Tombs of the Mughals

Is there a "home field" advantage with no audience?

                                Tombs of the Mughals

The Mughals of Northern India are famous for their tombs, Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, Jahangir’s Tomb in Lahore and, of course, the Taj Mahal. Why so many tombs? Culture surely has something to do with it, although conservative Muslims tend to frown on tombs and ancestor worship as interference with the communication between man and God. Incentives are another reason.
Under the Mansabdari system which governed the nobility, the Mughal Emperor didn’t give perpetual grants of land. On death, all land that had been granted to the noble reverted back to the Emperor, effectively a 100% estate tax. In other words, land titling for the Mughal nobility was not hereditary. Since land could not be handed down to the next generation, there was very little incentive for the Mughal nobility to build palaces or the kind of ancestral homes that are common in Europe. The one exception to the rule, however, was for tombs. Tombs would not revert back to the Emperor. Hence the many Mughal tombs
Here is some lovely jali (stone lattice) work in Barber’s tomb in the Humayan tomb complex.

The Aga Khan Development Network has done some great restoration work on Isa Khan’s tomb, again in the Humayun’s tomb complex. Here’s the ceiling and another piece of jali work.

From Tabarrok

The Reach of Education

                                                       The Reach of Education

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). That union represents more than 35,000 teachers in the nation's second-largest school district. Earlier this month, UTLA published a paper calling for schools to remain closed until the district could ensure adequate supplies of protective gear for teachers and students. UTLA also demanded the reconfiguring of classrooms to allow for social distancing.

But that wasn't it. UTLA also stated that the pandemic requires an immediate moratorium on new charter schools in Los Angeles.
It is also demanding things that the officials in charge of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) don't have the power to grant, such as the passage of Medicare for All, new state-level wealth taxes in California, and a federal bailout of the LAUSD—which is struggling to meet pension obligations for retired teachers and staff.


More than 10 teachers unions—including those in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul—have joined up with the Democratic Socialists of America to say that "schools cannot continue in this crisis without the resources our students need and deserve."
What sort of demands are being made? For starters, those unions want a national ban on evictions, a moratorium on charter schools, an end to voucher programs, and the abolition of standardized testing. They also want a "massive infusion of federal money"—though it is unclear how much that actually is—paid for by, of course, "taxing billionaires and Wall Street."

(excerpted from an article somewhere)

The Great Production of Slavery

                       The Great Production of Slavery


From McCloskey on the revolting 1619 Lie:

Both Senator [Tom] Cotton [R-AR] and the 1619 Project have the economic history wrong.
If it were true, the numerous slave societies of olden times, such as Rome in 30 BCE or Norway in 700 CE, would have long ago experienced the Great Enrichment, of 3,000 percent per person for the poorest in Britain and Japan and many other non-slave places 1800 to the present. Likewise, by now Canada, say, with no slaves or much of any connection with slavery, would have remained very poor. Switzerland. New Zealand. Botswana.


What “built”” the US and every other country now prosperous was not stealing from poor people, or for that matter piling up routine investment, but massive innovation—cheap steel, electricity, vaccines, the modern university, mobility of labor and capital, the internal combustion engine, sewage treatment, artificial fertilizer, radio, radar, free trade, jet planes, the green revolution, containerization, computers, and above all the shamefully delayed but in the end thoroughly achieved liberation of slaves, poor men, women, colonial peoples, immigrants, free Blacks, gays. Under what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”—in a word, liberalism– -people were permitted for the first time to have a go. It was their new liberty to innovate, not slavery or forced investment, that made billions rich, and will make the entire world rich. Or it will do so unless the 1619 Project and Senator Cotton, populists of left or right, with their Just-So understandings of history, kill it.

Accolades

                                       Accolades


These are difficult times and any optimism should be valued. Emergent Ventures from Mercatus Center and George Mason University has created prizes related to innovative approaches to The Virus. It should make everyone feel better--for the future if not the present. .Here is the list of winners:

1. Social leadership prize: Helen Chu and her team at the University of Washington.

Dr. Helen Y. Chu, an infectious disease expert in Seattle, knew that the United States did not have much time…

As luck would have it, Dr. Chu had a way to monitor the region. For months, as part of a research project into the flu, she and a team of researchers had been collecting nasal swabs from residents experiencing symptoms throughout the Puget Sound region.

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, interviews and emails show, even as weeks crawled by and outbreaks emerged in countries outside of China, where the infection began.

By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it. (from nyt)

2. Data gathering and presentation prize: Avi Schiffmann

A self-taught computer maven from Seattle, Avi Schiffmann uses web scraping technology to accurately report on developing pandemic, while fighting misinformation and panic. He is seventeen.

3. Prize for good policy thinking: The Imperial College researchers, led by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist.

Neil and his team calculated numerically what the basic options and policy trade-offs were in the coronavirus space. Even those who disagree with parts of their model are using it as a basic framework for discussion.

4. Prize for rapid speedy response: Curative, Inc. (legal name Snap Genomics, based in Silicon Valley)

Originally a sepsis diagnostics company, they very rapidly repositioned their staff and laboratories to scale up COVID-19 testing. They also acted rapidly, early, and pro-actively to round up the necessary materials for such testing, and they are currently churning out a high number of usable test kits each day, with that number rising rapidly. The company is also working on identifying which are the individuals most like to spread the disease and getting them tested first.

McCullough on Heyne

                     McCullough on Heyne

Some points from a review by Russ McCullough of Paul Heyne:

“Morality has more to do with intentions than with results; so the person who tried to run you down with his car is morally more culpable than the person who actually ran you down but while trying to get to church.”

Consider the phrase, “Hunger is an injustice.” As he explains, generally speaking, “no one intends the hunger of other people” and therefore there is no injustice.

He is one of the earliest writers to highlight the distinction between economic systems and the morality of people participating in those systems. His analogy to a traffic system is great:
An economic system that successfully coordinates the efforts of millions of people will necessarily work like an urban traffic system: Individuals will pursue their own goals, obeying general rules of the game, in response to the net advantages they perceive in their immediate environment, and adjusting those net advantages in the process so that they more adequately accommodate the diverse wants and abilities of the participants.

Paul is quick to emphasize that it is impossible for the government to “extract just outcomes from the economic system” and that efficiency gains from the market system can allow individuals to better foster personal relationships, community, and family. People who attribute materialism, consumerism, and selfishness to capitalism are confusing personal morality with impersonal markets.

Private property within the social system of capitalism is helpful because of his insight that “property rights are rights with respect to other people, and are therefore inescapably social, not private.” These rights combined with rules that state that only voluntary exchange is allowed create a fabulous social phenomenon where individual success “depends on your ability to persuade other people to cooperate” with you. Ultimately, efforts to curb or change the virtue of profit maximization are misplaced. Those efforts should instead be made to create better rules of the game so that the rent seeking benefits of lobbyists and other special interests are reduced, and political markets are made more competitive.

Disparities

Is Critical Theory an example of Begging the Question?

                                         Disparities

In 2018, women earned 62% or more of the bachelor’s degrees in 9 out of the 16 academic fields: Health Professions (84.5% and the greatest gender disparity for either sex for the 16 majors), Public Administration (82.8% and the field with the second-highest gender imbalance), Education (81.6% and the field with the third-highest gender disparity), Psychology (78.9%), English (70.8%), Foreign Languages (68.8%), Communication and Journalism (65.5%), Biology (62.2%) Visual and Performing Arts (61.4%).

Women have earned a majority of degrees in Biology in every year since 1988, and have earned more than 60% of those degrees in 8 of the last 17 years, including a peak 62.2% share in both 2004 and 2018.

Women have never earned fewer than 60% of bachelor’s degrees in any year of the following since 1971: Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, English, Foreign Languages, and Visual/Performing Arts. For Psychology, women have earned a majority share every year since 1974, a 60% share or greater starting in 1979, a 70% share or greater starting in 1988 and a 75% share or greater starting in 1999.

For the four academic fields of Business, Architecture, Math and Statistics, and Physical Sciences, women earned a slight minority of those degrees in 2018 ranging between 40.0% for Physics and 47.1% for Architecture. For the other two of the four fields, women earned 42.4% of Math/Statistics degrees, 47.0% of Business degrees. For degrees in Business, the female share exceeded 50% in 2002, 2003 and 2004 but then has gradually declined since then to a 47.0% share in 2018, the lowest share since 1990.

Over the 1971 to 2018 period, the three largest increases in the female shares of degrees were in Business (from 9.1% to 47.0% = +37.9 percentage points), Architecture (from 11.9% to 47.1% = +35.2 percentage points) and Psychology (from 44.4% to 78.9% +34.5 percentage points).

In 2018, the female shares of bachelor’s degrees in all of the 16 academic fields except Business increased from the previous year. The biggest annual increase in 2018 by academic field was the 1.8 percentage point increase in the female share of engineering degrees from 20.4% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2018, a new all-time high.

Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

                     Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

In today's gospel, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting smilies, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin, the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.


The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas

A Thought or Two

                                                          A Thought or Two

Yesterday's inclusion of the Babylon Bee's LGBTQ Loops headline drew an angry response. What I saw as satire was seen as malice.
There is an interesting discussion going on about Aristotle, really a strawman argument to discuss history. Aristotle not only thought slavery moral, he thought it was good for the slave. So, should we throw him out as a thinker with the bathwater? Since he is the foundation of Western thought, it has some serious implications--especially when replacements of quality are so hard to come by.
We have grown up in a culture where correcting the neighbor's children was encouraged because certain behavior in the culture was held in common; correcting your neighbor was not because every man was given in this land a certain dignity by birthright. He could believe what he liked because we all had a confidence in the people generally. All men were created equal because they had value. And could be relied upon. That is no longer believed.
The "moderation in all things" advice by the oracle is more than wisdom, it is essential. All qualities, contrary to the Manichees, have downsides. There is nothing more civilizing than the heterogeneity of the tribe and there is nothing less civilizing than the tribes's homogeneity.
Lust, for example, has a lot of elements in it, many bad. Cultures have created exotic distortions to manage it. But in the end, cultures must live, need to live, with it, and must come to some peace with it.
I like doing this but I have no intention of offending anyone. The idea behind this blog has been to evaluate and present ideas clearly, not as an endpoint but as a process, mainly for my kids but also for me. In this culture, that might not be possible.

Black Lives Matter

Quick, reactive politics generated by daily news and turmoil is incompatible with a deliberative, checks and balance republic.


                                       Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter is more than a slogan, it is an organization with officers, mission statements, and budgets. It looks like a charity, so is a donation deductible? There have been a lot of superficial summaries about it, and much of this is culled (and modified) from one in The Post.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said in a video from 2015 that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists” – making clear their movement’s ideological foundation.

Cullors, 36, was the protégé of Eric Mann, former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization, and spent years absorbing the Marxist-Leninist ideology that shaped her worldview, Breitbart News reported. The Weather Underground was a ruthless organization of murder and mayhem that, like so many others, masqueraded as idealists.

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers,” (but not, apparently, trained much in grammar) she said, referring to BLM co-founder Alicia Garza.

“We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk,” Cullors added in the interview with Jared Ball of The Real News Network.

Being "super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories" is, like, really super encouraging.

While promoting her book “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir” in 2018, Cullors described her introduction to and support for Marxist ideology.

She described to Democracy Now! how she became a trained organizer with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which she called her “first political home” under the mentorship of Mann, its director, Breitbart reported.

The center, which describes its philosophy as “an urban experiment,” uses grassroots organization to “focus on Black and Latino communities with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, pro-communist resistance to the US empire,” according to the outlet. 

An exhaustive search for victims of oppression in North America, presumably because they did not want to leave the comforts of the country.

It also expresses its appreciation for the work of the US Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as its support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s,” Breitbart reported.

Greta is Not an Outlier

We constantly worry about the distortions caused by commercialism. Shouldn't we also worry about the commercial distortion of the Press?


                     Greta is Not an Outlier


One of the themes of the Democrats over the last three years has been “the integrity of our elections.” So you might expect scrupulous management of the Iowa primary. No such luck. What we got is an international embarrassment, this from the nation that has interfered with other nations' elections with pompous righteousness.

The worry should not be limited to political events; they are easily ridiculed. The worry should be whether or not idiocy is becoming a national trait. It is becoming quite clear that we are increasingly unable to manage obvious and generally agreed upon problems. We have a gigantic drug problem, we have a gigantic criminal problem, our prison population is large enough to get U.N. representation, our primary education is terribly deficient, our higher education is having a nervous breakdown, the government debt is suicidal, grown men who appeared to be reasonable leaders weep during speeches, and we have developed a new and pervasive social and political trait which may well underlie all of these deficiencies: Childishness. We simply are incapable of serious discussion that transcends schoolyard spats. It's no wonder we take Greta seriously.

Politics are devoid of any significant content but steeped in personal animosity and astonishing immaturity. The three-year guerrilla attack on the newly elected president wound down with a whimper. This lowminded and spiteful behavior merged nicely with The State of the Union address, which might become the symbol of our national decline. The President delivered a ringing declaration of success and accomplishments of debatable accuracy but presented with bombastic, theatrical assurance--performance being the new coin of the realm--and he was met with pouting and sullen silence by his opponents--with the occasional petulant outburst. Paralysis in the face of violence in the streets is just another, more recent, manifestation.

This from the most powerful nation on earth.

In essence, we are a people afflicted with significant national and local problems who are led by children who happened to be heavily armed.

Is Capitalism the New Conservatism?

Demonstrations have impact only if they are taken seriously by the Press, first, then the public. There is an "Occupy Wall Street" quality about these demonstrations, making one wonder how big they really are and who they are representative of. Like Twitter.


                               Is Capitalism the New Conservatism?

There is always an elite looking for righteous self-expression. Two of the three big index providers, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors, have both said they will ramp up their political activism this year.

Economic commentator Scott Grannis recently predicted that this economic shutdown will be recognized as “the most expensive self-inflicted [economic] injury in the history of mankind.” So while private companies struggle for survival in the face of unprecedented economic disruption, some of the world’s largest asset managers seem unconcerned as they continue to pressure companies to publish questionable sustainability reports. This has all the appearance of another self-inflicted wound.

Sustainability usually breaks down in some fashion to one sustainable group raiding another more sustainable group. Or one self-appointed leadership group organizing it all with an iron fist. With conservation and sustainability there are necessary limits to effort and production. The other definition for that is "scarcity." There is sometimes just too much sustainability for others to benefit.

You just can't dress this wolf up.

Fertility Rates

The single lesson of George Floyd and all those people and businesses destroyed by the subsequent riots: The government has neither the will nor the ability to protect you.


                                      Fertility Rates

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. That has changed.

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.
Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.
They are two of 23 countries - which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea - expected to see their population more than halve.

The study projects:

The number of children under five will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100.
The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

Africa will be interesting. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
And the study says Nigeria will become the world's second biggest country, with a population of 791 million.

Prof Murray says: "We will have many more people of African descent in many more countries as we go through this.
Global recognition of the challenges around racism are going to be all the more critical if there are large numbers of people of African descent in many countries."

--from Gallagher on the Washington study

Deadly Speech

In Orwell's world, it was not wealth that made for hierarchy, it was poverty.


                                 Deadly Speech

Newspaper editors are forced to quit because of pieces they’ve run. Academics are removed from positions for daring to dissent from the dominant orthodoxy. Corporate executives have been fired for opinions written three decades ago that now fall outside the lines of acceptable public discourse. This is modern America.

The speech stakes have been raised. Your opponent is no longer angering you, no longer building monuments to stupidity and error, no longer misleading the foolish. When New York Times reporters mobilized to get an editor fired, they claimed the offending op-ed he published put their lives “in danger.” This was no mere difference of opinion. The offending speech was supposedly a direct physical threat to those offended. Speech has become a physically injurious weapon. And such weapons, like other weapons, need controlled.

So speech, and opinions, have significant consequences. And meaning. Favoring cutting back the size of government is a physical attack on the elderly, or the poor. Opposing birth control is a physical attack on young women that threatens their health and lives. Should such risks be tolerated? Must the elderly or young women endure this? Should these very thoughts be countenanced?

This is not hyperbole. People are being fired because of their thoughts and words. This is modern America.

(in part from a Baker article)

Sunday/A Parable and Christ's Commentary

                                Sunday/A Parable and Christ's Commentary

A week after the Parable of the Sower comes today's gospel, the parable of the wheat and the weeds. A farmer sows his wheat and, in the night, an enemy oversows the field with weeds. The farmer decides to wait and harvest them all together for fear extracting the weeds will harm the good wheat as well. Christ, in an unusual move, then explains the parable. A hard reading of it should be very alarming.

This is a significant insight into Christ's message. There is a Good. But there is also an Evil. And that Evil is sown by an Enemy, an active Enemy of the Good. The Enemy is surreptitious and the Evil he sows is inextricably interwoven with the Good so that separating them is injurious to the Good. There are incidental slaves in this parable--without comment--and the eventual harvesters are Angels. Angels.

This is a battlefield, a struggle over the soul of man. Good and Evil are real, are hard to separate, but separation will happen. 

This is the picture of a religion, not simply an abstract philosophy. And the weeds are darnel, strangely a name taken by football players and actors. Its historical meaning is "disorder."

Sowing Seed

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy--bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

ROBERT LAURENCE BINYON

1869-1943 / England

graphs

The idea of multiculturalism gives equality to all cultures. Quality is a "construct." This forces some cultures into a corner and makes them defend that culture to the death.



                                          Graphs

Cowen Re-Reads Rand

Respect for the minority has become regard for the outlier.





                                     Cowen Re-Reads Rand

Cowen re-reads Rand:

It used to be called The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, but the later title was Return on the Primitive. It was published in 1971, but sometimes drawn from slightly earlier essays. I wondered if a revisit might shed light on the current day, and here is what I learned:

1. “The New Left is the product of cultural disintegration; it is bred not in the slums, but in the universities; it is not the vanguard of the future, but the terminal stage of the past.”

2. The moderates who tolerate the New Left and its anti-reality bent can be worse than the New Left itself.

3. Ayn Rand wishes to cancel the New Left, albeit peacefully.

4. “Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned.” Ouch, it would be good to resuscitate this entire essay (on racism).

5. She fears the collapse of Europe into tribalism, racism, and balkanization. I am not sure if I should feel better or worse about the ongoing persistence of this trope.

6. It is easy to forget that English was not her first language: “Logical Positivism carried it further and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system — by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations.”

6b. Kant was the first hippie.

7. The majority of people do not hate the good, although they are disgusted by…all sorts of things.

8. Like many Russian women, she is skeptical of the American brand of feminism: “As a group, American women are the most privileged females on earth: they control the wealth of the United States — through inheritance from fathers and husbands who work themselves into an early grave, struggling to provide every comfort and luxury for the bridge-playing, cocktail-party-chasing cohorts, who give them very little in return. Women’s Lib proclaims that they should give still less, and exhorts its members to refuse to cook their husbands’ meals — with its placards commanding “Starve a rat today!”” Feminism for me, but not for thee, you could call it.

Overall I would describe this as a bracing reread. But what struck me most of all was how much the “Old New Left” — whatever you think of it — had more metaphysical and ethical and aesthetic imagination — than the New New Left variants running around today. As Rand takes pains to point out (to her dismay), the Old New Left did indeed have Woodstock, which in reality was not as far from the Apollo achievement as she was suggesting at the time.

New Americans

Some disqualifying hints appear in rabble-rousing proclamations in the U.S., hints that reveal significant errors in the assessment of this country. One is the use of cultural oxymorons, phrases transplanted into the U.S. that have no real application to the country. These are not simple hyperbole, they are a disjunction, an inappropriate continuation of an immigrant's culture (or a student's reading) from an old culture to the new one. If you hear "class," or "caste," you know the speaker is living in his own past as much as if he had said "serf" or "kulak." That past has nothing to do with the United States save its determination to escape it.
The only other explanation is that the speaker believes in a common, unifying, "intelligent design."


                                                  New Americans

What all the discord and upheaval has taught this country's enemies is this: The American no longer wants the risks and accomplishments of individual, personal freedom; he wants not to think too hard and to be left alone.
This is not the flint-eyed loner of Western American myth, it is a man trying to be an innocent bystander in a shooting war.
Hobbled by ignorance, overwhelmed by criticism, the modern American is not dropping his shoulders and leaning into the storm, he's pulling the covers over his head and hoping for the best.

Rushmore, or Less

There is a great difference between a diagnosis and an illness. So the numbers of Virus diagnoses is not meaningful without the balancing illness numbers. The Press knows this, right?


                                      Rushmore, or Less

From Jenkins on the Rushmore speech:

Every American, regardless of how he or she feels about Donald Trump, should read his July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore and then the Washington Post account of the speech by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. The Post account begins: “President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination, crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore . . .”

Except that Mr. Trump made no reference to the Confederacy or any of its symbols. His only reference to the Civil War was to Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery as a fulfillment of the American Revolution.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, as many commentators on the right noted, also lied when she said Mr. Trump “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.” He mentioned not a single leader or champion of the Confederacy.

In its own account, though hardly friendly to Mr. Trump, the New York Times went out of its way to counter these rampant distortions, reporting that Mr. Trump “avoided references . . . to the symbols of the Confederacy that have been a target of many protests.”

So we are turning to the NYT for accuracy about Trump.

Kshama Sawant and Old World Solutions

The transfusion of the country with immigrants has always been part of the nation's health. A problem, however, is that often the immigrant brings with him a contamination, old world solutions to old world problems that exist in his home country which he feels necessary to apply here, to the new world.


                          Kshama Sawant and Old World Solutions

The Seattle City Council last week approved a new tax on large businesses, two years after the council repealed a big business tax amid pressure from corporations such as Amazon and the prospect of a voter referendum.

The new tax called “JumpStart Seattle,” from lead sponsor and council member Teresa Mosqueda, will target companies with many highly paid employees, whereas the 2018 “head tax” would have applied to all employees at large companies.

The council voted 7-2 on the measure, which is expected to raise more than $200 million per year. The tax repealed by the council in 2018 weeks after it was adopted was expected to raise $47 million per year.

Mosqueda and council members Lorena González, Kshama Sawant, Tammy Morales, Lisa Herbold, Dan Strauss and Andrew Lewis voted for the new tax Monday. Alex Pedersen and Debora Juarez voted against it. In last year’s council elections, five candidates defeated opponents who were supported by big business groups.

“This is a huge win,” Mosqueda said. “This is about caring for Seattleites now and into the future. It will help Seattle survive the crisis of COVID and emerge stronger and more equitable.”

Under the new tax, companies with annual payrolls over $7 million will be taxed based on their pay to employees making over $150,000 per year. As amended in committee last week, the tax rate would range from 0.7% to 2.4%, with tiers for various payroll and salary amounts.

One vote "yes" came from Kshama Sawant. Wiki says that Kshama Sawant is an American politician and economist who has served on the Seattle City Council since 2014. She is a member of Socialist Alternative, a Marxist organization formed in Great Britain. A former software engineer, Sawant became an economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States from her native India.

Ms. Sawant posted this in a video address Tuesday on Socialist Alternative.
"I have a message for Jeff Bezos and his class. If you attempt again to overturn the Amazon Tax, working people will go all out in the thousands to beat you. And we will not stop there. You see, we are fighting for far more than this tax. We are preparing the ground for a different kind of society, and if you, Jeff Bezos, want to drive that process forward by lashing out against us in our modest demands, then so be it. Because we are coming for you and your rotten system. We are coming to dismantle this deeply oppressive, racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism. This police state. We cannot and will not stop until we overthrow it, and replace it with a world based, instead, on solidarity, genuine democracy, and equality: a socialist world. Thank you."

One Ring

Certainly governments have many failings, regardless of the type of government. One generally agreed upon common governmental function has become education, particularly early education. Whoy wouldn't the government decide to make their efforts in education, a testable effort with testable results, a proving ground of government's value?

                                                             One Ring

From Gareth Harvey on Twitter @OptimoPrincipi

1) A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread: this enigmatic Roman gold ring was found in a ploughed field near Silchester in 1785. The square bezel has a portrait of the pagan goddess Venus, inscribed backwards SUNEV for use as a signet ring by the owner. Curiously...

2) ...around the ten-sided ring is crudely inscribed the identity of a later Christian owner, "Senicianus" who it proclaims with spelling errors "lives in god" (vivas in deo). A ring passing from pagan to Christian hands - certainly possible in the 4th century - but remarkably...

3)... at a temple to the mysterious British god “Nodens” 80 miles away in Lydney, Gloucestershire, a lead curse tablet (defixio) was later discovered. On the tablet a man named “Silvianus” complains that his gold ring was stolen and he suspects “Senicianus” was the culprit! ...

4) Silvianus deposited the curse tablet and donated at the temple half the value of his lost ring, in the hope that the gods would "permit no good health to Senicianus." In 1929 the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler would make a connection between this curse and the gold ring...

5) Wheeler consulted a certain young J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, to work on the etymology of the curious deity Nodens and explore the possible connections with the enigmatic Roman gold ring...

6) Soon afterwards Tolkien would begin creating his legendarium of Middle-earth with both “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” revolving around the magical, golden and often-stolen One Ring that grants the wearer invisibility. Had Tolkien been inspired by the Silvianus ring?

7) We might fancifully conclude then that in the mid 4th century AD, Silvianus - a late-Roman man still clinging on to the old pagan gods, had his beloved Venus ring stolen from him by a Christian that he knew named Senicianus. The pious thief then rededicated the pagan ring...

8) ...with his own ironic inscription, saying he "lives in God". The bitter Silvianus then travelled to an ancient pagan temple to deposit a curse on the Christian thief. We know the ring was subsequently lost but are left to imagine if fate ever caught up with Senicianus...

9) Two millienia later, both the ring and the curse on its thief are both discovered 80 miles apart. Wheeler and Tolkien, titans in their fields, analyse the mysterious artefacts and just maybe, the gold ring goes on to inspire one of the greatest works of fantasy literature. END

For those interested in seeing these ancient artefacts...
The Silvianus Ring is displayed at @TheVyneNT, Hampshire. The curse tablet is displayed at Lydney Park Estate, Gloucestershire  https://www.lydneyparkestate.co.uk/lydney-park-gardens …