Sunday/Blood and Soil

Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.--Bastiat

Kessel was traded.
A very good dinner at the Duquesne Club with Kapil and Chris. He is joining the Mercy staff as the Vice-Chair of Medicine.
Kristy Borza, the PGC tennis pro, was married yesterday and Chris went to the reception at the Foundry.

Teachers' salaries have come up again in the national debate over the presidency. But the political fact is that education is largely a local issue paid for by local property taxes. A president has precisely nothing to do with that. So, what exactly does a presidential candidate taking a stand on teachers' salaries mean?

Philosophy from the Kleptocracy:

The liberal ideology that has underpinned Western democracy for decades is “obsolete,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times published Friday. Speaking to the FT on the eve of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, during which world leaders will discuss trade, security and other matters, Putin said “the liberal idea” had “outlived its purpose” and “come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
This is not nuts, this is the current belief of most young people as well as the multiple Presidential candidates. Individual liberty is increasingly sacrificed to the ignorance of the collective. The American Revolution looks more and more like a miracle every minute.

It is, however, an iron law: The more government does to influence the flow of money, the more money will be spent to influence elections.--Will
The oft-heard cry where politicians denounce money's influence in elections acts as if the politician is somehow not involved.

One of history’s most famous warhorses was Comanche. The Bay gelding was the mount of Captain Myles Keogh of the ill-fated 7th Cavalry and a survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Though badly wounded, he recovered from his injuries and became a mascot  to the cavalry. He received a military funeral when he died many years later. Comanche was stuffed and still resides in a glass case at the University of Kansas. His story was told in a Disney movie and in a Johnny Horton song.

Stuffed.

Today is Thomas Sowell's birthday. He is 89.

                                  Blood and Soil

The epistle from Paul today opens with this:

"For freedom Christ set us free;
so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery."

And ends with this:

"But if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law."

This fits well with the gospel, one of the most disturbing writings in Christianity, I think.

The gospel opens with Christ being turned away from a Samaritan village and the apostles hoping Christ will rain retaliatory fire on them. Christ ignores them and as they move on three men offer their allegiance to Him, each with a condition.
To the first He says, "Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head."

The second wants to bury his father first. To him He says,  "Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

The third want to say goodbye to his family first. To him He says, "No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God."

Is this as scary as it sounds? No, it's worse. 

To the first man, Christ is describing Himself--on two completely separate planes. First, He is on the road to Calvary; that is His physical essence. He is not a Galilean, or a son or a leader or teacher. He is a being whose definition will not be complete until He is sacrificed. He has no home because He is a process. Second, He actually is not of this world; He has no home here.

The second and third responses sound especially harsh, especially to people who have already been reassured they can pull a cow out of a ditch on the Sabbath. But His point is always that there is a gulf between the material and the spiritual. Blood and Soil are not adequate points of allegiance. The spiritual world and the material world do not overlap except in one instance: Him.

Work for its Own Sake

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?--Steven Wright


Went to Casbah last night with Kelly Meade.
Chris made cinnamon buns this morning. Terrific.


President Donald Trump and China's Xi Jinping agreed to a cease-fire Saturday in their nations' yearlong trade war, averting for now an escalation feared by financial markets, businesses and farmers.


Passive investments control about 60% of the equity assets, while quantitative funds -- those relying on trend-following models instead of fundamental research -- now account for 20% of the market share, according to estimates from J.P. Morgan.
Passive funds have attracted $39 billion of inflows so far this year, whereas active funds lost a whopping $90 billion in 2019, according to J.P. Morgan.


At one point in the Thursday "debate" the candidates were asked regarding health care plans to “raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants”, and every single one of them raised a hand. 
That is quite a commitment. I wonder why geography makes a difference. If people deserve medical coverage or disability payments, why should it matter where they live? We are a wealthy country. Why shouldn't we just pay for all of it, regardless of who you are or where you live? Why should location matter?


Speaking of the debate, at one point the esteemed candidates were shouting over one another in the voter auction, trying to out-bid each other. Kamala Harris jumped in with a since oft-quoted line:. 

"Hey guys, you know what, America does not want to witness a food fight," the California senator said. "They want to know how we're going to put food on their table." 

So the government is a farmer? A delivery system? Who do these people really think they are?

Today is the birthday of Frédéric Bastiat:
Thanks to exchange, a strong person can do without genius up to a certain point, and an intelligent being without physical strength, for each person would receive the benefit of the distinctive qualities of his fellow-men through the admirable community that it establishes between men.


I wonder if these guys think that reading the Mueller report aloud will make it different?

The wife of Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has left him — and taken £31 million--to start a new life, "it is understood." Princess Haya, who had not been seen since February, is said to have fled to Germany with her son and daughter.

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medications somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medications and a government bureaucracy to administer “universal health care.”--Sowell

When you examine the full extent of the poverty, inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on in this country, it can feel crushing. We still have a lot of work to do.--Jill Richardson, on the Fourth if July. This reminds me of the preoccupation of those plastic surgery addicts.

Schiller’s Pharmacy has become Schiller’s Apothecary. The business on the corner of South Aiken Avenue and Walnut Street was purchased in April by New Jersey-based Apotheco Pharmacy.

Small numbers are important over the long term. Over 20 years, a compound return of 5.6% will turn $10,000 into $29,736; at 7%, that $10,000 would grow to $38,697. Over 30 years and starting with $50,000, that “small” difference in return is the difference between $256,382 (5.6%) and $380,613 (7%).

 Recent gains have helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average  to ring up its best June gain of 7.2% since 1938 when the blue-chip benchmark surged an eye-popping 24.3% on the month, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Even through most of the 1990s, the Big Three’s market share was above 70% and they didn’t go below 50% market share until 2008. Ford and GM sales combined represented more than 50% of US car sales in every year until 2001, and subsequently fell below 33.33% for the first time in 2012. By 2016, the combined market share of the Big Three fell to an all-time low of 44.2%.

The Globe Theater, where most of Shakespeare’s plays debuted, burned down on this day in 1613. The Globe was built by Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1599 from the timbers of London’s very first permanent theater, Burbage’s Theater, built in 1576. Before James Burbage built his theater, plays and dramatic performances were ad hoc affairs, performed on street corners and in the yards of inns.

                       Work for its Own Sake

Griswold has a review, forthcoming in the Cato Journal, of Oren Cass’s new book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Here’s a passage from the review:

Cass flatly rejects Adam Smith’s fundamental observation that “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” He argues instead that production comes first: “Production without consumption creates options; consumption without production creates dependence and debt.” 

 
Smith felt that consumption (and the freedom to consume) created value of a product and guided production. On the other hand, the value of a commodity, according to Marx in volume one of Capital, can be measured according to the amount of socially necessary labor-time that was invested in its production. Value can only be expressed in relation to other commodities and manifests itself in exchange-value. For example, bartering.

The idea that production is the linchpin in the economy is an effort to dignify labor above all--a preoccupation of the Nineteenth Century--and to deny the economy's commercial  and social nature. The worker's efforts are of value regardless of how it is priced. (If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the essence of "Art for its Own Sake," where the act of creation is beyond critical evaluation.) But there is more at stake; its motive, from a political view, is crucial. If the value of things is in the consumer, then the effort to manage and direct production is useless; the economy can not be shaped and managed--or only can be influenced by such as crass advertising.

And if the economy can not be managed, what's a poor power-hungry politician to do?

New Chart

The idea behind giving professors lifetime tenure is that this will enable them to speak out freely. But it would be hard to name any other occupation with a more cowardly record than academics, who have been giving in to politically correct campus bullies ever since the 1960s. --Sowell


Brian has some job offers to weigh.
Nice Pa Women Work dinner last night at Casbah. A lot of Docs.
One of Liz' co-workers tried to pull her in to a plot to embarrass her boss; a real Iago.

The City of Toronto police department has confirmed that a woman was shot in Nathan Phillips Square during the rally celebrating the Toronto Raptors' NBA championship win.

The Dodgers, looking to bolster a bullpen that has had its share of slip-ups this season, are interested in acquiring Pirates closer Felipe Vazquez, Jon Morosi of MLB.com reports. There is no indication the Pirates would be amenable to trading Vazquez, however. Vazquez wouldn’t be the closer with the Dodgers; he’d instead team with game-ending righty Kenley Jansen to form a duo that would be one of the envies of the league.
He couldn't be their closer, he'd be their setup man!

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress he was often blindsided by Jared Kushner’s foreign-policy efforts as Trump’s son-in-law worked independently, according to a transcript of testimony.(wsj)

 A 2016 paper by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman attempts to measure wealth concentration at the very top of the distribution. Saez and Zucman’s study points to an extreme and rapid inequality spike. They claim that the wealth share of the top 1 percent skyrocketed from 24 percent of the total share in 1980 to 42 percent today — almost doubling in a little over three decades. A new statistical measure prepared by the Federal Reserve appears to tell a very different story. It shows that wealth inequality is increasing in recent decades, but at a much more modest pace that’s less than half of the Saez-Zucman spike. The Fed’s new DFA measure shows a recent rise in wealth concentration from a trough in the 1980s. But that rise only brings the 1 percent to parity with what Saez and Zucman’s own series depicts for the 1950s — an era that political commentators often champion as a “golden age” of greater equality in the United States.

A new Project Veritas investigation reveals some suspicious search manipulation skullduggery at Google to promote a political and social justice agenda. The guy who runs Veritas is really objectionable, but not as objectionable as Google's acts, if true.

According to the most recent data available from the National Science Foundation, women actually earned slightly more bachelor’s degrees in “Science and Engineering” (3,111,529) between 2006 and 2016 than men (3,091,614).

On this day in 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot to death by a Bosnian Serb nationalist during an official visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The killings sparked a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I by early August.


                             Some Charts

Why is it that the Asian-white achievement gap gets no attention compared to the extensive and widespread attention the white-black achievement gap gets, even though the gap for Math SAT scores has been growing for Asians vs. whites since 1996 while it’s been stable for whites vs. blacks for the last 20 years? (This chart compares Asian-White, not Asian-Black, scores.)




Can you believe this if it's a census question?



This is something:



This graph  of inflation pops up every so often but there is an interesting translation: Blue lines = prices subject to free market forces. Red lines = prices subject to regulatory capture by government. Food and drink is debatable either way. 

reparation

"Oberlin’s president defiantly says “none of this will sway us from our core values.” Those values — moral arrogance, ideology-induced prejudgments, indifference to evidence — are, to continue using the progressive patois, the root causes of Oberlin’s descent beyond caricature and into disgrace." Will on Oberlin's disastrous calumny and mendacity in their libeling a local merchant.

Mom had dinner at Superior Motors with her high school class.
I really hurt yesterday and last night after what is laughingly call my "Physical Therapy."

For the second week in a row, a small Florida city has agreed to pay cyber criminals hundreds of thousands of dollars after a ransomware attack crippled city systems.

A factory storekeeper in the Nzara township of Sudan became ill on this day in 1976. Five days later, he died, and the world’s first recorded Ebola virus epidemic begins making its way through the area. By the time the epidemic was over, 284 cases were reported, with about half of the victims dying from the disease. Symptoms of Ebola hemorrhagic fever generally begin about four to 15 days after a person is infected with the virus. 

                                                     Reparations

Definition of reparation. 1a : a repairing or keeping in repair. b reparations plural : repairs. 2a : the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury. b : something done or given as amends or satisfaction.

So such an act requires someone who has damaged someone and that person who has been damaged by him.
Slavery in the Nineteenth Century was a way of life throughout the world. It still is in some places --but not here. No one in the U.S. is responsible for anyone's slavery in the Nineteenth Century. Some may have had slave owning ancestors, but few. Far more had ancestors who went to war and freed the slaves. (People strangely rarely talked about.)

Ex post facto is most typically used to refer to a criminal statute that punishes actions retroactively, thereby criminalizing conduct that was legal when originally performed. Two clauses in the United States Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws: 1. Art 1, § 9 1. This prohibits Congress from passing any laws which apply ex post facto. 2. Art. 1 § 10. 1. This prohibits the states from passing any laws which apply ex post facto.
"It is settled, by decisions of this Court so well known that their citation may be dispensed with, that any statute which punishes as a crime an act previously committed, which was innocent when done, which makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission, or which deprives one charged with crime of any defense available according to law at the time when the act was committed, is prohibited as ex post facto."-- Beazell v. Ohio, 269 U.S. 167 (1925)

So criminalizing slavery now in a period when it was legal is ex post facto. It doesn't matter what you think of it now, it matters completely how it was assessed then. If you change the speed limit today from 65 to 55, you can not arrest a guy for driving 60 yesterday.

Reparations are often used in reference to payments made by a defeated enemy, which in this case might make some sense.

Reparations for slavery are like so many of the whims of the far Left. They are so illogical, so unreasonable, so unjust and so far from the experience of most people that they are hard to grapple with. But that doesn't make them any more logical, just or reasonable. There is a word for holding total strangers guilty for events no one remembers: Vendetta.

Sometimes being cruel to be kind is just being crazy.

The Picture of Dorian Grey

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century."--Sowell

A WashPo article ("Tax Us More") signed by 18 self described rich people asks that taxes be raised "on us." By "us," I supposed they mean on  the writers of the article,  although it doesn't make lots of sense because there is nothing stopping them from sending more of their money to the government. Unless....they actually mean "on them," i.e. on "ME." So the rich guy--who could give the government more money on his own but doesn't--really wants to raise my taxes and look like a noble guy doing it.

Is someone wearing a Clemente jersey living in the past? And is he indulging in cultural appropriation?

Right now, the Chinese government has jailed more than 1.5 million Muslim-minority Uighurs in prison camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Yet, the world says very little. Beijing claims to just be “re-educating” troubled individuals. Has there been an outrage of international social justice? Most companies and governments have continued their relations with Beijing, business as usual.

Men are 3X more likely than women to ride a bicycle for transportation in Seattle and 2x more likely in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

 

Right now, nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in the state of California, and more are arriving with each passing day.  When you walk the streets of San Francisco or Los Angeles, you can’t help but notice the open air drug markets, the giant mountains of trash, and the discarded needles and piles of human feces that are seemingly everywhere.  If this is what things look like when the U.S. economy is still relatively stable, how bad are things going to get when the economy tanks?In San Francisco, the homeless population has grown by 17 percent since 2017, and when a UN official recently walked the streets she was absolutely horrified by what she witnessed. When Leilani Farha paid a visit to San Francisco in January, she knew the grim reputation of the city’s homeless encampments. In her four years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Farha has visited the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta, and Manila. The crisis in San Francisco, she said, is comparable to these conditions.

San Francisco has banned e-cigarettes...but not real cigarettes.

For the foreseeable future, fossil fuels will be crucial to sustaining civilization. A way must be found to use oil and gas, but capture their carbon dioxide emissions – and have the industry do something more than signal its regret; to be part of the solution, rather than most of the problem. The technology for sequestering carbon dioxide, still hopeless a few years ago, is now progressing in Norway, Canada and Texas. 

Philippize:
To behave, especially to speak or write, as if corruptly influenced.
After Philip II of Macedon. It was believed that after Philip took control of the shrine at Delphi, the seat of high priestess Pythia, she began delivering oracles in his favor.

An article by somebody named Nino Pagliccia attempts to rescue Venezuela from the damage done by America and its media running dogs (Spanish included to help the impression of authenticity):
We cannot deny the economic crisis in Venezuela caused by the “guerra económica” (economic warfare) waged by the US. The last conservative figure for the cost of US sanctions to Venezuela is US$130 billion. But the US government and the corporate media want you to believe that the economic crisis in Venezuela is due to the Maduro government mismanagement totally disregarding the impact of the unilateral coercive measures.


                            The Picture of Dorian Grey

When a politician looks in the mirror, what does he see?

Trump is a caricature of a politician. Everything is exaggerated. He is a walking satire, with all the politician's foibles highlighted. His most egregious behavior was the "lock her up" mantra that he started with Hilary, an echoing of the countless soundtruck democracies where the winner of the election imprisons the loser.

But he is a real danger to the politician and it is no wonder why they hate him so.

The danger is that the public may start to see them all for what they really are: Trump Lite. They should try to rise above him. But, since what he is essentially what they are, they can not. Like so many stupid fiction characters, they can not escape what they are. They don't imitate him, they are him. Kamala Harris has started a new tack: She wants to "lock him up."

Silly, self-absorbed, mendacious, posturing--they are all variants of the same theme--as they play to the voter's vanities and hopes. Universal access to a limited service. Curing cancer. Legislating equality. Taxing us into prosperity. At some future time it will make for great comedy. Now it is just mortifying.

But not as mortifying as a politician when he looks in the mirror. Because he sees Trump.

First Amendment

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. -Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher

We and the McGraws could not get tickets to the Holmes play at the Foster.
I've made some progress with my diet; sort of level 2 of three. But broke down last night with some of Chris' great bread.

Do you get the feeling the Press was furious that Trump did not attack Iran?

During Buttigieg’s recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd read him a statement from the Reverend Rodric Reid, an African-American pastor in Indianapolis. “I guarantee,” Reid had told the Indianapolis Star, that Buttigieg’s marriage to another man “is going to be an obstacle. . . . That is really still a touchy subject, specifically and especially in the African-American church.” Todd also noted that he’d talked to black congressmen who said Buttigieg’s homosexuality could be a problem with segments of the African-American vote.
Why is that opinion so accepted when if it were, say, from a Mormon, it would not?

The dates on our food labels do not have much to do with food safety. In many cases, expiration dates do not indicate when the food stops being safe to eat — rather, they tell you when the manufacturer thinks that product will stop looking and tasting its best. Although some foods, such as deli meats, unpasteurized milk and cheese, and prepared foods such as potato salad that you do not reheat, probably should be tossed after their use-by dates for safety reasons.
84 percent of consumers at least occasionally throw out food because it is close to or past its package date, and over one third (37 percent) say they always or usually do so. That food waste in landfills generates carbon dioxide and methane, a greenhouse gas 28 to 36 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. And you are not just wasting calories and money. You are wasting all the resources that went into growing, packaging and transporting that food.

In Britain last year, generously using the Final Energy Consumption metric, 4 per cent of energy came from wind and solar, 3 per cent from nuclear and less than 1 per cent from hydro, the three zero-carbon sources. The common misconception that wind and solar are bigger contributors comes from forgetting that electricity is just 20 per cent of energy: the rest is heat, transport and industry. (Think firing a steel furnace with wind.)

AbbVie struck a deal to buy Allergan for about $63 billion.


From a brutal interview with the feminist Dr. Phyllis Chesler by Louise Perry:
In 1979, Chesler was raped by her then-employer, Davidson Nicol—a senior official at the United Nations and dignitary from Sierra Leone. She tells me that this rape proved to be less traumatic than the subsequent behaviour of her fellow feminists. When Chesler disclosed what had happened to Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem—some of the most powerful women in the movement at the time—they refused to support her in confronting her attacker. Chesler writes that Morgan told her that it would “look bad for feminism” for a “white feminist to charge a black man with rape and sexual harassment,” and that Steinem backed up this decision. Even Andrea Dworkin failed to stand up for her, telling Chesler that in her opinion “accusing a black man would make feminists look like racists.” This, despite the fact that several women of colour were supportive of Chesler’s desire to confront Nicol, particularly given that he was well known to be predatory.

Big companies are scrambling to grab a share of the $150bn (£119bn) global cannabis market, eyeing products as diverse as beer and dog treats according to a report by Standard & Poor's which predicts further expansion as legal cannabis becomes acceptable.The report by the ratings agency says growth may be volatile, because of the changing regulatory framework. Two of the biggest investments in the sector have come from Altria, owner of Philip Morris cigarettes, and Constellation Brands, owner of Corona beer, which have each invested more than $1bn in such products.

Republican Roy Moore—who narrowly lost to Democrat Doug Jones in a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate in Alabama—announced he will run again. This country is reasonably concerned about surplus and scarcity. Now look at the 2020 presidential candidates. Why should a country of this size and competence have so much difficulty attracting good leaders? 


On this day in 1876, American Indian forces led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeat the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River.


                             First Amendment


The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Writing about NPR and PBS, Bordeaux raises an interesting question that is new to me.

"Note that among the freedoms guaranteed by this Constitutional provision are freedom of religion and freedom of the press. The authors and ratifiers of this amendment wisely sought, among other goals, to prevent the federal government from exercising influence over religion and over the press.

If the First amendment is violated when federal taxpayer funds are channeled to schools operated by churches – channeled with no intention by the state (or anyone else) either to give any religion an advantage or to deny the people of any religion the freedom to worship as they please – why is the First amendment not violated when federal taxpayer funds are channeled to organizations that are part of “the press”?

Put differently, if it is Constitutionally permissible for Uncle Sam to have a policy through which some of its tax revenues are channeled to support some media outlets, why is it Constitutionally impermissible for Uncle Sam or the states to have policies through which some of their tax revenues are channeled to support religious schools?

Indeed, if there is any Constitutionally relevant difference between the two cases, it seems to me that federal-government funding of NPR and PBS – funding made through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – is more Constitutionally dubious than are school vouchers. NPR and PBS were created by the CPB, itself created by the federal government and whose funding comes almost entirely from Congressional appropriations. In contrast, none of the religious schools, or religions, that receive, or that would receive, funding through school vouchers are creatures of the state.

The principal purpose of school vouchers is to promote schooling, not religious belief or churches. Any promotion of religious belief or churches is indirect. In contrast, the principal purpose of government funding that goes to NPR and PBS is to promote journalism. Government funding that goes to NPR and PBS is meant to affect the operation of the press in a rather direct manner, while government funding that goes to churches through school vouchers is not meant to affect the operation of churches or the acceptance or rejection of any theology."

So, why are government subsidies of the Press tolerated? Is it that the Press is seen as more pure than religion?

A Poster and Some Charts

i think i cracked the riddle: price is the signal in a free market economy that tells everyone what to do. this is why socialists and authoritarians hate market prices so much.THEY want to be the ones telling everyone what do do.--somebody on Twitter

Max was over for pizza last night.
Watched the Apollo 11 on CNN last night. Still astonishing.

A bidet is, literally, a pony (from French). An easel is, literally, an ass (from Dutch ezel).  If you are called Philip, you are, literally speaking, a horse lover, from Greek philo- (love) + hippos (horse). A hippopotamus is, literally, a river horse, from Greek potamos (river). A walrus is, literally, a horse whale, from Old Norse hrosshvalr (horse whale). Hippocampus, a part of the brain, is named so because its cross-section looks like a sea-horse, from Greek kampos (sea monster).

Some guys opened a store selling chips and drinks on the corner of Maryland and Walnut. We thought such a bizarre idea must mean it was for money laundrying. Well, it went out of business this week so it was just a bizarre idea.

Younger drinkers are drinking less, an S&P report says, and are turning instead "to coffee shops and recreational cannabis for an experience".

A senior Chinese police official who once headed Interpol admitted to receiving more than $2 million worth of bribes, a trial court said, in a case that symbolized a pitfall in China’s growing global reach. (wsj)

Hermetic is only indirectly related to Hermes.

adjective: 1. Airtight.
2. Not affected by outside influence.
3. Relating to the occult sciences, especially alchemy; magical.
4. Obscure or hard to understand.
From the belief that Hermes Trismegistus invented a seal to keep a vessel airtight in alchemy. Who was Hermes Trismegistus? It was the name of a legendary figure that Greek neo-Platonists thought was a blend of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. Trismegistos is Greek for thrice-greatest, from tris (thrice) + megistos (greatest), ultimately from the Indo-European root meg- (great) that's also the source of words such as magnificent, maharajah, mahatma, master, mayor, maestro, magnate, magistrate, maximum, and magnify.

International investigators have brought murder charges against four suspects including a Russian former security-service colonel in the downing of a passenger plane over Ukraine in 2014. Russia, the conscience of the world.

The climate suddenly cooled about 12,600 B.C., plunging the Northern Hemisphere back into an ice age for 1,300 years. The episode is known as the Younger Dryas, because in Scandinavia abundant pollen from a tundra flower called the mountain avens, Dryas octopetala, reappears in soil from this date, indicating that the forest had once more given way to tundra. With the sudden arrival of cooler, drier and less predictable seasons, early human attempts at agriculture in the Near East ceased, and people returned to nomadic hunting and gathering.  Wallace Broecker, a Columbia University geochemist, suggested that a North American ice sheet collapsed, flooding the Atlantic with fresh water, which interrupted the normal circulation of the Gulf Stream. Then a marine geologist, James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, said he had found evidence of the impact of a large object from space 12,900 years ago. Dr. Kennett's argument is that a swarm of meteorites punched through the atmosphere and caused a vast conflagration, filling the air with dust and soot. This shut out the sun, causing decades of continuous winter -sufficient to trigger an advance of ice sheets that, even when the dust cleared, kept the climate cool for more than a thousand years.

                    A Poster and Some Charts

A little poster:

An astonishing chart of 600% growth:



The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences

Sunday/Caritas

When prosperity comes, do not use all of it.--CONFUCIUS

Cercone wedding. Lovely. The bride was quite beautiful. We left when the guests started to take selfies with cows.
We stayed at a strange hotel, though.

A fight between Tory leader Boris Johnson and girlfriend Carrie Symonds, where the police were called by neighbors concerned for the woman's safety,  led to senior Tories voicing concerns Johnson had ruined his chances to get into No10 over the row. 
There is some good reason to believe the call was politically motivated.
"Boris." Probably a Russian.

Mysterious objects over Kansas City.
it was revealed that the mystery flying objects were a top-secret DARP (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project, dubbed Adaptable Lighter Than Air (ALTA) program

ALTA was developed to test high altitude lighter-than-air vehicle capable of wind-borne navigation over extended ranges. The balloons can fly at altitudes of more than 75,000 feet while carrying a small payload. 

Symonds:



Created by the dating company Nozze., which operates 21 branches across Japan, DNA Matching works with scientists at a Tokyo laboratory in order to decode the science of attraction and find the perfect match for its clients.
DNA Matching is clearly one of the more futuristic innovators of Japan’s dating industry. Its concept is simple: based on the survivalist scientific theory that people with the most diverse DNA are the most attracted to one another

This quote from Will's new book is so witheringly sensible and insightful, it likely will be banned: 
"The voluntary interactions of individuals in what we now call the private sector, and what in the Founders’s era was called society, aka almost all of life, would naturally produce inequalities. Individuals who are naturally unequal in endowments, desires, and exertions would in a context of political liberty, experience different social results. “In the Founders’ understanding,” [Martin] Diamond wrote, “whoever says equality of liberty thereby says inequality of outcomes; whoever says equality of outcomes thereby says inequality of liberty, because only the unequal handicapping of the superior will prevent their capacities from manifesting themselves.”"

Companies are investing in marijuana. Altria paid $1.8bn for a 45% stake in Cronos Group, a Canadian cannabis company and there could be expansion. Sales of traditional cigarettes are expected to fall in the US by up to 4.5% annually as the new generation of products, such as e-cigarettes, becomes more popular. While these products may be the target for growth for cigarette companies initially, the report expects more of a focus on products from the cannabis family.In anticipation of changes in the beer and spirits market, Constellation Brands has taken a stake in Canopy, another Canadian cannabis producer, which S&P's analysts say will provide growth opportunities for the company as beer and spirits sales slow. Amazingly, lawn and garden company Scotts Miracle Grow has invested $1bn buying companies that help users grow plants with little soil. "While hydroponics products are not solely dedicated to growing cannabis, we believe this is the primary purpose," the S&P analysts say.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

The original was in Greek, but it passed through Latin on its way to us, and the Latin word used for love in the passage was not ‘amor’ but ‘caritas,’ the root of our word ‘charity.’  It means ‘caring love,’ or perhaps ‘loving care.'