Benson and Buddhist Monks on the Tibetan Plateau

 "The world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system. The instrument has only 88 notes, but those notes can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways. The same applies to our planet. The Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have."--Tupy and Pooley

I like this opening quote, not just for the potential but the complexity it describes. Controlling such systems is a monumental task requiring monumental arrogance.
Mrs. McGraw is hurt. She had a fall on an area rug and seems to have a tibial plateau fracture, left knee. I don't know if that is a surgical problem or not but her sister had an identical injury and ignored it for a month. (not recommended.)
Alyssa's mother came over for an impromptu wine and cheese party.
Nice trip to Harrisburg. Beautiful days, drive and nice party. Pretty neighborhood. Brenna looks good and so does Tallulah. Patrick looked good and he had an interesting argument that the entire NFL will pay all year for the refereeing error in the playoff game last year. I got a lot of bites.
Really hard not to enjoy Michigan's loss and Pitt's upset win.
The Steelers are too mediocre to be invested in. 
A broadcast team was very unimpressed with the Penguins and mentioned cap problems at the year end.
Mahones' mother has a KC jersey that says "QB Producer."

Government uses redistribution to correct social, meaning market, outcomes that offend it or some of its powerful constituencies. But government rarely explains, or perhaps even rarely recognizes, the reasoning by which it decides why particular outcomes of consensual market activities are incorrect. When taxes are levied not merely in order to efficiently fund government but to impose this or that notion of distributive justice, remember this: Taxes are always coerced contributions to government, which is always the first, and often the principal, beneficiary of taxes. Furthermore, in any complex modern society, any ambitious redistributionist agenda faces an epistemic barrier: The diffusion and division of knowledge about actions and their consequences is such that the project of redistributing wealth must give rise to government agencies guessing about consequences, and wielding vast discretion in doing so, with unhealthy consequences for the rule of law. The first function, and often the final achievement, of any redistributionist ideology is to legitimate the existence and activities of these agencies of redistribution.--Will

"Free speech principles were often at stake in the antebellum controversy over slavery. In every case, proslavery advocates took the offensive in seeking to suppress the rights of their adversaries. Abolitionists attacked slavery as an institution, but they never seriously questioned the right to advocate on its behalf. Slaveholders, by contrast, fought to suppress free speech whenever they had a plausible chance of doing so. They fought to “gag” the reading of abolitionist petitions in Congress, and to prevent the postal system from circulating antislavery writings in the South."--Rowe

Politics allows people to vote for the impossible, which may be one reason why politicians are often more popular than economists, who keep reminding people that there is no free lunch and that there are no ‘solutions’ but only trade-offs.--Sowell

Anyone who will defend his liberty must guard against the argument that access to the ballot, “by which people get whatever they want,” is liberty. It would be as logical to assert that liberty in the choice of a wife is assured to a person if he will put it to a vote of the community and accept their plurality decision, or that liberty in religion is assured if the state enforces participation in the one religion that receives the most votes in the nation.--Harper

This is a scary article:
https://quillette.com/2019/07/14/how-due-process-fell-victim-to-good-intentions-a-veteran-court-reporter-looks-back/

And, in honor of Mrs. McGraw's plateau injury:

       Benson and Buddhist Monks on the Tibetan Plateau

In 1981, Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, set out to study the ancient meditation practices of Buddhist monks on the Tibetan Plateau. With the Dalai Lama’s blessing, Benson spent roughly a decade in remote regions of the Himalayas in northern India researching an especially intense technique known as tummo, as well as the physiological effects of other advanced forms of meditation. Rather than debunking the seemingly tall tales of advanced practitioners capable of raising their body temperatures to dry cold, wet sheets around their bodies, Benson’s work actually confirmed and expanded upon these anecdotes. In particular, by tracking vital signs and body-heat output during meditation sessions, Benson found that these monks possessed remarkable capacities for controlling their oxygen intake, body temperatures and even brainwaves. In 2013, a second study conducted on advanced Tibetan tummo meditators by Maria Kozhevnikov, a cognitive neuroscientist the National University of Singapore, corroborated much of what Benson had observed, including practitioners’ ability to raise their body temperatures to feverish levels by combining visualization and specialized breathing.

The UK filmmaker Russ Pariseau’s feature documentary Advanced Tibetan Meditation: The Investigations of Herbert Benson MD relays portions of Benson’s landmark research, which ultimately signaled a seismic shift in how Western science views Buddhist meditation. Simultaneously, the material makes evident the disparate ways that Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists understand the self. This is from a review of the trailer.