Wehner on Will

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everyone's face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.--Swift 

Dinner at PGC with some interesting people but no better food.
Hartleib was throwing 98 easily last night.

The New York Police Department shot 341 people in 1971 and just 19 in 2017. 

David Glass and his family on Friday announced the sale of the Kansas City Royals to an ownership group led by local entrepreneur John Sherman in a deal expected to be worth about $1 billion.

Is a Mohawk haircut cultural appropriation?

The late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan invented the anchor-baby policy out of whole cloth and snuck it into a footnote of an opinion written in 1982. Yes, this ancient bedrock principle, this essence of “Who We Are,” dates all the way back to the Reagan administration.The Brennan footnote was not part of the decision. It does not have the force of law. No U.S. Congress or Supreme Court ever debated and then approved the idea that children born to mothers illegally present in the country should automatically become citizens. Consequently, any president or Congress could simply state that children born to illegal aliens are not citizens. If only we had a president or Congress that would do so.--Mean Ann Coulter

There’s no argument about Baltimore being a violent place with failed governance—except when Donald Trump says so.--letter to editor

States have all sorts of crazy ideas that will impact the environment. The Northern river reversal or Siberian river reversal was an ambitious project to divert the flow of the Northern rivers in the Soviet Union, which "uselessly" drain into the Arctic Ocean, southwards towards the populated agricultural areas of Central Asia, which lack water. Research and planning work on the project started in the 1930s and was carried out on a large scale in the 1960s through the early 1980s. The controversial project was abandoned in 1986, primarily for environmental reasons, without much actual construction work ever done. According to Alexey Yablokov, President of the NGO Centre for Russian Environmental Policy, 5–7% redirection of the Ob's water could lead to long-lasting changes in the climate of the Arctic and elsewhere in Russia, and he opposes these changes to the environment affected by Siberian water redirections to the south. (wiki)

There is a fascinating fight between the Babylon Bee and Snopes. Snopes has been fact-checking the Bee's satire for "fraudulent intent."

"When Primo Levi arrived in Auschwitz parched after a brutal train journey, he reached for an icicle to slake his thirst. When a guard yanked it away from him, Levi asked "Why?" The guard replied, "Hier ist kein warum" (Here there is no why). The death camps were an extreme form of -- perhaps the logical culmination of -- what Whitehead calls a "culture of impunity."

When some people have unrestricted and unreviewable power over others -- when no one can be compelled to answer for his actions when asked: "Why?" -- some of those with power will behave like beasts simply because they can." From Will's review of "The Nickel Boys"

Political leaders in Australia, Canada, and much of western Europe have been punished heavily in terms of political support after having endorsed and implemented policies increasing the cost of conventional energy. Is there a reason to believe that the political outcome in the US would prove different? 


On thus day in 1997, Princess Diana was killed.

                              Wehner on Will

(This is from Wehner's discussion with George Will about his new book and President Trump)

"Will has claimed that Trump has done more lasting damage than Richard Nixon did during the Watergate scandal because, in Will’s words, “you can’t un-ring the bell. You can’t unsay what he has now said is acceptable discourse in the United States.”

Trump supporters argue, I told Will, that the president may be a little rough around the edges, that his tweets might be over the top now and then, but those things are mostly inconsequential and ephemeral. What matters, they say, is what Trump does, not what he says, and what he has done is advance conservative policies and appoint conservative judges.

Will replied that he hoped Trump supporters are right—but he’s pretty sure they are wrong when they say that what Trump is doing to our culture, our politics, and our civic discourse is ephemeral.

Trump’s supporters on the right “misunderstand the importance of culture, the viscosity of culture, and I think they are not conservatives, because they don’t understand this,” Will said. “Nixon’s surreptitious burglaries were surreptitious; that is, they were done in secret because they were unacceptable to the country, and once exposed, they were punished and the country moved on. What Mr. Trump has done is make acceptable, make normal, a form of behavior that would get a third grader sent to the principal’s office or to bed without dessert.” Will argues that Trump’s agenda, to the degree it pleases conservatives, is what any Republican president would have done. “So the question is, What does Trump bring that’s distinctive?” Will said. “And it’s all vulgarity, coarsening, semi-criminality.”

.....

“The answer is in the terms themselves,” Will replied. “The norms, that is, what are normal and what are normative, cease to be normal. And cease to be normative.” His point is that Nixon, for all his crimes, evaded norms; he didn’t challenge them. He didn’t dispute them. He didn’t degrade them. In fact, he was ultimately done in by them. Donald Trump promised when he ran for president that he would overturn our norms, Will has said, and that’s one promise he’s kept.

.....

“The American nation’s finest political career derived from Lincoln’s refusal to allow his country to be seduced into thinking of itself in an unworthy way,” Will wrote 35 years ago. He added that the civic virtues that Madison and the other Founders believed were essential for a free republic to survive “must be willed. It is folly to will an end but neglect to will the means to the end. The presuppositions of our polity must be supplied, politically.”

He added, “To revitalize politics and strengthen government, we need to talk about talk. We need a new, respectful rhetoric—respectful, that is, of the better angels of mankind’s nature.” The reason, he said, is that “mankind is not just matter, not just a machine with an appetitive ghost in it. We are not what we eat. We are, to some extent, what we and our leaders—the emblematic figures of our polity—say we are.”

Today, the most emblematic figure of our polity is Donald J. Trump. Which is a problem.

.....

The most important of all revolutions, Edmund Burke said, is a “revolution in sentiment, manners and moral opinion.” What conservatives like Will and me believe, and what we think Trump supporters either don’t understand or deny, is the destructive revolution in manners and mores that Donald Trump is ushering in, the enormous cultural and social blast radius of his presidency. Through his promiscuous lying and assault on demonstrable truths, his cruelty and crudity, his coarseness, bullying ,and dehumanization of his opponents, and his lawlessness and conspiracy-mongering—the whole corrupt, packaged deal—he has brought us into dark new realms.

There was a time when Republicans and conservatives more generally insisted that culture was upstream of politics and in many respects more important than politics; that leaders needed to take great care in cultivating and validating standards of decency, honor, and integrity; and that a president who destroyed rather than defended cultural norms and high standards would do grave injury to America. But now Republicans are willing to sacrifice soul and culture for the sake of promised policy victories."

How Couples Meet

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.--Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872, with "settled science"

Mom's meetings in Wheeling went well.

Before England became colonizers, they were colonized/conquered by Romans, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Vikings, and Normans. The locals vented by killing their new lords. So the law came down that any murder of a Norman was to result in a heavy fine for the whole village. On the other hand, if the person killed was an Englishman or a Englishwoman: ech. This fine was known as murdrum. A palindrome!

Bankruptcies are rising in the U.S. oil patch as Wall Street’s disaffection with shale companies reverberates through the industry. (wsj)

Success Academy
Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City. Admission is open to all New York State children, including those with special needs and English language learners. Students are admitted by a random lottery held each April. Success Academy operates 45 schools serving 17,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Across the network, 76% of students are from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and former special needs students. About 93% of students are children of color.
Of the 30 elementary schools in the entire state of New York (the top 1.24% of schools) with the highest Average Standard Score for the 2018-2019 school year, two-thirds of those top schools (20) are Success Academy Charter Schools. There were four other Success Academy elementary charters that didn’t rank in the top 30, but they weren’t far behind at No. 32 (Success Academy Charter School-Harlem 1) , No. 37 (Success Academy Charter School-Harlem 2), No. 40 (Success Academy Charter School – Springfield Gardens) and No. 45 (Success Academy Charter School-Bronx 3). In other words, 100% of the elementary Success Academy Charter Schools (24 out of 24) ranked in the top 2% of all of the 2,413 elementary schools in New York State (actually the top 1.865%). And when you compare the demographics of the Success Academy Charters Schools above to the other 10 top-ranking schools in the table above, you’ll see that the students attending Success charters: a) are more than two times as likely to qualify for free or discounted lunch, b) nearly four times as likely to be black, and c) 1.4 times as likely to be Hispanic.
It's hard to say which is stranger, the success of Success or DeBlasio's hatred of it.

So what Hilary did was wrong, illegal but not court-worthy and what Comey did was wrong, illegal but not court-worthy. If you were of a suspicious sort, you could see a pattern here. But it does raise a question: Are we poor worker bees held to a higher standard than our queens?

Sherlock Hibbs, a wealthy alumnus of the University of Missouri who passed away in 2002, set aside $5 million from his estate to endow up to three chairs and three additional professorships in the study of Austrian economics. The gift’s terms included an awkwardly worded stipulation that the positions must go to “dedicated and articulate disciples” of Ludwig von Mises. The University of Missouri acceded to those terms and accepted the gift. Indeed its failure to follow them would invoke another clause, in which case the money would transfer to Hillsdale College — a small conservative-leaning institution in Michigan that also has an established program in Austrian economics.
Missouri took the money and, over the past two decades, used it to endow positions for four faculty members. The recipients specialize in management and marketing. None appear to have any discernible research or teaching interests that even tangentially connect them to Austrian economics or to Mises. As a result of what appears to be a violation of the terms of the original endowment, Hillsdale is now suing Mizzou to invoke the transfer clause.

Between 1525 and 1866, about 380,000 Africans were brought to the United States over the course of the slave trade, out of the estimated 10.7 million African slaves brought to North America, the Caribbean and South America (nearly 5 million to Brazil alone, or almost half of all African slaves). Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after landing first in the Caribbean, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade. Therefore, only 4.2% of African slaves brought to the New World ended up in the U.S. and the vast majority (95.8%) ended up outside the U.S. And yet the narrative we frequently hear is that slavery was a uniquely or predominately American phenomenon. And, of course, in America it was a British phenomenon.

After speaking at a factory in Moscow, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was seriously wounded but survived the attack. The assassination attempt set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. Thousands were executed as Russia fell deeper into civil war.

                    How Couples Meet

"We present new data from a nationally representative 2017 survey of American adults. For heterosexual couples in the U.S., meeting online has become the most popular way couples meet, eclipsing meeting through friends for the first time around 2013. Moreover, among the couples who meet online, the proportion who have met through the mediation of third persons has declined over time. We find that Internet meeting is displacing the roles that family and friends once played in bringing couples together."

  from the article “Research Note: Disintermediating Your Friends” 

new charts

What is telling is the fact that many of the descendants of those who live in the countries that sold their fellow countrymen into slavery are trying to emigrate to the United States, while few descendants of those who were slaves in the United States are trying to immigrate elsewhere.--Rahn

Went to Olgebay last night. Had a GPS confusion but otherwise pretty easy. Really easy back through legendary places like North Strabane, Donaldson's Crossing and the like. Olgebay was very nice, an attractive place with easy access and terrific food. Small rooms but a good little place.


Biden said, “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids.” Crisis! What Mr. Biden probably meant to say was that “poor kids are just as bright as wealthy kids”. And the Press gave him the break they would not have given Trump. But is that true? What is it about us that drives us to believe--or say, at least--that successful qualities, which we know are both inherited and nurtured, do not distinguish groups? One possible explanation: People confuse "equality" as an ends rather than a means.

Project Stormfury, was carried out by the U.S. Government for about twenty years starting in the early 1960s. Aircraft seeded hurricane clouds with silver iodide in an attempt to strengthen the outer portions of the storm in hopes of weakening the intense storm core.

The project was a failure because it was learned that hurricanes already efficiently convert the available cloud water to precipitation anyway, throughout the storm. 

By 1804, all the Northern states had abolished slavery which at one time was legal in all the American colonies. Slavery persisted in the South not because it was capitalistic but because it was feudal. the essence of feudalism is not free-market; it thrives on coercion and closed labor markets. How could anybody argue that slavery thrived on free-markets?

In Wyden'a taxation scheme, annual increases in the value of people’s assets would be taxed as income, even if the assets aren’t sold. Someone who owned stock that was worth $400 million on Jan. 1 but $500 million on Dec. 31 would add $100 million to income on his or her tax return.

A palindrome is a text that reads the same forward and backward, such as: “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” The word palindrome is from Greek palin (again) + dromos (running). 
“Madam, I’m Adam.” “Eve.” Palindromes are clearly very old.


Richard Jewell, the hero security guard turned Olympic bombing suspect, died on this day in 2007 at age 44 of natural causes at his Georgia home. His life was ruined by the Press.

From political scientist Francis Fukuyama:

According to Will

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots. -Barbara Ehrenreich, journalist and author (b. 26 Aug 1941)
  

Mom is in Wheeling with a big dinner last night. I'm going today.
Liz in Ottawa with a canal cruise last night.

A law passed in February 2019 allows the French police to arrest any person suspected of going to a demonstration; no authorization from a judge is necessary and no appeal possible.


There is an argument out that nationalism is the logical and good outgrowth of tribalism. ( Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, via his book The Virtue of Nationalism.) This allows for little variety within a culture. It might be fine for Israel or Japan but virtually excludes America. Of course a political theorist from Israel might have a pretty narrow idea about how a state should be organized but....
Adam Smith pointed out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, our ability to extend our sympathy and empathize with one another is a central part of human moral psychology and serves as grounding for a wide range of obligations. We can and should recognize others for who they are, not simply for what group they originate from. 
Any nationalistic movement in the U.S. is not based upon soil or blood, it is based upon founding concepts. So it is welcoming, contained and not jealous or expansive.
For this reason, identity politics--which is a mini-nationalism--should be shunned as it is inherently un-American.

"Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity.

…..

America’s universities deserve credit for this double standard. Identity politics dominate higher education: Administrators, students and faculty obsessively categorize themselves and each other by race. “White privilege,” often coupled with “toxic masculinity,” is the focus of freshmen orientations and an ever-growing array of courses. Any institutional action that affects a “person of color” is “about race.” If a black professor doesn’t get tenure, he’s a victim of discrimination; a white professor is presumed to be unqualified.

…..

Identity politics, now a driving force in the Democratic Party, celebrates the racial and ethnic identities of designated victim groups while consigning whites—especially heterosexual white men—to scapegoat status."--MacDonald

In 1981, a British Submarine Crashed into a Nuclear Russian Sub, the Soviet submarine K-211 Petropavlovsk. K-211’s mission was straightforward: to cruise undetected for weeks or months at a time, awaiting only the signal that a nuclear war had broken out to unleash its apocalyptic payload from underwater on Western cities and military bases up to four thousand miles away.
Good thought content.


On August 28, 1941, more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered by the Gestapo in occupied Ukraine.

                     According to Will

Kyle Smith has a review of Will's new book and in it lists some of his old aphorisms,

"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”

“Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one’s friends.”

“Freedom means the freedom to behave coarsely, basely, foolishly.”

“A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.”

“The future has a way of arriving unannounced.”

And some new ones:

What do conservatives seek to conserve? “We seek to conserve the American Founding.”

“William James spoke of a ‘moral equivalent of war.’ TR’s idea was: Accept no substitutes. TR wanted the body politic to really be one body, with the president as the head.”

“The words ‘leader’ or ‘leaders’ appear thirteen times in The Federalist, once with reference to those who led the Revolution and twelve times in a context of disparagement.”

“In the 1960s, progressivism became a stance of disdain, describing Americans not only as [John Kenneth] Galbraith had, as vulgar, but also as sick, racist, sexist, imperialist, etc.”

“The mind of the true believer [is] a mind stocked with unfalsifiable propositions.”

“Humanity . . . was supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. It is neither. So what went wrong?”

“Time was, the upper crust rode in carriages, the lower orders walked. No such dramatic difference distinguishes the driver of a Mercedes from the driver of a Chevrolet.”

“The government is good at delivering transfer payments. It is not so adept at delivering services, still less at delivering planned changes in attitudes and behaviors.”

Adlai Stevenson “was considered by advanced thinkers to be an advanced thinker.”

“In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing ‘just about always or most of the time.’ Today, fewer than 20 percent do. The former number is one reason [Lyndon] Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.”

“America might be entering what will be called the Great Flinch, a reaction against the uncertainties and other stresses inherent in dynamism.”

“The egalitarian’s work is never done.”

And one-liner from other thinkers: 

“Doing worse than others does not entail doing badly.” (Harry Frankfurt)

“No man who owns a house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” (Bill Levitt)

“Liberty is the goal at which democracy aims, not the other way around.” (Timothy Sandefur)

66

“Men may chuse different things, and yet all chuse right.” (John Locke)

Krakatoa

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong...the truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I'm not too sure."--Mencken  


Mom is off to Wheeling today.
Chris had a good presentation yesterday.
Liz got in to Ottawa.
Dickerson homered for the Phillies. We have Pablo Reyes.
Sean Rodrigues: Walkoff homer.

Here is a truly scary story that appeared in the WSJ: A diversity panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio has called for New York City to stop using academic criteria to screen applicants for admission to public middle schools, and to phase out elementary gifted-and-talented programs that now require a test.
It is hard to imagine a culture being successful with that kind of thinking.

Who is Greta Thunberg and why is the Press paying attention to her?

“Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,”  James Lovelock, the famed British environmentalist and futurist says in the book, "Novacene." “The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”

MacDonald: The saddest part of the current rage against the American past is that after the monuments have been removed, the paintings effaced and the nationalistic words banished, nothing will have changed in the status of the self-proclaimed intersectional victims. The academic achievement gap will be intact. The greatest barriers to racial equality today are not statues and patriotic holidays; they are family breakdown and a street culture that regards academic effort and achievement as “acting white.” The time spent spray-painting statuary could be far better spent in the library acquiring knowledge and mastering skills.

Through June, coal's share of US electric power is at an all-time low of <24 35.4="" all-time="" an="" font="" gas="" high="" natural="" of="" reached="" share="" the="" while="">

In the new paper “From workers to capitalists in less than two generations” by Li Yang, Filip Novokmet, and  Branko Milanovic, China’s economic transformation is “a unique event in world economic history: never have so many people over such a relatively short period of time increased their income so much.” And it happened as “China moved from the still predominantly command economy of the 1980s, with only timid attempts at reforms, towards more comprehensive marketization of the country observed today.” 



                                                Krakatoa

The most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history occurred on Krakatoa, a small, uninhabited volcanic island located west of Sumatra in Indonesia, on August 27, 1883.

Krakatoa literally blew itself apart, setting off a chain of natural disasters that would be felt around the world for years to come. An enormous blast on the afternoon of August 26 destroyed the northern two-thirds of the island; as it plunged into the Sunda Strait, between the Java Sea and Indian Ocean, the gushing mountain generated a series of pyroclastic flows (fast-moving fluid bodies of molten gas, ash and rock) and monstrous tsunamis that swept over nearby coastlines. 

The best documented is the Krakatoa explosion starting August 26, 1883. The volcanic cloud was 17 miles high, the waves 100 feet. The fourth and greatest of its explosions was heard 3000 miles away on Rodriguez Island. The particles sent into the air caused red reflections throughout the world that stayed for three years and were included in American landscape paintings of the period. 36,000 people were killed by thermal injury and tsunami.

Sullivan on the Right

I'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day;
I'd rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
 -Edgar Guest, poet (20 Aug 1881-1959)


I thought the Steelers looked pretty good last night. Dupree made two plays.
Ned should be back, Liz should be leaving, today.
Chris spent most of Sunday on a work project.
I'm enjoying my course, as opposed to the first one.

From Phil Gramm and John F. Early’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal “Americans Are Richer Than We Think“:

When corrected for documented price overstatements, real average hourly earnings from 1975 to 2017 are shown to have risen some 52%, not 6%—an additional $6.77 an hour. Real median household income increased 68%, not 21%—$17,060 more annually. Gross domestic product grew 253% rather than 216%—$6,312 of additional output per capita. Productivity expanded 142% rather than 117%—$10 of additional value for every hour worked. And published poverty incidence fell by almost half. Combined with the 67% drop in poverty that comes from accounting for all government transfers, poverty incidence sank from 12.3% to about 2%.

The old American fear of Russia stemmed from a basic insecurity about the American economic philosophy: There has always been the fear that competitive, random markets were vulnerable to managed ones. At the creation of every new centralized government structure, the Americans fret and wait for the hammer to fall.

But to favor government planning over innovation and markets fundamentally misunderstanding how an economy functions and improves.

The Trump administration is vastly expanding the scope of condominium purchases eligible for lower-down-payment loans.

On this day in 1346, during the Hundred Years War, King Edward III’s English army annihilated a French force under King Philip VI at the Battle of Crecy in Normandy. The battle, which saw an early use of the deadly longbow by the English, is regarded as one of the most decisive in history.



                   Sullivan on the Right

Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.

Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked. In the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump. None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention, founded in 1619 and not 1775.

The whole article is here: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/andrew-sullivan-the-limits-of-my-conservatism.html?utm_source=tw

Sunday/Strait and Narrow

The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of an eye, the more light you shed upon it, the more it contracts.--Oliver Wendell Holmes



Went to the Ekstrom birthday party, a neighborhood affair that was invaded by a marching band. Funny. I tried to film and send it but couldn't.
Mom is preparing to go to Wheeling for three days this week to pull her project together.
Ned went to a bachelor party in Atlantic City where he lost some money. 
Liz goes to Ottawa for the week tomorrow. 

"There are an estimated 27 million men, women, and children in the world who are enslaved — physically confined or restrained and forced to work, or controlled through violence, or in some way treated as property.

Therefore, there are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade [11 million total, and about 450,000, or about 4% of the total, who were brought to the United States]. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach—and in the destruction of lives." (Nat. Geo.)

A U.S. judge on Friday ordered a woman accused of hacking Capital One and at least 30 other organizations to remain in custody pending trial because she is a flight risk and poses a physical danger to herself and others.Police in Mountain View, California, said she also threatened to shoot up an undisclosed company in May, while she was living with a convicted felon who had a stockpile of pistols, rifles and ammunition.

Lawyers for Thompson, a transgender woman, denied that she is violent and said she should be released to a halfway house where she would have better access to mental health care. Citing a doctor, they say her safety is at risk in the male facility.

There is a lot of pressure on campus to ban meat as a factor in global warming. American consumption of beef has fallen by a third since the 1970s without regulatory moves to restrict beef, and Americans could still eat 1.5 burgers a week without any further agricultural expansion.

It is easy to take symbolic positions but harder to legislate politically against livelihoods, as Hilary found in her parroting anti-coal positions.

                             Strait and Narrow                             

Today's gospel asks the question, How many will be saved? Christ has a pessimistic answer. Life has an easy path; Christ says heaven is reached only "through the narrow gate." Meaning effort. So a good life requires thought and effort. The "Straight and narrow" is a biblical phrase misread: It is actually "strait and narrow," meaning "confined." And, to a sailor, risky.

Holy Sonnet VII

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

John Donne

St Bartholomew Massacre

If I've said one thing to a group of seventeen people, I've said seventeen things.--Chris


The McGraws put Henry down last night. We went with them and Blair to Senti for a good meal.


Some headlines from the Babylon Bee: a) Portland Police: ‘We Wish There Were Some Kind Of Organized, Armed Force That Could Fight Back Against Antifa' b) Bernie Sanders Arrives In Hong Kong To Lecture Protesters On How Good They Have It Under Communism and c) Strong Link Found Between Supporting Communism And Never Once Having Opened A History Book 

In 2017, a survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of India liked the idea of military rule. 

Biden said this in N.H. yesterday: “Imagine what would have happened if, God forbid, Barack Obama had been assassinated after becoming the de facto nominee. What would have happened in America?” 
He actually said that. He did not say, "Imagine what would have happened if Obama had put everybody from Nebraska in concentration camps?" Or, "Imagine what would have happened if Obama had carpet-bombed New Zealand?" So, I suppose that's good. 
These people are too stupid to rule.

Bloomberg reports that Brazil is actually third in the world in wildfires over the last 48 hours, citing data from the MODIS satellite analyzed by Weather Source.


The always insightful McCloskey: "Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production.

Economists have been thinking about such issues for half a century. You wouldn’t know it from the King Cottoners. They assert, for example, that a slave was “cheap labor.” Mistaken again. After all, slaves ate, and they didn’t produce until they grew up. Stanley Engerman and the late Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel confirmed in 1974 what economic common sense would suggest: that productivity was incorporated into the market price of a slave. It’s how any capital market works. If you bought a slave, you faced the cost of alternative uses of the capital. No supernormal profits accrued from the purchase. Slave labor was not a free lunch. The wealth was not piled up.

….

We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world."

U.S. health authorities are investigating the cases of 153 people, mostly teenagers and young adults, who developed severe lung illnesses after using electronic cigarettes, raising new questions about the health risks of the devices. (wsj)


The grotesquely swollen place of the presidency in governance (now that governance has become, for Congress, merely a spectator sport) and society has been made possible by journalism that is mesmerized by, and easily manipulated by, presidents — especially the current one, whose every bleat becomes an obsession. This president is not just one prompting from the social environment; he, in his ubiquity, thoroughly colors this environment, which becomes simultaneously more coarse and less shocking by the day.--Will

                           St. Bartholomew Massacre

Religious conflicts within nations offer a real teaching point on the importance of mutually agreed upon common beliefs within a culture. The 16th and 17th Century in England and France was a boiling cauldron of animosity and righteousness. Catholic Bloody Mary burned protestants, Protestant Elizabeth burned Catholics, James I carried on Elizabeth's savagery. Meanwhile, in France, everybody killed everybody. The Catholics defended their power through the Regency and the Jesuits, the protestants fought back through various noblemen and eventually became the Huguenots. Hungry for more chaos, Catholic Spain fought Protestant England in Holland and led them to raise the Armada.


In France, this brutality peaked and declined in The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572 (the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle), two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots. The king ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks, the massacre expanded outward to other urban centers and the countryside. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.

The massacre also marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its prominent aristocratic leaders, as well as many re-conversions by the rank and file. Those who remained were increasingly radicalized. Though by no means unique, it "was the worst of the century's religious massacres". Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion"

Slavery and Capitalism

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.--C.S. Lewis


Mom had a girls night out at the movies.
Mike Lange on the Pirate broadcast  didn't look like he would survive the night.

In the US, an annual income of only $5,300 makes you richer than 75% of the world’s population by income, $16,5000 per year makes you richer than 90% of the world’s population, $53,000 makes you richer than 99% of the world’s population and $100,000 puts you in the top richest 0.1% of the world’s population.

Asia's 20 wealthiest families are now worth more than $450 billion combined, a testament to how the world’s economic growth engine is minting fortunes at an unprecedented level. Topping the list with a $50 billion fortune is India's Ambani family.

A poll conducted with professional philosophers a few years ago asked them to name the philosopher, no longer living, with whom they most identify. Hume won, by a clear margin. In Julian Baggini’s estimation, contemporary ‘scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume’. 

Amazon intentionally posts low profits because it takes the vast majority of the money it earns and invests it right back into the company so that it will profit all the more in the future. Its business model, once reviled on Wall Street, has spurred numerous other companies like Uber and WeWork to emulate Amazon and forgo profits for the sake of growth — though many of these companies haven’t really proved that they could ever be profitable.


Both "Lynch" and "Dewitt" mean "To kill by mob violence."  While the word lynch is coined after a perpetrator of such killing (Captain William Lynch), the word dewitt is coined after people who were the object of such violence, after the brothers Johan and Cornelius De Witt, Dutch statesmen, who were killed by a mob on Aug 20, 1672. This was a horrific event, the end of the Dutch Republican merchant class leadership as William ascended first to Dutch leadership and eventually to the throne of England. Early experiments against monarchies did not go well. It was the opening of Dumas' Black Tulip.

On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact, stunning the world, given their diametrically opposed ideologies. Apparently some people believed that public ideologies rather than the drive for power motivated people.

                    Slavery and Capitalism

The anti-capitalists are busy bees. If they weren't so malicious they would be funny. One of the new themes is this: Capitalism came from slavery and therefor capitalism is bad. There is some sort of transgenerational immoral contagion at work. Remember, the sins of the father are visited upon the sons. The Left is sometimes very biblical.

A new multipart feature series in the New York Times advances this thesis, depicting modern free market capitalism as an inherently “racist” institution and a direct lineal descendant of plantation slavery, still exhibiting the brutality of that system. This characterization draws heavily from the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) — a genre of historical writing that swept through the academy in the last decade and that aggressively promotes the thesis that free market capitalism and slavery are inextricably linked.

NHC contains historically implausible arguments, such as the notion that modern double-entry accounting emerged from plantation ledger books (the practice actually traces to the banking economies of Renaissance Italy), or that its use by slave owners is distinctively capitalistic (even the Soviets employed modern accounting practices, despite attempting to centrally plan their entire economy). Indeed, it was NHC historian Ed Baptist who produced an unambiguously false statistic purporting to show that cotton production accounted for a full half of the antebellum American economy (it actually comprised about 5 percent of GDP).

Magness has an interesting article on this deceptive frenzy where he resurrects 
George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South, first published in 1854. He quotes the opening lines:
"Political economy is the science of free society. Its theory and its history alike establish this position. Its fundamental maxim Laissez-faire and "Pas trop gouverner," are at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least."

This is not a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom tract. This guy is a slaver and a proponent of controlled economy and society. Fitzhugh was a leading slavery apologist who tried to make an elaborate ideological case for slave labor and indeed all aspects of social ordering. Such a system, he announced, would resolve the posited state of perpetual conflict between labor and the owners of capital by supplanting it with the paternalistic hierarchy of slavery. Fitzhugh was also an avowed anti-capitalist. Slavery’s greatest threat came from the free market economic doctrines of Europe, which were “tainted with abolition, and at war with our institutions.” To survive, he declared, the South must “throw Adam Smith, Say, Ricardo & Co., in the fire.”
By 1861, he had added his voice to the cause of southern secession and began mapping out an elaborate slave-based industrialization policy for the Confederacy’s wartime economy.

Fitzhugh had effectively worked out the Marxian theory of “surplus value” over a decade before the publication of Marx’s own Capital (1867), and derived it from the same sweeping indictment of the free-labor capitalism.
These similarities between Fitzhugh and socialism, and indeed the aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric of proslavery ideology, are seldom examined in the NHC literature. But never mind.

Buzz, buzz. These controlling statists never sleep.
(a lot from Magness)