Haffner, Hitler and Us

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”--Jefferson

Brian is really seeing a lot of theft and wanton destruction of scooters.

Bad scene from Pirate game last night. Pirates threw at Dietrick again, Hughes hit Marte, some trouble between the bench and Garrett, who lost his mind and attacked the Pirate bench. Puig recognized lunacy and joined in. Really ugly. Two really bad teams, suffering and miserable, bonding.

A man who was involved in a middle school shooting when he was 11 years old in 1998 died in car crash on a northeastern Arkansas highway, the State police said. He was released when he was 21, changed his name and moved to a town near you.....

The new anxiety of income inequality is stalking the free world. The widely-used flawed data from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez exclude both taxes and transfers in its calculations--but everyone uses it anyway. 
But by adjusting for different household size,  the highest 20% earned only 6.5 times as much after-tax income per person as the lowest 20%.  

But income is likely to be higher in households with two or more workers than it is in households with no workers or only one. By further adjusting for the different number of earners, the highest 20% earned only 3 times per worker as much as the lowest 20%, after taxes. That seems to imply a lot of uncertainty regarding the problem and wrenching the economic system to adjust such a low disparity seems excessive.

Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor. These people confuse wage rates with wage income. It has always been a mystery to me to understand why a youngster is better off unemployed at $15 an hour than employed at $7.25 (updated). The rise in the legal minimum-wage rate is a monument to the power of superficial thinking.--Freidman

On Tuesday, Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University (PSU) in Oregon, publicly shared a letter he’d received from his employer, outlining the results of an academic misconduct investigation into his now-famous 2018 “grievance-studies” investigation. As was widely reported in the Wall Street Journal, Quillette and elsewhere, Boghossian, researcher James Lindsay and Areo editor Helen Pluckrose submitted nonsensical faux-academic papers to journals in fields such as gender, race, queer and fat studies, some of which passed peer review—and were even published—despite their ludicrous premises. The project was defended by 1990s-era academic hoaxer Alan Sokal, who famously performed a somewhat similar send-up of fashionable academic culture two decades ago. While many cheered Boghossian’s exposé, some scholars within these fields were horrified, and it has long been known that Boghossian, by virtue of his PSU affiliation, would be vulnerable to blowback.PSU’s Institutional Review Board decided that Boghossian has committed “violations of human subjects’ rights and protection”—the idea here being that the editors who operate academic journals, and their peer reviewers, are, in a broad sense, “human subjects”—and that his behavior “raises concerns regarding a lack of academic integrity, questionable ethical behavior and employee breach of rules.” As punishment, he is “forbidden to engage in any human-subjects-related [or sponsored] research as principal investigator, collaborator or contributor.” (from Quillette)
The paths of satire lead but to the grave.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is leading his colleagues to cut interest rates this week for the first time since 2008, even though the economy looks healthy, partly because it isn’t behaving as expected.
So they are reacting forcefully to something they don't understand in an effort to influence it?

GDP Numbers: Gross government spending, which accounts for about 17.5 percent of the GDP pie, spiked 5 percent. Non-defense spending rose by 15.9 percent!

Thus, without the spending binge, which will be accelerated by the budget betrayal promoted by the president and backed by more Democrats than Republicans in the House, the topline number would have been lower.

While government spending juices up the economy in the short run, the debt that we must incur to continue that spending is permanently weighing down the economy in the long run.

Which leads us to the third component – gross private domestic investment. That is the engine of a supply side economy. Those numbers contracted by 5.5 percent this past quarter, the worst showing since 2015. Investment in non-residential structures plummeted by 10.8 percent, highly unusual with such a good job market.

Then, of course, there is the final component: exports. Net exports were down 5.2 percent because of the tariffs.

“Homicide is the leading cause of death for non-Hispanic black male teenagers,” notes the Center for Disease Control, while accidents remain the top cause of death for teens from other racial backgrounds. The homicide rate in 2017 for black teens was almost 16 times higher than the rate among white teens.
It is actually more likely for black and Hispanic citizens to be killed by black and Hispanic police officers than by white officers.

On July 31, 1917, the Allies launched a renewed assault on German lines in the Flanders region of Belgium, in the much-contested region near Ypres, during World War I. The attack begins more than three months of brutal fighting, known as the Third Battle of Ypres. Haig ordered a final three attacks on Passchendaele in late October. The eventual capture of the village, by Canadian and British troops, on November 6, 1917, allowed Haig to finally call off the offensive, claiming victory, despite some 310,000 British casualties, as opposed to 260,000 on the German side, and a failure to create any substantial breakthrough, or change of momentum, on the Western Front. Given its outcome, the Third Battle of Ypres remains one of the most costly and controversial offensives of World War I, representing–at least for the British–the epitome of the wasteful and futile nature of trench warfare.

                    Haffner, Hitler and Us

From an FT article I could not read completely comparing the current American leadership to Germany in the 1930s through Sebastian Haffner's memoir of the rise of Nazism in Germany.  It is an assessment I just can not completely understand. There is a great difference between pointed mendacity and bloviating, between focused political ambition and Trump's casual shallowness. More, there is little difference to me between disdain for minority groups and disdain for working class tax payers and their children, but there is a lot of difference between hatred and disdain. Nonetheless, it is presented here as a reasonable concern:

. Then, as now, political moderates were constantly having to ask the question, how serious is this? Is it just distasteful or is it truly dangerous? . . .

. . . One strong temptation was simply to stop paying attention to the news and “shut one’s windows tightly and withdraw into the four walls of one’s private life.” Another was to take comfort in the things that had not changed — the parts of the state and of public life that still seemed solid and familiar. . . .

. . . The US president has just told black, Hispanic and Muslim congresswomen to “go back” to the “places from which they came”. Britain’s likely incoming prime minister has said that Muslim women wearing the niqab look like letter boxes. But it still seems unimaginable that storm troopers might one day drive minority groups out of public places.

But when do you sound the alarm? From exile in London, Haffner reflected: “It took me quite a while to realise that my youthful excitability was right and my father’s wealth of experience was wrong; that there are things that cannot be dealt with by calm scepticism.”

My instinctive reaction to the rise of Mr Johnson and the rhetoric of Mr Trump is still “calm scepticism”. But then again, I’m at roughly the same stage of life as Haffner’s father was in 1933.

The Roots of Conflict

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. -Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (25 Jul 1902-1983)



I watched the first innings  of the Pirate game last night and was ready to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. They are appallingly bad. 
The rumor is they are willing to trade Vasquez to the Dodgers but want their best minor leaguer. 

• Biden has rebounded to 28.4 percentage points from a low of 26.0 percentage points just after the debate. He was at 32.1 percent before the debate, so he’s regained about two-fifths of what he lost. Harris has fallen to 12.2 percentage points from a peak of 15.2 percentage points. She was at 7.0 percent before the debate, so she’s lost about a third of what she’d gained.

PragerU is a conservative web site with 5-minute videos on various topics. As of last week, 56 of the organization’s 320 five-minute videos on conservative topics — the minimum wage is bad, gun rights are good — are hidden on YouTube from users watching on Restricted Mode (RM). YouTube describes RM as “an optional setting … used by a small subset of users, such as libraries, schools, and public institutions, who choose to have a more limited viewing experience on YouTube.” Some conservatives are furious, claiming "censorship." But 98.5% of YouTube users don’t use restricted mode. And PragerU still has more than two million subscribers, and its YouTube videos receive over a billion views a year. One billion! As to those 56 videos specifically, the thrust of YouTube’s explanation in a Senate hearing last week is that they involve mature topics, including “Gender Identity: Why All The Confusion?,” “Born to Hate Jews,” “Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?,” and “What Is Intersectionality?”

Brazilian Prison Riot Leaves 52 Prisoners Dead, 16 Decapitated. Probably not scared straight yet.

"…. if your view is that the progressive agenda is morally wrong, that people shouldn’t receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes, you should be aware how many Americans are already “takers,” “moochers,” whatever. In fact, we’re talking about a vast swath of the heartland that includes just about every state that voted for Donald Trump. I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states’ federal “balance of payments” — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue. The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states." 
This is from Krugman and it is hard to think about. Does he think that the government takes money then gives it back to the people who paid them? Does anyone think that taxes should be just returned? This is the strawest of straw men. I get a headache just reading it.

Capital One said a hacker accessed the personal information for roughly 106 million credit card customers and applicants, one of the largest data breaches of a big bank.

Kyle Giersdorf, a 16-year-old video-game player, won $3 million on Sunday after winning the first-ever Fortnite World Cup. In an interview with ESPN, Giersdorf was asked what went through his mind when he won. “I don’t even know. That all the hard work I put into the game has finally paid off,” he said. The Pennsylvania teen, who goes by the screen name “Bugha,” played the insanely popular battle royale shooter game eight to 10 hours a day, his mother told ESPN. That dwarfs the approximate one-hour average time that many people spend playing video games, according to a 4,500-person survey on online gaming that Limelight Networks released earlier this year.

Antagonism is being touted as a quality inherent to populism.  One article points to  Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher of the Nazi era—he is sometimes called the "crown jurist of the Third Reich"—who has had a strong influence on both the hard left and the hard right. In The Concept of the Political (1932), a relentless critique of classical liberalism and constitutional democracy, Schmitt sought to displace the ideal of voluntary cooperation with the idea of conflict. The "specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced," Schmitt wrote, "is that between friend and enemy." 
So there is no effort to come together, to have a pluralistic society discuss their differences and come to a mutually agreed upon solution. But this sounds much more like the Left than populism.

This year, the government will raise $3.5 trillion, borrow $1 trillion, and spend $4.5 trillion.

China’s GDP was less than $300 billion in 1980, a figure that had risen to $11 trillion by 2015. The country’s total trade with the outside world came to just $40 billion in 1980, but in 2015 it was $4 trillion—a hundredfold increase. Allison has plenty more shockers up his sleeve: “For every two-year period since 2008, the increment of growth in China’s GDP has been larger than the entire economy of India. Even at its lower growth in 2015, China’s economy created a Greece every sixteen weeks and an Israel every twenty-five weeks.” In fact, since the Great Recession of 2008, 40 percent of all the economic growth in the world has occurred in just one country: China. Allison quotes Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, for the coup de grâce: “It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state since July 4th, and most of those quakes were aftershocks of the two very large events that hit the Ridgecrest area early in the month.  

“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This, one of Lady Macbeth’s most famous lines, is cited by Elizabeth Winkler in her recent Atlantic essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” as a "thrilling instance of a woman’s resistance to femininity." Winkler then goes on to compare Lady Macbeth’s anger to women’s #MeToo “fury.” “This woman,” Winkler says of Lady Macbeth, woke her out of her “adolescent stupor” by “rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status.”
"a woman’s resistance to femininity?" 
This is a very unusual explanation of these lines. The good Lady is calling for divine help to assist her in killing the innocent king, a guest in her home. This is one of the real villains of  Elizabethan drama. Is this really #MeToo?
This is in The Atlantic!

On this day in 1864, a Union advance was stopped at the Battle of the Crater.


                             The Roots of Conflict

Think about primary and secondary schooling. I think that every parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, every parent has the right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. The same can be said about the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag, sex education and other hot-button issues in education. These become contentious issues because schools are owned by the government.

In the case of prayers, there will either be prayers or no prayers in school. It’s a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not, and parent groups with strong preferences will organize to fight one another. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent will be forced to either concede or muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. Such a conflict would not arise if education were not government-produced but only government-financed, say through education vouchers. Parents with different preferences could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice. Instead of being enemies, parents with different preferences could be friends.

People also have strong preferences for goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for white wine and distaste for reds while others have the opposite preference — strong preferences for red wine. Some of us love classical music while others love rock and roll music. Some of us love Mercedes-Benz while others love Lincoln Continentals. When’s the last time you heard red wine drinkers in conflict with white wine drinkers? Have you ever seen classical music lovers organizing against rock and roll lovers or Mercedes-Benz lovers in conflict with Lincoln Continental lovers?

People have strong preferences for these goods just as much as they may have strong preference for schooling. It’s a rare occasion, if ever, that one sees the kind of conflict between wine, music and automobile lovers that we see about schooling issues. Why? While government allocation of resources is a zero-sum game — one person’s win is another’s loss — market allocation is not. Market allocation is a positive-sum game where everybody wins. Lovers of red wine, classical music and Mercedes-Benz get what they want while lovers of white wine, rock and roll music and Lincoln Continentals get what they want. Instead of fighting one another, they can live in peace and maybe be friends.

It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of market allocation, have government, through a democratic majority-rule process, decide what wines, music and cars would be produced. If that were done, I guarantee that red wine lovers would organize against white wine lovers, classical music lovers against rock and roll lovers and Mercedes-Benz lovers against Lincoln Continental lovers.

Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Again, the prime feature of political decision-making is that it’s a zero-sum game. One person’s win is of necessity another person’s loss. If red wine lovers win, white wine lovers would lose. As such, political allocation of resources enhances conflict while market allocation reduces conflict. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict. That’s the main benefit of limited government.

Unfortunately, too many Americans want government to grow and have more power over our lives. That means conflict among us is going to rise.
(This is from an old essay by the always insightful, pure and simple Walter Williams)

Push Button Research

“Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.” --Voltaire



Chris and I were too tired to go to Mineo's last night.
Good to see the Clarksons this weekend.
Beautiful sky.
My online course is over and good riddance. But I nonetheless plan another next month, this one from a guy I know.
I hope Ned and Caroline will help me with a Wordpress this week.
 
A business is rising: Repomen grabbing scooters. They contract with people who do not want scooters dropped on their property. "it’s a very simple concept,” a scooter repo guy says. “They have taken their stuff and placed it on someone else’s property without permission.”

“Now that’s them, and here’s us. We’re two guys who went to the property owners and got permission with that property owner to remove that stuff off their property. That’s all it is.”

Aristotle said it is unjust to treat equals as unequal (I.e. treating a man and women different in a divorce settlement) but equally unjust is treating unequals as equals (i.e. holding a child to a contract with adults).

President Bush, President Obama, and both parties in Congress deepened the red ink with the TARP bailouts, which were initially expected to cost $700 billion, as well as with President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus law, which failed to rescue the economy even by the White House’s own metrics. By 2009, the deficit had exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, reaching $1.4 trillion. Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats. The result was the 2011 Budget Control Act which limited federal spending.
The current budget deal would essentially repeal the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act and raise the baseline for future discretionary spending by nearly $2 trillion over the decade.

Not at all sure where this thing on Rashida Tlaib came from but she seems nice: https://twitter.com/NewsChute/status/1152675252901752832






An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, “5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.” The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.

On this day in 1958, the U.S. Congress passed legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space.


                                Push Button Research

In 2008, Science, one of the top scientific journals, published a paper by a group of psychologists that claimed to find biological differences between liberals and conservatives. According to the paper, conservatives tended to react more to “sudden noises” and “threatening visual images.” This result, which suggests that political liberalism and conservatism spring from deep, indelible sources rather than reactions to the issues of the day, suggests that polarization will never end -- that the populace will always be divided into two camps, separated by a gulf of biology.

This raises an interesting point. Although early experimenters in physics and chemistry generally had to build one apparatus to test each hypothesis, modern researchers gather reams of data and run a large number of statistical tests on it. Many big institutions with good computer systems do this all the time. In this model the thesis emerges from the data, not the other way around. That increases the chance that the researchers will find spurious correlations, especially if they choose which tests to perform based on the results of previous tests. This problem is especially severe for fields like economics and biostatistics that rely on observational data not produced in a lab, since running test after test can be accomplished with the press of a button. 

Fast forward to now. In a working paper published this month, another team of psychologists attempted to repeat the experiment, and also conducted other similar experiments. They failed to find any evidence linking physical-threat perception with political ideology. But when they tried to publish their paper, Science desk-rejected it -- that is, the editors refused to even send the paper out for peer review, claiming that the replication study simply wasn’t noteworthy enough to be published in a top journal. Meanwhile, another team of researchers also recently tried to replicate the original study, and failed. So even though at this point the evidence proving a biological basis for liberalism and conservatism seems to have been invalidated, it’s unclear whether this fact will make it into the public conversation.

A recent article in Bloomberg by Noah Smith concluded that science was suffering from a serious research problem: Scientific journals are too focused on novel ideas. And replication studies were less appealing.

There have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” (New Yorker)

sunday/ Paternoster

The big thieves hang the little ones--Czech proverb

Dinner at Lidia's with the Clarksons and the McGraws. The meal was good. While I think Trump a 'no philosophy zone,' Clarkson thinks he has a real vision and plan; he thinks his tariffs, for example, are not protectionist but methods to change government philosophies, like embargoes. He described Trump as "Psychologically bulletproof!"From Maureen Dowd's column, the very thing we were saying last night: "The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter." Beeldenstorm.

Attorney General William Barr has ordered that the federal death penalty be reinstated; the last execution in the federal system came in 2003.

The Pirates are picked as having a 5% chance of the Playoffs. But they are ahead of 10 others.

E-cigarettes allow users to ingest more nicotine than they would using traditional cigarettes. Addiction treatment specialists say that some teenagers who use e-cigarettes show signs of nicotine toxicity and respiratory problems. Doctors note that teenagers use e-cigarettes at faster rates than traditional cigarettes, and experts worry they make teenagers more vulnerable to other kinds of substance abuse.

Three large asteroids buzzed planet Earth on Wednesday, one coming even closer to us than the moon. That one, called 2019 OD, is 393 feet across at its widest, and it zoomed by at 42,926 miles per hour. None of the three was considered a threat, per NASA. 

"... libertarian radicalism sought to carefully establish the rules of permissible conduct in such a way as to allow the competitive forces of the free market to do their progressive work. The evolution of the economy would be driven by the principles of natural law. Social progress was to be the indirect consequence of the competitive engagement of human minds with one another, not the direct result of the conscious planning of any single organization of minds. It was to be a society where no person was to coercively rule over another but where each one was to be persuasively influenced by others."--Lavoie

Paris hit 108.6 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday, the hottest temperature ever recorded there, breaking a record of 104.7 degrees set in 1947. Record highs were also set in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

On this day in 1868, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, was officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

                         Paternoster

In today's gospel, Christ teaches the apostles how to pray, specifically The Paternoster, The Our Father. God as a "Father" was a significant change in the personification of God who was usually described as a destroyer, fire and flood. Here the revolution is complete with God answering sincerity and persistence.

 

Church of the Pater Noster, Jerusalem 

Ancient documents speak of a cave on the Mt. of Olives near the outskirts of Jerusalem that is associated with the teachings of Jesus.

In the early fourth century, St. Helen visited the Holy Land, and, with the help of the local community, identified this cave as an important place where Jesus gathered his followers. She led the building of a large church here; its sanctuary covered this cave.

Persians destroyed the church in 614, but the location was remembered as the place where Jesus taught the Our Father to his followers. Crusaders built a place of prayer here in 1106, and records from that time indicate that the oratory displayed inscriptions of the Lord’s Prayer in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

In 1872, a Carmelite monastery was built here that preserved and restored the foundations of Helen’s church. The image above shows those open walls and a doorway. Today, the site displays in tile wall hangings the Our Father prayer in more than 100 languages, such as Tagalog, Aramaic, Lakota Sioux, and Hebrew.

(from a Notre Dame site)

Let It Be

Commerce always results in inequalities of outcome, and always should result in unequal rewards because different people have different abilities and desires to add value to the economy. It is, however, also true that commerce, which is based on contracts between consenting buyers and sellers, insinuates throughout society an egalitarian ethos that is subversive of aristocratic status.--Will


Dinner at Zinho. Mom thought her food better than at Senti.

There are more electric scooters than people in Pacific Beach, a crowded neighborhood in San Diego. Scooters from Lime, Bird, Lyft, Uber, and Razor are parked along the main path. People can even rent tiny electric bikes from a company called Wheels.

According to Pew Research estimates, about 2 percent of American adults are Jewish and 1 percent are Muslim.

This is surprising and under-reported: In the Marist poll, 90 percent of Democrats thought a plan that provided for a public option was a good idea, as compared to 64 percent who supported a Sanders-style Medicare for All plan that would replace private health insurance. The popularity of the public option also carries over to independent voters: 70 percent support it, as compared to 39 percent for Medicare for All.
Medicare isn't very popular.

The interviewer and stand-up comic Joe Rogan reaches over 5.8 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. That's O'Reilly levels.

27 percent of Americans say immigration is the most important problem facing the country today, the highest number of any issue, according to data released by Gallup this week. 

Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are the most popular of the 2020 candidates among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to recent Gallup polling, with Sanders at 72 percent favorable and 17 percent unfavorable, while Biden is at 69 and 17 percent.

Mueller’s investigation ignored that FISA applications evidence presented to justify warrants to surveil Trump associates were not verified. Mueller did not seem to even know about this problem, the essential reason the investigations were initiated.

A recent YouGov poll found that one in six British people agreed with the statement: “The moon landings were staged.” Four per cent believed the hoax theory was “definitely true”, 12% that it was “probably true”, with a further 9% registering as don’t knows. Moon hoaxism was more prevalent among the young: 21 % of 24- to 35-year-olds agreed that the moon landings were staged, compared with 13% of over-55s.


Despite what we hear from politicians like Bernie Sanders, labor unions and the “Fight for $15” crowd, employees compete not against employers for higher wages, but against other employees. And it’s also the case that employers compete against other employers for the best employees. It’s like that in every market: buyers (employers) always compete against other buyers (employers), and sellers (employees) always compete against other sellers (employees).--Perry

On this day in 1949, the world’s first jet-propelled airliner, the British De Havilland Comet, made its maiden test-flight in England. The jet engine would ultimately revolutionize the airline industry, shrinking air travel time in half by enabling planes to climb faster and fly higher.


               Let It Be

The Beatles may have been hiding evil beneath their lyrics. This is from "Get Back:"

Sweet Loretta Modern
thought she was a woman,
But she was another man.
All the girls around her
said she had it coming
But she gets it while she can.

Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged

This is an obvious criticism of the sacred concepts of Identity generally and the Trans Community specifically, hostile and intolerant, with preemptive reminiscence of "Send her back!"
So...should The Beatles and their music be banned?

Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner,
But he knew it wouldn't last.
Jo Jo left his home in Tucson Arizona,
for some California grass.

Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back Jo Jo

[nstrumental verse]

Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged
You better go on back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged.

Get back
Yeah

Sweet Loretta Modern
thought she was a woman,
But she was another man.
All the girls around her
said she had it coming
But she gets it while she can.

Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back! You better get on back
Get back to where you once belonged.
Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged
Get back Jo Jo
Get back! Get back!
Get back to where you once belonged
Ah yeah, ow
Get back, Loretta
You're mama's waitin'
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Ow Ow
Ow Ow Ow
Get back

Me and you
Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner,
But he knew it couldn't last.
Jo Jo left his home in Tucson Arizona,
for some California grass.

Songwriters: John Lennon, Paul McCartney

© Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Negative Rates in Europe

Today’s political discord is less durable and dangerous than an obvious consensus, one that unites the political class more than ideology divides it. The consensus is that, year in and year out, in good times and bad, Americans should be given substantially more government goods and services than they should be asked to pay for.--Will


It feel cool. Like Fall.
Chris went to the Pirate game, then played baseball; mom went to a movie; Liz went to a musical.

Amanda Knox is getting married. Her wedding will be "very nontraditional."
That includes the couple "writing a fun script," Knox said, and asking guests to come in costume. Probably not scary ones.

Frequent Uber customers in San Francisco and Chicago can get Uber’s new subscription pass that combines all of the company’s offerings into a single deal: Discounted Uber rides, access to Jump electric scooters and bikes, as well as free Uber Eats deliveries, all in a single package. $24.99.

The Justice Department has received 270 bias-crime cases since 2009, and obtained convictions in only 29 of them. 

The political theorist Isaiah Berlin warned in 1967 that "a single formula to cover all populisms everywhere will not be very helpful. The more embracing the formula, the less descriptive. The more richly descriptive the formula, the more it will exclude." Nonetheless, Berlin identified a core populist idea: the notion that an authentic "true people" have been "damaged by an elite, whether economic, political, or racial, some kind of secret or open enemy." 
What fuels populist politics is that concept of the people battling the elite. This is often presented as anger towards subsets who are more successful but often looks more like anger toward subsets that have more access to perceived common assets. I'm not so sure about the "true people" requirement.

By 2017, a Pew poll showed that just 15 percent of Republicans supported paring back the escalating costs of Medicare or Social Security to bring down the deficit.

In every year from 1977 until about 2003, North Dakota ranked in the bottom 15 US states for GDP per capita. Thanks to the fracking revolution and the prolific Bakken Formation, North Dakota’s energy-related economy was booming by 2009 when it rose into the top 15 states for the first time, before quickly rising to the No. 1 state for per capita GDP in 2015. By 2018, North Dakota fell back to the No. 6 ranking.

On this day in 1945, in the 11th hour of World War II, Winston Churchill was forced to resign as British prime minister following his party’s electoral defeat by the Labour Party. It was the first general election held in Britain in more than a decade. The same day, Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, was sworn in as the new British leader. 
Apparently Churchill had not done enough for the British people.


               Negative Rates in Europe

There has been plenty of discussion in the financial media about the Fed needing to “compete” with other central banks, whose policies have led to $13 trillion in bonds with negative yields. As absurd as that might seem, especially when developed economies aren’t in recession, this type of  monetary policy has gone mainstream.

But how will that work when rates in so much of the developed world are already negative?

In his Out of the Box commentary, Mark Grant, B. Riley’s chief global strategist for fixed income, wrote on July 22 that the negative yields exist “for one reason only, and it is because the nations of the European Union, Switzerland and Japan have mandated that their central banks take rates to these levels so that their countries can survive.” Grant elaborated in a later commentary: “Most nations in Europe cannot afford their budgets, or their social programs, and have lost their ability to raise taxes without having their politicians thrown into the streets, and so they manufactured money in their computer rooms and lowered the yield on their bonds, to less than zero, in many cases.”
So the creation of that money needed to run their programs will be cheap.

All this, with low inflation. Someone planning to retire 10 years from now and fund a significant portion of his expenses with interest or dividend income from savings or investments may have to change his plans. Unless inflation quickens and forces a complete change in central banks’ policies, interest rates and dividend yields may be too low for a simple change “from growth to income” to fund his golden years. On the other hand, what will happen if the interest rates on that created money rises?

Present, Past and Future

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





The Mueller testimony was very peculiar. A hearing on a final report is strange anyway but the whole thing reminds one of nine months of labor giving birth to a mouse. I thought Mueller looked overwhelmed and often confused, especially by Nadler's strange summary. This diminished him, a significant guy.
The Left withers everything it touches.

Convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was found in his cell on Tuesday nearly unconscious with injuries to his neck after a possible suicide attempt, sources said.
It’s unclear how Epstein suffered his neck injuries.
Investigators believe Epstein may have done it to himself either on purpose or as a ploy to get transferred out of the jail, sources said.
It was also possible that Epstein was attacked by another inmate, the sources added.(MW)

China’s latest round of retaliatory tariffs put the combined tax rate on a bottle of American wine at 93%, pushing prices out of reach for much of the Asian country’s growing middle class. Yao Family Wines, started by the Hall of Famer in 2011, has seen its export business drop by half over the past year, said Tom Hinde, the vineyard’s president and winemaker.

Deficit spending is a debt that must be paid later, perhaps by generations as yet unborn, trough, of course by taxation. Without representation.

Josh Hader’s fastball is the most dominating pitch of its type in recent baseball history. And it’s a complete mystery. The Milwaukee Brewers reliever has struck out an absurd 50 percent of batters faced this season.  For a single season in the pitch-tracking era, only two pitchers have posted higher rates: Aroldis Chapman at 52.5 percent in 2014 and Craig Kimbrel at 50.2 percent in 2012.But what’s perplexing about Hader’s whiff rate is that hitters know what’s coming: He is going to throw his four-seam fastball. Hader turns to his signature pitch on 88.6 percent of his throws, a greater frequency than all but two MLB pitchers to have thrown at least 20 innings this year. While the pitch’s velocity (95.9 mph) is above average, it ranks just 66th among fastballs. By comparison, Chapman’s fastball averages 98.2 mph, which is sixth-best in the league. High spin efficiency likely explains Hader’s amount of vertical movement despite his low total spin. It suggests that the majority of Hader’s spin is transverse spin — which would explain the vertical movement. That’s why he can blow his fastball right by the best hitters in the game even when they know it is coming, even when it’s thrown right over the plate. His delivery comes from a funny angle which might explain the rotation.

AB InBev sold more beer at higher prices globally in the second quarter, but its struggles persisted in the U.S. where drinkers continue to shun its flagship Budweiser and Bud Light brands.(wsj)

"We can raise incomes by increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, strengthening unions, ensuring that women of color get the wages they deserve, and empowering workers to elect at least 40% of board members at big American corporations. We can reduce costs and slash household debt by cancelling up to $50,000 in student loan debt for 95% of people who have it, bringing down the cost of rent, providing universal affordable child care and early education for all our kids ages 0–5, and making tuition free at every public technical school, two-year college, and four-year college." This is from president candidate E. Warren. Estimated cost, $22 Trillion.

On this day in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) was born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown.


                        Present, Past and Future

“Who controls the past, controls the future, and who controls the present, controls the past”--Orwell

"We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.

Google’s manipulation of algorithms, recently discussed in American Affairs, favors both their commercial interests and also their ideological predilections. Similarly, we see the systematic “de-platforming” of conservative and other groups who offend the mores of tech oligarchs and their media fellow travelers. Major companies are now distancing themselves from “offensive” reminders of American history, such as the Nike’s recent decision to withdraw a sneaker line featuring the Betsy Ross flag. In authoritarian societies, the situation is already far worse. State efforts to control the past in China are enhanced by America’s tech firms, who are helping to erase from history events like the Tiananmen massacre or the mass starvations produced by Maoist policies. Technology has provided those who wish to shape the past, and the future, tools of which the despots of yesterday could only dream.

……

A healthy appreciation for the past is being lost. Today, historical analysis is increasingly shaped by concerns over race, gender, and class. There are repeated campaigns, particularly in and around schools, to pull down offensive statues and murals—including of George Washington—and to rename landmarks to cleanse Western history of its historical blights.

……

These trends are combining to produce what the late Jane Jacobs called a “mass amnesia,” cutting Western societies off from knowledge of their own culture and history. Europe, the primary source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in both academia and elite media, to replace its art, literature, and religious traditions with what one author describes as “a multicultural and post racial republic” supportive of separate identities."

(from an article by Joel Kotkin)


If you do not know where you have been, the present is a single data point.