SOLSTICE

 

                                                                                   SOLSTICE

SOLSTICE: either of the two times during the year when the sun is farthest from the equator, about June 21st when the sun is farthest north of the equator and about December 22nd when it is farthest south: The summer solstice has the longest days, and the winter solstice has the shortest.

The seasons have nothing to do with how far the Earth is from the Sun.  If this were the case, it would be hotter in the northern hemisphere during January as opposed to July.  Instead, the seasons are caused by the Earth being tilted on its axis by an average of 23.5 degrees (Earth's tilt on its axis actually varies from near 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees).  Here's how it works:

The Earth has an elliptical orbit around our Sun.  This being said, the Earth is at its closest point distance wise to the Sun in January (called the Perihelion) and the furthest in July (the Aphelion).  But this distance change is not great enough to cause any substantial difference in our climate.  This is why the Earth's 23.5 degree tilt is all important in changing our seasons.  Near June 21st, the summer solstice, the Earth is tilted such that the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude.  This situates the northern hemisphere in a more direct path of the Sun's energy.  What this means is less sunlight gets scattered before reaching the ground because it has less distance to travel through the atmosphere.  In addition, the high sun angle produces long days.  The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere, where the low sun angle produces short days.  Furthermore, a large amount of the Sun's energy is scattered before reaching the ground because the energy has to travel through more of the atmosphere.  Therefore near June 21st, the southern hemisphere is having its winter solstice because it "leans" away from the Sun.

Advancing 90 days, the Earth is at the autumnal equinox on or about September 21st.  As the Earth revolves around the Sun, it gets positioned such that the Sun is directly over the equator.   Basically, the Sun's energy is in balance between the northern and southern hemispheres.  The same holds true on the spring equinox near March 21st, as the Sun is once again directly over the equator. 

Lastly, on the winter solstice near December 21st, the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south latitude.  The southern hemisphere is therefore receiving the direct sunlight, with little scattering of the sun's rays and a high sun angle producing long days.  The northern hemisphere is tipped away from the Sun, producing short days and a low sun angle.

What kind of effect does the earth's tilt and subsequent seasons have on our length of daylight (defined as sunrise to sunset).  Over the equator, the answer is not much.  If you live on or very close to the equator, your daylight would be basically within a few minutes of 12 hours the year around.  Using the northern hemisphere as a reference, the daylight would  lengthen/shorten during the summer/winter moving northward from the equator.  The daylight difference is subtle in the tropics, but becomes extremely large in the northern latitudes.  Where we live in the mid latitudes, daylight ranges from about 15 hours around the summer solstice to near nine hours close to the winter solstice.   Moving to the arctic circle at 66.5 degrees north latitude, the Sun never sets from early June to early July.  But around the winter solstice, the daylight only lasts slightly more than two hours.  There becomes a profound difference in the length of daylight heading north of the arctic circle.  Barrow, Alaska at slightly more than 71 degrees north latitude, lies just less than 300 nautical miles north of the arctic circle.  Barrow sees two months of total darkness, as the Sun never rises for about a month on each side of the winter solstice.  On the other hand, Barrow also has total light from mid May to early August.  And what about the north pole, or 90 degrees north latitude?  The Sun rises in the early evening near the spring equinox and never sets again until just after the autumnal equinox, or six months of light.  Conversely, after the Sun sets in the mid morning just after the autumnal equinox, it will not be seen again until the following spring equinox, equating to six months of darkness.  

(NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE)

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon

                 A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Minorities in the U.S.

                                                 Minorities in the U.S.

The anti-American mantra has some defects.

We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year—an unprecedented outcome.

According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823).

The latest Census data indicate that the median earnings for full-time, year-round female Palestinian American workers ($52,061), female Iranian American workers ($64,220), and female Turkish American workers ($67,759) were all higher than those of white women ($45,581). Turkish and Iranian women also out-earned white men ($57,003).

From Arora

So, what does all this grousing really mean?

Sinterklaas

 

                                  Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.
Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.
The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last year urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.
Dutch Stamps:

  

The Holy Family

 

                        The Holy Family

Today is the feast of The Holy Family, one of those feasts that are so Catholic; it is not a feast of an event, it is from "The Feasts of Ideas." The gospel involves the astonishing loss of the young child by his parents on a trip back from Jerusalem, something that would be a felony nowadays. He is found teaching the teachers and seems curiously dismissive of his parents' anxiety, as if just outside of empathy, looking in.

This is Thom Gunn's "Jesus and His Mother:"

My only son, more God's than mine,

Stay in this garden ripe with pears.
The yielding of their substance wears
A modest and contented shine:
And when they weep in age, not brine
But lazy syrup are their tears.
"I am my own and not my own."

He seemed much like another man,
That silent foreigner who trod
Outside my door with lily rod:
How could I know what I began
Meeting the eyes more furious than
The eyes of Joseph, those of God?
I was my own and not my own.

And who are these twelve labouring men?
I do not understand your words:
I taught you speech, we named the birds,
You marked their big migrations then
Like any child. So turn again
To silence from the place of crowds.
"I am my own and not my own."

Why are you sullen when I speak?
Here are your tools, the saw and knife
And hammer on your bench. Your life
Is measured here in week and week
Planed as the furniture you make,
And I will teach you like a wife
To be my own and all my own.

Who like an arrogant wind blown
Where he pleases, does without content?
Yet I remember how you went
To speak with scholars in furred gown.
I hear an outcry in the town;
Who carries this dark instrument?
"One all his own and not his own."

Treading the green and nimble sward,
I stare at a strange shadow thrown.
Are you the boy I bore alone,
No doctor near to cut the cord?
I cannot reach to call you Lord,
Answer me as my only son.
"I am my own and not my own."

Virginia

 

                                                                                Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted every year until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

Christmas

 

                              Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.
Merry Christmas.

Joseph Has a Dream

                                     Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation. 

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad formed his opinion of Christianity through an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

Saturnalia

                                    Saturnalia

Saturn is the Roman Chronos, an early Titan in the history of the evolution of the gods and man, the son of the Earth and Sky. He defeats his siblings and, in fear of a prophesy that he will be overthrown by a son, eats his children. One child, Zeus, is hidden by his mother and grows to rescue his siblings and overthrow his father. 

 Saturn is the original fertility symbol in mythology, preceding Persephone in chronology and hierarchy. He does not quite fit the popular notion of a historical evolutionary progression away from female fertility goddesses to the more combative male deities. As the second layer of the gods, supplanted by Zeus and his siblings, he is much less active but had a significant old mythological following. 

 Saturnalia originated as a farmer's festival to mark the end of the autumn planting season (satus means sowing). It started as a two day celebration but grew longer and later; it was seven days around the winter solstice in the third century A.D., when numerous archaeological sites demonstrate that the cult of Saturn still survived. 

The poet Lucian of Samosata (AD 120-180) has the god Cronos (Saturn) say in his poem, Saturnalia: "During my week the serious is barred: no business is allowed. Drinking and being drunk, noise and games of dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping...an occasional dunking of corked faces in icy water--such are the functions over which I preside." A public holiday with gifts, masters and slaves swapping clothes, the strange election of a temporary house "monarch." A time for feasting, goodwill, generosity to the poor, the exchange of gifts and the decoration of trees. 

 By that time, with Christianity well established, it is difficult to determine which gave and took.

Sunday/Annunciation

                            Sunday/Annunciation

Today is the Annunciation, where Gabriel comes to Mary with her fate, fulfilling the prophecy in Isaiah. Gabriel is described in Daniel thus: "His body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude."

This is the angel of the Old Testament and becomes the messenger of Mohammad.

In Christianity, it is a strange, pivotal moment. Here the human being gets to say "No."
“The Annunciation” By Elizabeth Jennings

Nothing will ease the pain to come
Though now she sits in ecstasy
And lets it have its way with her.
The angel’s shadow in the room
Is lightly lifted as if he
Had never terrified her there.

The furniture again returns
To its old simple state. She can
Take comfort from the things she knows
Though in her heart new loving burns
Something she never gave to man
Or god before, and this god grows

Most like a man. She wonders how
To pray at all, what thanks to give
And whom to give them to. “Alone
To all men’s eyes I now must go”
She thinks, “And by myself must live
With a strange child that is my own.”

So from her ecstasy she moves
And turns to human things at last
(Announcing angels set aside).
It is a human child she loves
Though a god stirs beneath her breast
And great salvations grip her side.

Not that an angel entered (realize this),
scared her. Just as others would not startle
if a ray of sunlight or the moon at night
busied itself in the room, the form in which
an angel walked, did not scare her;
she barely had an idea that this stay was
difficult for angels. (O if we knew just how pure
she was. A doe once beheld her in the forest and
became so fond of her that within her was conceived
the unicorn, the animal from light, the pure animal.)

It did not scare her that he entered,
but that he was so utterly present, the angel,
bearing a young man's face, and turned to her;
that his gaze and hers, looking up to him, collided
as if everything outside had become empty,
and everything that millions saw, did, wore
became condensed in them: only her and him;
Seeing and seen, nowhere else except in this very spot
- see, that scares, and both startled.

Then the angel sang his melody.

Rilke's poem is of a forgetful angel and opens with a phrase challenging to modern Catholics.


Annunciation: The Words of the Angel" by Rainer Maria Rilke



You are no closer to God than any of us;
we all live far and wide.
But it’s wonderful how your hands
have been sanctified.
They don’t find a match in other women’s,
so brilliant from beneath their sleeves:
I am the day, I am the dew,
but you are tree.
I am rather tired now, my journey was long,
forgive that I forgot
that he, who sat in gilded garb
like in a ray of light,
sends news to you, you quiet one
(this room here startled me).
Look: I am the beginning one,
but you are tree.
I spread my wings apart
and become oddly broad;
now your little house is flooded
with my coat.
And still, you are so all alone
as never before, me you hardly see;
because I am just breath in woods,
but you are tree.
All the angels are worried now,
letting go of each other’s hands:
never before was there such a longing,
so uncertain and immense.
Perhaps it will come about soon
and you will grasp it as if in a dream.
Blessings to you, my soul perceives
you are ready and ripe to receive.
You are a great and lofty gate
and about to open up.
You are my song’s most beloved ear.
I feel there disappears and seeps
into you my word.
That’s how I came and completed
your dream among a thousand and one.
And with blinding eyes God looked at me …

Graphs

 

                                                       Graphs

Since the outset of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, the carbon dioxide concentration in Earth’s atmosphere has increased by about 47%, most rapidly from about 1960 onward:

Another way to view the  “case fatality rates” (deaths/cases) for the world (2.2% and falling) and US (1.8% and falling):

 

Some of the global warming since 1850 could be a recovery from the Little Ice Age rather than a direct result of human activities. So it is important to recognize that natural variations of climate are appreciable and will modulate any future changes induced by man.

New World

 

                                                          New World

The astonishing delegation of dignity and freedom to the individual as written in the Constitution is a revolution of thought to a degree undreamed of by modern revolutionaries. The modern revolutionary's hallmark is expropriation. Taking what others have has been around for as long as Cain. Giving people freedom and value has been around for 250 years. Yet somehow people continue to believe the envy, repression, and violence of socialism and its ilk to be innovative and optimistic.

Backtracking on 1619

 

                                                       Backtracking on 1619

An article in the WSJ  reports that the NYT is on the run, as light drives out deceit, over the 1619 atrocity.

In a letter to the Times, historians at Yale, Princeton, and other institutions wrote “to express our deep concern about the New York Times’ promotion of The 1619 Project” and noted “the problematic treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras.” The scholars added:

We are also troubled that these materials are now to become the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of the New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights. We therefore respectfully ask the New York Times to withhold any steps to publish and distribute The 1619 Project until these concerns can be addressed in a thorough and open fashion.

In March, the Times did make one significant correction, though it simply labeled it an “Editors’ Note.” But the historians signing this week’s letter say the passage is still flawed:

Where Hannah-Jones had originally written, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” the new text says “some of the colonists.” Even this softened assertion has little or no documentary basis, according to the most distinguished specialists in the period.

Historian Phillip Magness, among the signers of this week’s letter, noted recently that the Times has quietly edited its material again to remove the claim that 1776 is not the true American founding—and amazingly the Times’ prize-winner is now saying that she never made the claim. In this week’s letter, the historians write:

The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.

Eric Swalwell, American Leader

 

                                      Eric Swalwell, American Leader

 Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) had a close relationship with an alleged Chinese spy, Christine Fang. His behavior during this period and after it is a crash-course on American political desolation and hypocrisy.

Swalwell was one of the most prominent purveyors of the now-disproven conspiracy theory that Donald Trump had colluded with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 election. Yet it turns out that all the while Swalwell was spreading those lies, he knew that he had been cultivated and funded by a suspected Chinese intelligence operative.

During the Mueller probe, Swalwell repeatedly claimed without a shred of evidence that Trump not only colluded with Russia but also that he was an “agent” of Russian intelligence. In an interview on MSNBC, Chris Matthews asked him whether Trump was a Russian agent “like in the 1940s where you had people who were ‘reds’?” Swalwell answered, “He’s working on behalf of the Russians, yes.” It turned out that was a lie. Swalwell used his position as a member of the House Intelligence Committee to suggest that he had seen evidence the rest of us could not that Trump was a Russian operative — when we now know no such evidence existed. You can always trust the political insider; he always knows and shares the truth.

So the congressman who claimed Trump was an agent of a hostile foreign power himself had a relationship with an alleged agent of a hostile foreign power. Fang began cultivating Swalwell when he was a member of the Dublin, Calif., city council, as part of a Chinese intelligence operation to get close to rising political stars. After he was elected to Congress in 2012, she became a bundler raising money for his reelection campaign. She chose her target well. Swalwell became a member of the House Intelligence Committee and lead Democrat on the subcommittee with oversight over the CIA. According to Axios, “Fang facilitated the potential assignment of interns into Swalwell’s offices” and “in at least one case, an intern recommended by Fang was placed into Swalwell’s D.C. office.” 

Let’s give Swalwell the benefit of the doubt that he denied Trump: There is no evidence he knew that Fang was an alleged Chinese operative, or that Swalwell was an “agent” working on behalf of Communist China. He cut off contact with her as soon as the FBI warned him about Fang. But we can be sure that if he had the same kind of photos of Trump palling around with a beautiful Russian spy that we now have of Swalwell palling around with an alleged Chinese spy, he would have held that up as proof that Trump was in the pocket of Russian intelligence, or worse.

Swalwell has not been accused of any wrongdoing. The issue is his hypocrisy in attacking Trump for alleged collusion with a foreign intelligence agency when he himself had been used by an alleged operative of a foreign intelligence agency. Indeed, Swalwell had the nerve to complain that the story was leaked to Axios by Trump supporters to try to “discredit” him — a charge Axios’s Jonathan Swan, whose colleagues broke the story, called “completely absurd.”

Then, there is the hypocrisy of the FBI. The bureau gave Swalwell a “defensive briefing” in 2015, informing him that Fang was a suspected Chinese agent and allowing him to cut ties with her. They gave a similar briefing to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in 2013, when the FBI learned that the then-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for about 20 years — after which she fired the individual. That’s because it’s standard practice to inform the target of foreign espionage that they are being targeted. But while the bureau did give Trump what former FBI director James B. Comey called “a general counterintelligence briefing about the threat coming from different nations,” it never told him that they had opened counterintelligence investigations against four Trump campaign associates whom they suspected of inappropriate contact with Russian intelligence. Instead, the FBI kept him in the dark and wasted two years and tens of millions of dollars chasing a conspiracy theory.

Those resources might have been better spent focusing on the threat from China. In July, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray explained, “We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours.” As we can see from China’s suspected compromising of Swalwell, the Chinese espionage threat is real. Swalwell hid his relationship with a Chinese spy from public scrutiny for five years. He owes the American people an explanation.

Great guys, stand-up and patriotic, not manipulative or insincere. Just astonishing. (a lot from Theissen in The WashPo)

Standards

 

                                     Standards

In this time of intellectual confusion, rampant sentimentality, and mindless flat-earth beliefs, we can always rely on the university community to right the ship.

Georgia State University has a single-sex, female-only “WomenLead: Empowering Women to Lead” program. This is the preferred pronoun list that is part of the program’s application form. 

"Help" is apparently not an option in the last choice.

Brexit

                                    Brexit

A minority report on Brexit in Bloomberg:

...there is the rise of illiberalism in Hungary, and to a lesser extent Poland, which is perhaps the EU’s biggest problem right now. The EU is seeking to withhold aid from those nations for weakening their independent judiciaries, and they are in turn threatening to veto the union’s $2.2 trillion budget and recovery package, which requires unanimous support. In response, the EU is considering approving that package outside its normal procedures.

More likely than not, a compromise will be found. But you have to wonder how long a well-functioning EU can tolerate a non-free nation such as Hungary. The EU certainly does not appear on the verge of kicking Hungary out (Germany, for one, would not welcome such a move, given its strong interests in Eastern Europe). But the challenges to the EU model presented by nations such as Hungary are much worse than they were in 2016, when the Brexit referendum was held.

Even if the EU succeeds in pushing Hungary around — and I hope it does — it is not necessarily a good outcome for the U.K. Such a policy would require weakening the EU’s unanimity requirements on many decisions, and that is something the U.K. should feel uncomfortable about. If Hungary can be pushed around, so can the U.K.

Finally, southeast England is emerging as a global technology center, especially in artificial intelligence and biomedical research. That’s great news for the U.K. But how does it square with the EU’s long-term pursuit of tougher regulations on tech companies, higher privacy standards for platforms and apps, and more stringent regulations on AI algorithms?

Sunday/Light

 

                                                            Sunday/Light

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent, in John's Gospel. It is filled with declarations of what is and, unusual for this kind of writing, what is not, as John the Baptist is defined, then Christ.

6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. 8He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

9That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. 10He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. 11He came unto his own, and his own received him not. 12But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: 13Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

So, echoing the darkness versus light of Genesis, John presents Christ as light in a world where only dots of campfires lit the night.

Here is Hardy, not really about John, but worth it anyway.

The Superseded

I

As newer comers crowd the fore,
We drop behind.
– We who have laboured long and sore
Times out of mind,
And keen are yet, must not regret
To drop behind.

II

Yet there are of us some who grieve
To go behind;
Staunch, strenuous souls who scarce believe
Their fires declined,
And know none cares, remembers, spares
Who go behind.

III

‘Tis not that we have unforetold
The drop behind;
We feel the new must oust the old
In every kind;
But yet we think, must we, must WE,
Too, drop behind?

Graphs

 

                                                                          Graphs

The number of Prohibition-era police deaths by gunfire (2,516) is greater than the number of US military casualties since 2001 in the US War in Afghanistan (2,354).

We are now living in the “Golden Age of Beer” with a record number of US breweries (8,217 as of June 2020) making some of the highest quality craft beer in the history of the world (see chart below)!

During 2019:

• petroleum supplied 36.7% of all primary energy consumed in the U.S.
• natural gas supplied 32.0%.
• coal supplied 11.3%.
• nuclear supplied 8.4%.
• hydroelectric supplied 2.5%.
• wind supplied 2.7%.
• wood supplied 2.3%.
• biofuels supplied 2.3%.
• solar supplied 1.0%.
• biowaste supplied 0.4%.
• geothermal supplied 0.2%.[60] [61] [62]

Chesterton

                                                               Chesterton

Chesterton shows that we really do not change. And our problems are on a loop.

"The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus, some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus, some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity is often untruthful […] they have parted [Christ’s] garments among them, for His vesture they have cast lots; though the coat was without seam woven from the top throughout."

And also with time.

"Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father."

Chesterton lived from May 1874  to June 1936.

Risk

                                                                   Risk

Socialism despises competition and its fallout of failure. In a way, it is an intolerance of the nature of life with its ups and downs--and eventual fatal denouement. Those busybodies who relentlessly try to interfere with all social and economic events are really trying to smooth the uncertainties of living, to homogenize the results of social and economic interactions.

The basic enemy is risk. And they are willing to sacrifice progress--the result of risk-taking--to eliminate it. In the back of their self-declared kind minds, they probably believe their ingenuity can substitute for the creative destruction of the marketplace. It s a wonder that they allow our dangerous social interactions like school and love.

Perhaps this explains the Left's hysterical, aggressive animosity toward the chaotic Virus.

Adolescent Violence

                                    Adolescent Violence

After many years of decline in violent behavior among adolescents in several Western countries, recent official statistics indicate a possible trend change. So far, knowledge on how this change is related to co-occurring changes in leisure time activities is limited. Using two cross-sectional surveys from Oslo, Norway, this study found substantial increases in the prevalence of physical fighting from 2015 (N = 23,381; 51.6% girls) to 2018 (N = 25,287; 50.8% girls) in junior and senior high school. The rise in fighting was related to co-occurring changes in several leisure activities, including increasing time spent unsupervised by adults, rising digital media use, and rising cannabis use. The study emphasizes the importance of considering leisure time activities when addressing adolescent misbehavior.

In the aggregate data:

After a steady decline from 2007 to 2013 in police registered violent crime among adolescents under the age of 18 in Oslo, the capital of Norway, the number of violent crimes increased from 259 to 499 from 2013 to 2018, an increase
of 93% in five years.

Table 2 indicates that changes in “migration background” do not seem large enough to explain that evolution, even if that were the significant factor. And from the survey data:


In junior high school, the prevalence rates for boys increased from 31.4% in 2015 to 38.1% in 2018 and from 8.9% to 13.1% for girls…

Covid Reporting

                                     Covid Reporting

“The young die as well from COVID-19, even as many engage in denial” (USA Nov. 28).

But the number of Covid deaths in America of people younger than 40 – 3,571 – is 1.5 percent of all Covid deaths in this country, which is unmentioned.

More than 40 percent of all Covid deaths in the U.S. are of residents of nursing homes. Instead of alerting readers to the fact that 97 percent of Covid deaths are of people 45 and older, the article reveals that 

under-40 Covid deaths “has now surpassed the total death toll from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Shocking.

Or, maybe, even Pearl Harbor. And I'll bet a lot more than the kids killed at Columbine. Or Sandy Hook. Even combined probably.

What could be worse?

Emmys in Journalism

 

                                    Emmys in Journalism      

Ultimately, it is not the journalist’s role, and it is not the goal of activists or politicians, to present the world as it really is. They will always have to compete to engage our attention with exciting stories and dramatic narratives. They will always focus on the unusual rather than the common, and on the new or temporary rather than slowly changing patterns.--Rosling

Rosling is talking here about entertainment. News as a product, not information or revelation. Journalists as entertainers, not contemporary historians.

Why are we suspicious of all commercial events yet are not disdainful of commercialism in the media?

Sunday/Opening of Mark

                                                      Sunday/Opening of Mark

This is the Second Sunday of Advent, and the gospel starts with the opening of Mark's gospel. Mark was not an original apostle but rather became the scribe for Peter and his gospel is believed to be mostly from Peter, probably in Rome around the time of the fire. It serves as a bridge between the Old and New Testament through the appearance of John the Baptist.

There has always been speculation as to what the Evangelists actually thought of Christ. The gospel opens:

"The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."