Casting LOTR

“We don’t claim to know what other ignorant men are sure of.”--Clarence Darrow, lawyer and civil libertarian


Chris and Alyssa went to Philly to visit Matt and Sarah.
The Pens were terrible last night.

Data is available that shows the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees. If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.

Is a homeowner more likely to align with capital rather than labor interests? And are pension holders likely to do the same?

Sin-eater: A custom that disappeared. Puckle (Bertram S. Puckle, a British scholar, and author of Funeral Customs, Their Origin and Development) tells of a curious functionary, a sort of male scapegoat called the “sin-eater.” It was believed in some places that by eating a loaf of bread and drinking a bowl of beer over a corpse, and by accepting a six-pence, a man was able to take unto himself the sins of the deceased, whose ghost thereafter would no longer wander.--from The History of American Funeral Directing, by Robert Habenstein and William Lamers

Say it is a given that "hate speech" is an evil thing. Is there in history any example of where a people have been fortunate for allowing any politician to ban speech he did not like?

It was a sad day when politicians discovered arithmetic. Some of them say that Latin American immigration lowers the average education level in the U.S. True, but to what effect? What difference does that "average" make? Did things get better for the American Indians because the better educated Europeans arrived and raised the education average of the Americas?

There is a report that Leonardo DiCaprio and WWF sent large amounts of money to organizations that earned their living by starting fires and then selling pictures of the fires to environmental news outlets.

Sine qua non: a necessary condition without which something is not possible. e.g. An interest in children is a sine qua non of teaching.

The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation. The members of the Plymouth colony had arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership. Reflecting the current opinion of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, their charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared. You probably will not be surprised to hear that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else’s children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women’s husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted. Famine came as soon as they ate through their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. Unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes, giving each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. The colonists threw off the statist intellectual fashions of their day. The results were overwhelmingly beneficial. Men worked hard, even though before they had constantly pleaded illness. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash, and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.--Bower

                             Casting LOTR

From an article by Gary O'Conner on the origin of parts in LOTR:

How each actor was chosen is the first of many epic stories surrounding the making of The Lord of the Rings. Ian Holm became Bilbo, in part because Jackson had heard him portray Frodo in the BBC radio adaptation; Christopher Lee was cast as Saruman as a result of reading for Gandalf; Elijah Wood, to prove his claim to play Frodo, produced a video of himself dressed as a hobbit in Hollywood Hills woodland locale. The model-turned-actress Liv Tyler was Arwen, for which her tall, long-limbed grace, flawless skin and dazzling blue eyes were a perfect match. She calls this the result of the decision of Jackson and the writer that “there wasn’t nearly enough female energy” in Tolkien’s books, indeed “the only female energy came from the big Black Spider that kills everybody . . .” So Arwen became the love interest, the only blockbuster sine qua non. Ian, never one to drop the idea, suggested impishly there might be some love interest for Gandalf (with, say, the dwarf Gimli).

This rejection of roles was duplicated with other characters. Daniel Day-Lewis was offered Aragorn but turned it down. Timothy Spall at one stage was due to be Gimli the dwarf; David Bowie wanted to play the elf Lord Elrond, but this never happened. Then Stuart Townsend was relieved of his part after two weeks of shooting as Aragorn—he was considered too young by Jackson—and replaced by Viggo Mortensen. But “they say” McKellen was “lured”—the word Brian Appleyard used—into The Lord of the Rings by the arrival at his home in Limehouse of Jackson with Fran, his wife, who had flown to London to meet and choose the cast.

Thomas Nast

Politics is not the art of the possible. It is choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous.--Gailbreth
  
Terrific dinner last night.

"The Crown" is very good. Even Charles has come off well so far.

Stossel has a little article on the early Pilgrims' try at collective farming that preceded Thanksgiving. Collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.

"By the spring," Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, "our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger... So they began to think how ... they might not still thus languish in misery."
His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they "set corn every man for his own particular. ... Assigned every family a parcel of land."

Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The "commons" is a shared resource. That means it's really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.

The Pilgrims' simple change to private ownership, wrote Bradford, "made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been." Soon they had so much plenty that they could share food with the natives.

When you consider what an enormous windfall gain it is to be born in America, it is painful to hear some people complain bitterly that someone else got a bigger windfall gain than they did.--Sowell

Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now. Sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years.  Anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.

On this day in 1947, despite strong Arab opposition, the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state. The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1910s, when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory. The Jews were Zionists, recent emigrants from Europe and Russia who came to the ancient homeland of the Jews to establish a Jewish national state. The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state. Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine.

                             Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast was a Bavarian immigrant credited with developing the American cartoon. He arrived in the 1840s as a child and became the illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He developed the modern version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the Republican Party symbol. As such, this is a provocative drawing, from the Nineteenth Century.

Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday and the Heart of the American Experience (link added):

[Thomas] Nast was an immigrant, having arrived in America from Germany when he was six years old, and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” reflected what Nast saw as the immigrant’s passionate affection for his new country and commitment to its democratic values….
At the head of the table stands Uncle Sam, who is carving a turkey. Around the table are seated Americans representing an array of races and religions, identified in many cases by their national dress. Among the guests are an African American family, a Native American, a Chinese man with a long queue, an Irish American couple, a Spanish woman wearing a mantilla and holding a fan, a bearded Muslim with a fez on his head. Nast presents the people in this portrait respectfully, not as caricatures. His message is that every American has an equal right to sit at the Thanksgiving table.

Happy Thanksgiving

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.--Napoleon

Alyssa got tickets to the Pens game and took Chris, Callie Myhrun and me. They ate appalling food. Crazy exciting game. 14 goals. A madhouse crowd.

According to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 survey of criminal victimization, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well."

Never underestimate the wisdom of the people. Rebels have killed four Ebola response workers in eastern Congo, the World Health Organization said Thursday, an alarming development that could cause the waning outbreak to again pick up momentum in what has been called a war zone.

With an average cost of $531,373 per unit – with many apartments costing more than $600,000 each –  building costs of many of the homeless units will exceed the median sale price of a market-rate condominium. In the city of Los Angeles, the median price for a condo is $546,000, and a single-family home in Los Angeles County has a median price of $627,690, the study states.

We argue that the implementation of the one-child policy has significantly increased both child abandonment and child abduction and that, furthermore, the cultural preference for sons in China has shaped unique gender-based patterns whereby a majority of the children who are abandoned are girls and a majority of the children who are abducted are boys. We provide empirical evidence for the following findings: (1) Stricter one-child policy implementation leads to more child abandonment locally and more child abduction in neighboring regions; (2) A stronger son-preference bias in a given region intensifies both the local effects and spatial spillover effects of the region’s one-child policy on child abandonment and abduction; and (3) With the gradual relaxation of the one-child policy after 2002, both child abandonment and child abduction have dropped significantly. This paper is the first to provide empirical evidence on the unintended consequences of the one-child policy in terms of child trafficking in China.

(That is the abstract of a new paper by Xiaojia Bao, Sebastian Galiani, Kai Li, and Cheryl Xiaoning Long.)


Former US Attorney Joe diGenova predicts that US Justice (sic) Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Obama regime’s FISA court violations and US Attorney John Durham’s criminal investigation of the Russiagate hoax perpetrated by the CIA, FBI, Democratic National Committee, and media will be “very bad for people in the Obama administration. . . . it’s going to be devastating . . . it’s going to ruin careers.”
A guy named Roberts begs to differ with a great quote: From what I know of Washington, I am certain that Washington, the cesspool of the world, will never rat on itself.

The Mayflower arrived at its final destination—Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts—in December of 1620. Of the original 30 crew and 102 passengers, fewer than half would be alive at winter’s end.


                     Happy Thanksgiving


Thanksgiving is a tricky word. It means gratitude but it implies more than something to be grateful for, it implies something to be grateful to.

In the fall of 1621, the Plymouth settlers had a celebratory meal with a local Indian tribe as part of a traditional English harvest festival. There are two accounts; no mention is made of a Day of Thanksgiving but they were probably happy; since their arrival, they had a 50% mortality. It lasted three days. A Day of Thanksgiving, a day the English would have considered religious, was first held in the new land in 1623 following a needed rainfall. Various days of thanksgiving were celebrated by the country over the years, the first in commemoration of the end of the Revolution by Washington. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln formally made Thanksgiving an annual event.

It is interesting to see these two men, Washington suspicious of organized religion and Lincoln harder to read, celebrating an official Thanksgiving, but both seem heartfelt, Lincoln's surprisingly so. Washington is almost a mirror of the mindset of the time. The two proclamations are below.

The Thanksgiving

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor--and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me `to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.'

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be -- That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks -- for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation--for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed--for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted -- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions--to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually -- to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed--to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn [sic] kindness onto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord -- To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease [sic] of science among them and us -- and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence [sic], have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln

Samuel Palmer's "Harvest Moon:"

A Reverse Coverup

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.--Marx (Groucho)

Fearful of the challenge that a thriving Chinese private sector might pose to the Communist Party’s political hold on the country, President Xi is now reestablishing party discipline and increasing the role of China’s state enterprises.--Lachman

This is a neat little generality that seems to me to be completely meaningless but could provoke fun debate:

Fraction of all US wealth owned by Boomers & Gen-Xers when the average member of each was age 35:

Boomers, 1989 21%
GenX, 2008 8%

The average Millennial turns 35 in 2023. Right now they own 3%.

There will surely be political implications. (somewhere)

Definitions: Baby Boomer=born 1946-1964, Gen X=born 1965-1980, and Millennial=born 1981-1996.

According to a report by InfluenceMap, the UK-based think-tank, investment portfolios held by some of the world's largest asset managers, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, “remain significantly misaligned” with climate-change goals set by world leaders in Paris in 2015.

The most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement was to keep the rise in global temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and aim for 1.5C. But InfluenceMap’s analysis of 50,000 investment funds found little exposure to companies across the oil and gas, automotive, electric power and coal industries that are deploying green technology to limit their impact on the environment.

These numbers are not new, but they bear repeating. One of the front-runners, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), touts proposals that seem to add up to roughly $49 trillion over the next decade. Another, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would spend more like $97.5 trillion. Warren would focus on programs like “Medicare for All,” free college and other new entitlements. Sanders would add to that a job guarantee program. Apparently, free stuff is expensive.
“The wealth of the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is not gold bars hidden under his mattress. Rather it is that his 12 percent ownership stake in Amazon.com, a company that employs more than 600,000 people, creates a platform for many other businesses, and saves consumers a huge amount of money.” A significant wealth tax applied to these assets will have consequences for the workers who count on it for employment and more.
The bottom line is that, as much as vast swaths of Americans want what Warren and Sanders are offering, we still have no clue how they will pay for it.--deRugy

Someone with a mild infection--maybe even a virus--will be given amoxicillin or other first-line treatments, and only if that doesn’t work will they be given a second-line treatment, such as a carbapenem. But in emerging markets, many precious second-line medications are widely available and presumably used inappropriately. India makes every product, often with Chinese ingredients, and they are the cheapest products in the world. India is also incredibly poor, where sanitation is often lacking and where antibiotics are used as substitutes for better hygiene. While second-line antibiotics are not cheap compared with first-line treatments like Cipro or amoxicillin, patients can at least buy them when they or their dependents inevitably get sickened due to poor sanitation and first-line treatments do not work. Clinical failure may be due to resistance but just as often because of substandard production. But regardless, inappropriate use of second-line treatments occurs.
it’s possible to buy these products without even a prescription. Although the situation improved in 2018 an alarming number of establishments were still selling carbapenems, a critical second-line type of antibiotic.
Perhaps worse still is that many of the products are substandard in some way or other. In a few instances, 25 percent don’t work and at best 8 percent fail.


South Korea ranks second to last in terms of conscientiousness but also ranks first in the number of hours worked.  South Korea is not an anomaly.  Country-level reports of Big Five conscientiousness are unrelated to the number of hours worked.  The rank correlation between hours worked and conscientiousness across countries is negative, though statistically insignificant. I'm unsure if this is meaningful, especially with the soft metric of "conscientiousness." But there is a lot of scientific literature out there.

On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II made perhaps the most influential speech of the Middle Ages, giving rise to the Crusades by calling all Christians in Europe to war against Muslims in order to reclaim the Holy Land, with a cry of “Deus vult!” or “God wills it!”

                     A Reverse Coverup

Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots. (Politico)

No doubt this will become our CIA cover-up story for the next decade. But.....

This might remind one of Oswald in Mexico City.

Now a real conspiracy. Jack Childs was a spy/raconteur who knew Castro. He says Castro told him that when Oswald realized the Cubans would not grant him a visa when he was in Mexico City he screamed with defiant bravado, "I'm going to kill Kennedy!" This was confirmed by the spy Rodriques Lahera in a debriefing with Harold Swenson. In November 1963, the Cuban intelligence officer in charge of monitoring possible CIA/exile activity against Cuba, Florintino Aspillaga, was told by Castro to abandon his usual sweeps and focus all his listening devices on the Dallas area.
So.....? The specifics of the assassination are beyond debate. Oswald, a defector to Russia, a communist disillusioned with the Russian system but enamored with the Cuban one, murdered President Kennedy. The only question is whether someone or some group influenced Oswald's decision. Castro may not have been involved. But it sounds as if he was not surprised.

Kennedy #2

In the academic world, diversity means black leftists, white leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists. Demographic diversity conceals ideological conformity.--Sowell


Saw some of "The Crown" last night. Very well done and the Royals never looked so good. I can always console myself with Andrew.
Also saw the beginning of the old "Thing from Outer Space," one of the best. It is said William Faulkner worked on it.
Chris made the best pumpkin pie I've ever had.

Over the most recent 15-year investment period from June 30, 2004, to June 30, 2019, roughly 90% of professional fund managers (89.83% for large-cap, 90.33% for mid-cap and 90.25% for small-cap) failed to outperform their benchmarks on a relative basis. 

Once Silicon Valley’s highest-flying darlings, companies from WeWork to Uber Technologies have collectively lost about $100 billion in value this year, prompting some startup executives to talk up profitability over growth. (wsj)

According to a new study from researchers at Princeton, Stanford, and UC-Davis, the children of recent immigrants are moving up the economic ladder in the USA today just like the children of European immigrants 100 years ago.

The American Farm Bureau Federation’s 34th annual survey of classic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table indicates the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $48.91, or less than $5.00 per person. This is a 1-cent increase from last year’s average of $48.90.



 Compared to the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 in 1986 of $66.89 (in 2019 dollars), today’s classic turkey dinner is 26.9% cheaper at $48.91 this year.

On this day in 1922, in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first souls to enter King Tutankhamen’s tomb in more than 3,000 years.

                          Kennedy #2

An industry has arisen to continue the mythology.

Oswald was not capable of such violence; he could not have made the shots in the time allotted; the rifle was inferior and the scope was misaligned; he had an alibi; there is no record of his interrogation by the Dallas police; he was an imposter from Russia; the "Oswald" in Mexico City was an imposter;  his pictures holding the rifle with the pistol and the two Communist newspapers are fakes; he travelled with Cuban revolutionaries; the rifle found on the depository sixth floor was a Mauser, not Oswald's Italian infantry rifle Model 1891/1938; the third shot--the head shot--came from the front; a second shooter was seen on the "grassy knoll;" the Dallas doctors disagreed with the Bethesda pathologists; three tramps in a box car in Dallas were likely CIA and were probably involve--one even looked like Woody Harrelson's father; Tippit's murderer was unidentified; the bullets that killed Tippit did not match Oswald's pistol; many involved have died suspiciously; the Mafia did it because of their annimosity to Bobby Kennedy; the CIA did it because of their fear of a Kennedy retaliation over the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Garrison argument implicating Clay Shaw (on the evidence of a psychotic who failed a lie detector test); Castro did it in self-defense; the JFK movie by Stone (see Garrison); the Navy pathologist burnt his notes; the Dallas FBI burnt a note Oswald left for them before the murder; Marina Oswald burnt photographs of Lee holding the rifle, Ruby killed Tippit, Tippit was meeting Oswald and was involved, .....on and on.

The democracy is hard at work here. Many of these notions come from average and concerned people, volunteers working far afield. Some are lawyers. Few are experts in the area they are focused on in the murder. One writer on the Zapruder film and what it reveals about the number of bullets and their timing is a  Kierkegaard lecturer from Haverford. Some of these objections are just nuts, some are true but, of those that are true, none would change anything.

What is certain is this:

1. Oswald bought the murder weapon from a mail order house using an alias he always used and had  the false ID in his wallet at his arrest. Oswald posed with the rifle holding communist newspapers; his wife, Marina, took the picture. Marina saw the rifle many times and knew where it was kept.

2. Before going to shoot Gen. Walker, a right-wing John Birch Society member, Oswald wrote a detailed letter to Marina explaining what he was going to do and what she should do if he were killed or did not come back.

3. He shot at Walker and the window slat diverted the bullet. He then fled the state for New Orleans.

4. The day of the murder he left his wedding ring in a glass by his wife's bed, then carried the gun to the depository wrapped in paper (later found at the shooting site) in a car driven by a fellow worker.

5. He was seen and described by a witness as he pushed the gun out of the window and the muzzle fire of 3 shots were seen.

6. Men at the window' one floor down and directly below the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the depository, heard the gunfire above, heard the bolt action and heard the casings hit the floor.
7. Oswald was seen in the depository after the shooting; he left the building and took a bus, then a cab, to his rooming house where he got his pistol.

8. Officer Tippit was a well regarded, simple guy and a solid citizen. At least ten people saw him murdered by Oswald and all identified him. Three bullets hit him in the chest. Oswald stepped away, then returned several steps to put a bullet in Officer Tippitt's temple as he lay on the ground.(!)

9. Ruby killed Oswald but his motives are obscure. It may not even have been planned. All acquaintences said he was distraught over Kennedy's death and the possibility that Jackie, whom he adored, would have to return to Dallas to go through a trial with Oswald. (The only press interview he ever gave was to Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen!)

Any theory about the killing has to include and accept these facts.

 

Kennedy #1

Indeed, much of modern history is a sad story of absurdities cloaked in power.--Will

Amazing Steeler game. Amazing being different from "good."

Pope Francis warned about the potential damage to society from technology such as nuclear power after meeting victims of the 2011 tsunami-caused meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. He seems to be wandering into difficult waters, without prompting.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey thinks that government restraints on speech would be a good idea. He wants “regulators” to “ensure a level playing field.” Does that mean limiting the dollars that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can raise online? Does it require MSNBC and CNN to give equal time to conservative voices? Does it require Twitter to deactivate overly influential accounts? Limit their number of tweets concerning “issues?” How level must the field be, and who determines both the standard and when it has been reached? A primary reason why the Founders adopted the First Amendment was their recognition that we couldn’t trust government to decide what is “fair.”--Smith

The clock is ticking for Democratic presidential contenders hoping to make the sixth debate on Dec. 19. And a new survey of the Iowa caucuses by Quinnipiac University has given two candidates the final qualifying poll they need. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard got 3 percent support in the new poll, which qualified her for the November debate, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar earned 5 percent, putting her on the December stage. This means 10 candidates have now made the fifth debate and six have qualified for the sixth.

Quantifying the obvious: "This paper provides theory and evidence that worker effort has played an important role in the increase in income inequality in the United States between 1980 and 2016. The theory suggests that a worker needs to exert effort enough to pay the rental value of the physical and human capital, thus high effort and high pay for jobs operating expensive capital. With that as a foundation, we use data from the ACS surveys in 1980 and 2016 to estimate Mincer equations for six different education levels that explain wage incomes as a function of weekly hours worked and other worker features. One finding is a decline in annual income for high school graduates for all hours worked per week. We argue that the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs forces down wages of those with high school degrees who have precious few high-effort opportunities outside of manufacturing. Another finding is that incomes rose only for those with advanced degrees and with weekly hours in excess of 40. We attribute this to the natural talent needed to make a computer deliver exceptional value and to the relative ease with which long hours can be chosen when working over the Internet."

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.--Tabarrok

On this day in 1950, the so-called “storm of the century” hit the eastern part of the United States, killing hundreds and causing millions of dollars in damages. Also known as the “Appalachian Storm,” it dumped record amounts of snow in parts of the Appalachian Mountains. An accompanying windstorm covered a far greater area. New York City recorded a 94 mile-per-hour wind gust. At Bear Mountain, just north of the city, a 140 mph gust was recorded. The winds throughout New England were of hurricane-like force. In addition, high tides and wind-driven surf battered the coastline. On the south edge of the storm, record low temperatures were recorded in Tennessee and North Carolina even without the wind chill. In Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, a temperature of 26 degrees below zero was recorded.

The storm was unique, however, because it featured not only extremely strong winds and heavy snow but both record high and low temperatures. In Pittsburgh, 30 inches of snow fell in a blinding snowstorm. Further north, Buffalo saw no snow but experienced 50 mile-per-hour winds and 50-degree temperatures. Paul Kocin, a Weather Channel expert, has said that this storm “had the greatest contrast of weather elements in probably any storm, including the 1993 March Superstorm.” The extreme weather was deemed responsible for the loss of 160 lives over several days.

                                Kennedy #1

The Kennedy assassination was a significant moment for me and for many. Yet the event, so terrible and intense, so researched and analyzed, has developed almost as its own entity, its own beast, as it matures along paths of manipulation, overt deception, and least resistance.

First, the reaction. Mrs. Kennedy's quote here is significant: "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights . . . . It's — it had to be some silly little Communist."  

This may not have set the tone for the management of the murder in history but it certainly was representative of it. The general reaction to the murder was completely divorced from what happened. Chief Justice Earl Warren ascribed Kennedy's "martyrdom" to "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots." Drew Pearson wrote that Kennedy was a victim of "hate drive."A Soviet spokesman assigned "moral responsibility" for Kennedy's death to "Barry Goldwater and other extremists on the right." The NYT encouraged us all to take blame for  "the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down" the President. James Reston's article the day after the shooting--on the first page--was headlined ""Why America Weeps: Kennedy a Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation." Senator Mike Mansfield eulogized the President as a victim of "bigotry, prejudice, and hatred."  In Arthur Schlesinger Jr. one thousand page history of the thousand day Kennedy presidency the assassin is not even mentioned. The Manhattan Institute's James Piereson, in his 2007 book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism," writes that the country's illness that led to the assassination required a curative "punitive liberalism." A newer book, Dallas "1963", says Dallas did it through a "climate of hatred" created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and media moguls. And an updated take by Alex Beam in a Boston Globe article: "Kennedy brought low by some redneck."

This is not simply a need to turn away and shield our eyes; there is plenty of stomach for Zapruder films and autopsy shots. This is much worse, an inability--an unwillingness--to see things as they are. It is simply not possible for the Left to accept the idea that Kennedy was murdered by a Marxist. And this perspective will lead to any number of creative narratives, consistent or not, to shift the blame from Oswald and towards a more acceptable villain. More, it is a refusal to see the modern world and its potential where a man of great standing and regard can be brought down by a fool. It is the egalitarian nightmare.

                

Sunday/Forgiveness

Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC's fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." 

Got back easily from Boston. Left a good book on the plane. Really tired and fat. Slept nine hours last night and gained 4 pounds in three days.

Environmentalists and their political allies attribute the recent increase in deadly forest fires to global warming. However, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, forest fires reached their peak in the 1930s and have declined by 80% since then.

Whatever money China spends subsidizing its exporters is money that could have been used by a Chinese industry that doesn’t need to be subsidized. Every additional renminbi yuan Chinese consumers are paying for automobiles or other products upon which they place high tariffs is one they no longer have to spend on something else, making the Chinese poorer for all the same reasons US tariffs make Americans poorer.--Mullen
This is a reflection by Diedre McCloskey, A profound and productive economist and observer of the world, on her decision to change her gender. It is very sad and moving. https://quillette.com/2019/11/10/reflections-on-my-decision-to-change-gender/




That's a surfer. Why are those watching him not running for their lives?




                                         Forgiveness

Today's gospel is The Good Thief, where Christ promises the thief crucified with him that he will be with him in paradise.
Forgiveness is a key element in Christianity. It has been said that a person is in thrall to whomever he cannot forgive. So does that mean that forgiveness is the state of ultimate freedom? Like divinity? Is forgiveness a prerequisite of the divine?

And while self-love each jealous writer rules,
Contending wits become the sport of fools:
But still the worst with most regret commend,
For each ill author is as bad a friend.
To what base ends, and by what abject ways,
Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise!
Ah ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast,
Nor in the critic let the man be lost!
Good nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human; to forgive, divine.
(Pope--Alexander, the "the")

Western Civ

 “At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”--Nietzsche

Walked in to dinner last night at Lucca. Amazing.
It took me about ninety minutes to confirm my flights last night. It took me 20 minutes to sign on this morning.
Watched the impeachment shoy yesterday. Another long labor; another mouse delivered.

The working age population, those 18 to 64, is only going to grow 17%. Seniors will grow 102% during that time. Right now, there are 4.8 workers supporting each retiree. By 2030, that number will be 2.9 and by 2050 it will be 2.4.
But what is this "support" thing? Didn't these seniors all put in their own money--by law--to be withdrawn later? Why do they need "supported?" Or are there separate, non-contributing, groups that need 'supported?" And if the latter is true, whose fault is that?

There is an article by a guy who makes a living evaluating the price of sex. It is a lot superficial but these are two interesting observations. The latest generation of dating apps produce data that reveals the extent of difference between male and female courtship behaviors. A study on Tinder, for example, found that men have to swipe right about 15 times more than women to get a similar level of response. These are not marginal differences, and they shine a light on an old reality: that female sex is vastly more valuable than male.
It is no coincidence that marijuana farmers destroy male plants, and retain the females for their big, resin-heavy flowers.
Females are more valuable, almost everywhere.

 
                     Western Civ

In 2010, psychologists Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia pointed out that virtually all research psychology studies were performed only in the countries they dubbed WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Their point was that these are not people who are necessarily representative of mankind.

(This, of course, is dangerous territory. We insist now that, despite our faith in the value of diversity, we are all alike. The balance between equality and diversity makes for interesting calculus.)

Henrich (now at Harvard University), in a paper published in the journal "Science," tried to explain the bases for the difference he saw in the west: Western Christianity. He offers a number of unprovable, fun theories--particularly how incest taboos influences social and political outlook--but it got me thinking.

I recently saw a local discussion at the university about the direction of education in the Classics. There is a big problem fitting Classics into the current social fads. Particularly, Classics departments are notoriously "non-diverse." Which is to say, "white." And the departments have been historically narrowly selective; they have demanded a strong understanding of classical language. This has narrowed research papers and the like further: One can not hold an academic position, can not make a living as a classicist, without translating skills.

What has happened, apparently, is a gradual thinning of the traditional classicist herd. Not only is it whiter, it is smaller and smaller. Students no longer take classics courses, survey course attendance is down and the departments are lucky to get an occasional guest lecture in a literature course. And the lack of diversity in these departments was felt by many to raise at least a social--if not moral--question.

The solution? Dilute and expand. The proposition was to eliminate the language requirements of the Classics Departments and develop a more casual, sociological approach to research, papers, and scholarship.

There was some disruption in the response. Several older teachers, committed to a classical education, politely lost their minds. One middle-aged woman with long gray hair and trembling voice pleaded for standards that most of the room thought were dead and buried, practically if not officially. In a last, desperate act she cried, "We are talking about the basis of Western Civilization."

It was time for the diversity champion to lose her mind, less politely. She implied that the gray-haired woman was a racist and then pronounced angrily, "Western Civilization is a construct!"

"A construct?!" 

All narratives are "constructs." Few social observations are perfect and writ in stone. That is just a fact. But it is a poor criticism. States and language are constructs, does that diminish them? What about religion? 

Or by "construct" does she just mean "artificially divisive?" Does "Western Civ" threaten her vision of a homogeneous world community? 
The problem of equality and diversity again. 
  

November 22, 1963

Fish and Chips last night. This town is very young.

                            November 22, 1963    

The past and present merge:

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid 60's by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the 60's and 70's was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is a unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence in the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway