Open Minded to Death

The essence of socialism is government allocation of capital.--many


Went to the ballgame last night with Chris. Lovely night and setting. Everything but baseball. We had a great time. No one enjoys a baseball game as much as Chris. I Ubered for the first time. Expensive. Bell hit a monster homerun.

“The glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming” have “no place in our city or on our Earth anymore.” This is DeBlasio at his announcing his presidential candidacy. The mayor of New York wants to outlaw New York.
Is there no satirist out there, no clear thinking observer to chronicle these ridiculous times?

The WashPo has a list of the things Trump doesn't want to do. They call this "obstruction." It is all pretty weak stuff. They must know that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-guide-to-20-inquiries-trump-and-his-allies-are-working-to-impede/2019/05/11/83114574-733a-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?noredirect&utm_term=.ee5f69b703f0


Asylum-seeking is not a classification of immigrant, it is a defense against deportation.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he didn’t intend to soon implement a planned move to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, saying a decision would be pushed off several years.

Since 1976 there has been the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Every year, taxpayers can, by checking a box on their tax return, contribute ($1 until 1993, $3 since then) to the fund -- without increasing their tax liability. Participation peaked in 1980, when 28.7% of taxpayers checked the box.
By 2018, participation had withered to 3.9% (i.e., 96.1% "voting" against it with their pencils). John McCain in 2008 was the last major party candidate to accept taxpayer funding (and consequent spending limits).

Consequently, justice is secured by suitably punishing acts of injustice, not by rewarding justice, which is your duty. Justice is the residual (a negative virtue) that consists in what remains, or is left over, after the civil order has instituted proportional punishments for unjust actions.--Nobel laureate Verrnon Smith. Is that true?

 A new study finds that overconfident people from upper-class backgrounds succeed, even if they’re not that clever. This is a difficult problem for the "Adversity Scale." Perhaps the upgrade of disadvantaged people will not be enough; perhaps we should downgrade the advantaged. Make the physically gifted wear extra weight (a Vonnegut story), make the others eat leaded paint.
  
U.S. industrial capacity has never been larger -- it is 66% above what it was when NAFTA was ratified in 1994 and 15% above what it was when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 -- and real U.S. manufacturing is almost back to where it was in 2007, the year the recession began.
Manufacturers' output is 11% above what it was in 2001 and 45% above 1994. (These statistics are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.) U.S. exports are 85% higher than in 2001 and 200% higher than in 1994, and about 800% higher than in 1975, the last year of a U.S. trade surplus.


On this day in 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through referendum. The referendum passed with 62% of voters (1.2 million people) voting yes. The vote attracted a large turnout, with 60.5% of eligible voters.
  
                                                  Open Minded to Death

We are a trusting people. We are willing to give strange and unreasonable ideas a chance. So we consider that we might be born with an incestuous lust for some family members and murderous hate toward others. Such an idea may be called many things but scientific is not one. So, too, behaviorism which postulates we are born as tiny, pink giggling tabla razas whose personalities are imprinted after birth by experience. This notion is not devoid of science--it is contrary to science. There are countless experiments that show it simply is not true. But we were willing to give it a chance.
These errors are not just of academic interest.  People were treated as if these ideas were reasonable. So, too, people were lobotomized. And their stomachs removed for ulcers. All these errors were made with good intent, if inaccurate science.

Our open-mindedness extends beyond bad science; the so called social sciences are rife with it. Communism saw inherent social conflict resolving inevitably to a promised land of happy workers --after the prerequisite wholesale murders--with no proof at all. Nazism claimed a racial superiority of a self-interested subset contrary to all evidence. Socialism periodically rises from the dead--after horrible periods of homicide and degradation--with claims that are only hopes, hopes that defy what we know about people and behavior.

The recent plans of  'adjusting' SAT scores on the basis of mitigating factors that might influence performance is similarly starry-eyed. This, too, has been disproved. But the idea is Behaviorism II, the silly old Skinner-ism notion that we are all born the same, literally the same, and that differentiation is provided by life experience. A negative experience will impact our performance.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.


But people are complex. The only way our managers can manage us is if the fault is in our environment, something they can manipulate. But throwing our support behind erroneous thinking never ends well.