has a big editorial on Joe Rogan and his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. It is Apple Podcasts’ second-most-downloaded podcast in both 2017 and 2018 and routinely sits near the top of Stitcher’s weekly most-popular-podcast rankings. The YouTube streams of the podcast draw millions of views from the young male demographic that has long made up the entertainment industry’s most coveted audience.
"Rogan’s podcast has become an important node in the “Intellectual Dark Web,” a loose network of “classical liberal” writers, scholars, and speakers who claim to have been marginalized by elitist progressives intent on maintaining identitarian orthodoxy. These people inveigh against political correctness and identity politics in publications like Quillette and on YouTube videos and one another’s podcasts. They claim to be personally liberal—like Rogan, they mostly all claim to “go left on everything”—even as they profess reactionary ideas. They take the fact that their theories and opinions are unpopular among their peers in academia and the media as proof that their peers are suppressive."
Slate is worried, superior and slightly obtuse. The problem here is not specific to any group, it is a pervasive broad and judgmental shallowness in a huge media that a large minority has no access to.

Are tattoos and piercings cultural appropriations?

Rescue helicopters were battling severe winds on Saturday to airlift more than 1,300 people off a Viking Cruises' ship that issued a distressed call after an engine failure off the coast of Norway.

The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires that each administration report "the economic and programmatic assumptions" underlying a budget. The result is a database of every administration's growth forecasts released since 1975. Using this data, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) just released a report showing that this administration "is the first on record to have experienced economic growth that meets or exceeds its own forecasts in each of its first two years in office."

There is an article on the return of the night train, with sleeper cars.

Barbra Streisand  said the children molested in "Neverland" “were thrilled to be there” and that what allegedly happened to them “didn’t kill them." Sometimes when there is a lot on your plate there is no room for reality.

The U.S. posted its largest monthly budget deficit on record in February with a gap of $234 billion, breaking the previous $231.7 billion mark set in February 2012, Bloomberg reports. According to Treasury data released Friday, the deficit for the first five months of this fiscal year jumped to $544.2 billion — a 40% increase from the 2018 fiscal year — as corporate and individual tax revenues declined following President Trump's $1.5 trillion tax cut package.  U.S. budget deficit grew by $113 billion in fiscal year 2018.

A survey of 2,000 Americans found that about half expressed fear of working out in front of others.

                                          Wages of Sins

The gospel today has two unusual references to current affairs, one an attack on some Galileans in the Temple and the other, an industrial accident where a tower collapsed and killed eighteen. The former is especially interesting in that it apparently involved Pilate's raiding the Temple treasury for funds to build an aqueduct that appears again in the "renewed friendship" that Herod and Pilate show during the Crucifixion. 
Christ's point is that earthly suffering, contrary to belief, was not experienced in response to spiritual failure. This idea of suffering on earth for your sins is a seemingly basic notion in us and even Christ could not defeat it. Even in the Middle Ages a husband could divorce his wife if she went mad not because of her madness but because her madness was assumed to be an affliction that she suffered because of some previous serious sin that devalued her.

Reverie

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. --Karl Marx 
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed. -- Gandhi

Watched the wrestling nationals last night. Really terrific. Penn State is a monster but Ohio State is very strong. Bo Nickel pinned into the finals at 197.

The Mueller report is in--so that will end all the bickering, right?

For those of you who are wondering why Trump keeps hammering the dead: “A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the … Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday. David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on December 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro. BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on January 10, 2017.” (The dossier, paid for by the Clinton campaign, alleges that when Trump found out he was in the same hotel room that  Barack Obama had used,  Trump called and hired some prostitutes to come over and urinate on the bed. It was called “the golden showers” story.)
Our leaders.

Nearly 1,600 people were secretly recorded in South Korean motel rooms and live-streamed online for paying customers to watch in an unsettling, widespread scandal.

[H]istorians should approach capitalism not as a system of exploitation, which it clearly is not, but as a system of access. In the bad old days, only a tiny few had any access at all to large accumulations of capital or to the benefits that such accumulations could produce. Under capitalism, a revolutionary thing has occurred: anyone at all can get access to a share of the returns on capital. From the perspective of world and comparative history, this is an utterly momentous development, one whose implications have not yet been adequately explored owing to the discipline’s wasteful intellectual diversions, first to Marxism, and second to critical theory.---Kuznicki 

Mississippi’s Republican governor signed a bill Thursday that, with few exceptions, criminalizes abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Something called The 2019 World Happiness Report  says that Finland remains the happiest country on Earth for the second year in the row, while the U.S. drops to No. 19, its worst ranking ever (it was No. 18 in 2018 and No. 14 in 2017). In the U.S., where prosperity is on the rise, researchers pin the blame on declines in social capital and social support and increases in obesity and substance abuse. Author Jean M. Twenge believes fundamental changes in how Americans spend their leisure time are also to blame, pointing a finger at the rise of digital media and the decline of face-to-face interactions.

From a Mallon essay in The New Yorker: “As we got deep into 2016, the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina came to feel almost like refuges. So did the political discourse of the early two-thousands: I invite you, in our current ghost-tweeted political era, to go back just eight years, to the Facebook postings of Sarah Palin, and tell me that they do not now read like a lost volume of ‘The Federalist Papers.’ ”

During a speech before the second Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry declared, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” Following the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, Patrick Henry was appointed governor of Virginia by the Continental Congress.


                                           Reverie

Jake Tapper asserted to Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post that "the Obama administration has used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists ... more than all previous administrations combined.".

Only 37% support Medicare-for-All if it means raising taxes. And 57% of Americans oppose banning semi-automatics. And apparently the idea of the "Green Deal" requires the abolition of private car ownership (new to me.) So the Dems are creating powerfully unpopular notions as baseline political beliefs. Maybe the Russians are influencing their policy committees.

The West is confused about individuals. One white whacko is seen to represent all white people, a movement within Islam is seen not to represent Islam, and we are discouraged from even generalizing about the XX or XY genotype.

The enthusiasm for the Second Amendment repeal is characteristic of thin but symbolic thinking. There are 40 odd State Constitutions that have similar language you’d have to repeal as well.

More than 65 million Miles are driven by trucks in the U.S. every year.

When Sweden eliminated its wealth tax, The Financial Times reported, the elimination of the tax had "virtually no effect of government finances."

The U.S. government has spent well over $150 billion over the last decade on green renewables, according to the Institute for Energy Research, but today we get less than 10% of our energy from "green" renewable sources.

The Va. governor's PR problems are comic. The double standards in the Press have become huge, irrational blind spots.

Raise your hand if you believe that the likes of Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Marco Rubio can possibly know enough to plan and to run an economy that effectively serves the needs of 328 million people. But the deeper point is not that this task is beyond the abilities of venal politicians; it’s that this task is beyond – far beyond – the abilities of anyone. --Bordeaux

Medical direct to consumer ads make up 32% of pharma  advertising budget.

5G has a significant security problem that has not yet been fixed. When it is it will allow remote robotic surgery.

Lions can jump 15 feet high, 40 feet long and run up to 50 mph.

The odds that police will solve a shooting are low and dropping. Homicides and assaults carried out with guns lead to arrests about half as often as when the same crimes are committed using other weapons or physical for. The odds of an arrest are particularly low when victims survive, in part because those crimes tend to be assigned to detectives whose caseloads are exponentially higher compared to their colleagues in the homicide department, who are often overburdened themselves. The chances are even lower if the victims are people of color. When a black or Hispanic person is fatally shot, the likelihood that local detectives will catch the culprit is 35% — 18 percentage points fewer than when the victim is white. For gun assaults, the arrest rate is 21% if the victim is black or Hispanic, versus 37% for white victims.

These are just numbers; the factors are myriad.

 

The public phone calls after the SOTU were a strong argument against the idea of democracy. One girl from Pittsburgh called and thought that opposition to nine month abortion implied a violation of the separation of church and state.

Priest, of Epoch Investment Partners, summed up the social issue raised in Barron's Roundtable: “Democracy flowers when living standards are rising alongside it. But when you simultaneously challenge social norms and many of the values that anchor people—a sense of home, job security, and the prospects for growth—and amp it up with social-media networks, you get serious blowback.”

The Virginia governor for Kavanaugh! ‘‘Iphigenia for Helen!’’ "Agamemnon for Iphigenia!" "Clytemnestra for Agamemnon!"

College funding in the U.S.I is privately funded. In the US 69.7 percent of 2018 high school graduates enrolled in college. However, slightly over half will graduate.

• In Germany, where college is tuition wavered, 29.3 percent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Germany has a quota system, Numerus Clausus, which results in system where competition is high; students must be at the top of their class. So, the government does pay for college, but only pay for the best.