Wealth Tax

                                                       Wealth Tax

While it tickles all the deep inferior elements in the human heart, a wealth tax has many problems. While it makes for great "soak the rich" soundbites, in reality, it's ineffective at reducing inequality. What wealth taxes do best is to disrupt the accumulation of capital. Since most wealth is invested and provides capital for innovators and producers to draw upon — and for workers to work with — all Americans would suffer from a wealth tax.

In a recent paper published by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, economists John Diamond and George Zodrow of Rice University's Baker Institute added to the extensive evidence on wealth-taxation's negative effects.

The authors simulated the Warren wealth tax's economic effects and how that impacts the lifetime earnings of different income groups. They estimate that long-run GDP would be 2.7% lower than it would be without a wealth tax. They also found declines in lifetime wealth from the upper to lower-middle classes.

The simulation assumes that wealth tax revenues would be used for redistribution in similar proportions to current spending. The authors thus found small increases in lifetime per-household wealth for bottom income earners, ranging from $100 to $500.

These very small "benefits" come at very high costs. Initial losses in average household income would amount to about $2,500.

The problem is that there is no reason to believe that the motive for politicians' behavior has anything to do what is best for the nation. Rather it is entirely what will benefit the politician through the exploitation of the naiveté of the poor voter. And a politician dressed in righteousness is an awesome sight.

(most from deRugy)

Sunday/The Divide

                               Sunday/The Divide

Today's gospel has Christ turn on Peter for suggesting he turn back from his mission. He calls him a satan, a word meaning "adversary."

As in Gethsemane, there is always this terrible tension within Christ, as if there is a poor, human argument to be considered, an argument supporting the value of the simple, human life without the wearying heavenly demands of Virtue. And lurking in the background is the limits of the human mind, the narrowness of the vision of human standards. Nothing can be seen clearly through the material prism.

"My way is not your way, my thoughts are not your thoughts."

At A Calvary Near The Ancre

One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate

(Wilfred Owen, killed one week before the armistice, 1918)

stats

 U.S. electricity system is experiencing a period of disruption and sustained stress — the product of too many power plants shutting down and not enough new generating capacity being brought online to replace them.

Morlocks

                                                       Morlocks

There has been an effort to connect missing persons and cave complexes in the U.S.
The top image is titled "North America Cluster Map" and is produced by the Canam Missing Project / Missing 411 and shows areas of missing people.
The bottom image was seemingly produced by Texas Parks and Wildlife.

Science shows the areas of caves in the U.S.

Nature

                                                         Nature

Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19:
On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50, and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

Strangely the experts are confused by the disparity. They assume that people will look at the stats objectively and come to the obvious conclusion that the virus discriminates; it strikes obliquely, favoring and impacting one victim over another.

But this, in the egalitarian world is impossible. The nature of life is evenhanded. Only white men are bigots.

CROATOAN

 

                                           Croaton

The English colonists who settled the so-called Lost Colony before disappearing from history simply went to live with their native friends — the Croatoans of Hatteras, according to a new book.


“They were never lost,” said Scott Dawson, who has researched records and dug up artifacts where the colonists lived with the Indians in the 16th century. “It was made up. The mystery is over.”

Dawson has written a book, published in June, that details his research. It is called “The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island,” and echos many of the sentiments he has voiced for years.

Teams have found thousands of artifacts 4-6 feet below the surface that show a mix of English and Indian life. Parts of swords and guns are in the same layer of soil as Indian pottery and arrowheads.


The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.


The two cultures adapted English earrings into fishhooks and gun barrels into sharp-ended tubes to tap tar from trees.


The Lost Colony stemmed from an 1587 expedition. Just weeks after arriving, White had to leave the group of settlers — including his daughter, Eleanor Dare, and newborn granddaughter, Virginia — to get more supplies from England. White was not able to return for three years. When he arrived at Roanoke Island in 1590 he found “CROATOAN” carved on a post and “cro” on a tree. He found no distress marks.


They literally made a sign. It was expected the colonists would go with their friends, the Croatoans and tribe member, Manteo, Dawson said. Manteo had traveled to England with earlier expeditions and was baptized a Christian on Roanoke Island.


White later wrote of finding the writing on the post, “I greatly joyed that I had found a certain token of their being at Croatoan where Manteo was born ....”


A bad storm and a near mutiny kept White from reaching Hatteras. He returned to England without ever seeing his colony again.


The Secotans and the Croatoans hated each other, Dawson said. Secotans enslaved Croatoans just a few years before the English arrived. The English had burned a Secotan village in 1585.


The Croatoans befriended the English as powerful friends with guns and armor. White’s colony welcomed their friendship, especially after one of their members, George Howe, was killed by the Secotans.


White was concerned about the danger posed by the Secotans when he left for England. The Croatoans saved the colonists by taking them away from Roanoke Island to their Hatteras Island village, Dawson said.


“You’re robbing an entire nation of people of their history by pretending Croatoan is a mystery on a tree,” he said. “These were a people that mattered a lot.”

from The Virginian-Pilot

New Trends

                                  New Trends


From Fayette, Missouri, listed at $375,000:


1875 Howard County Sheriff’s House and Jail. Extremely unique opportunity!! Extensive renovation in 2005 (supposedly $1.5 million) captures modern high end finishes with traditional architecture and character. This home is 2465 sq ft with three levels of living area, 2 bedroom. 1.5 bath, high-end finish throughout, appears to have been totally rewired, replumbed and new HVAC zoned system installed. AND THE BEST PART, connected to the home is a 2500 sq ft legitimate jail with 9 cells, booking room and 1/2 bath. The cell door lock throws appear to be operational. Full basement under the home with lighting throughout. Possibilities are amazing with this property.

Sunday/A Question

Sunday/A Question

Today's gospel is the declaration of Peter. It contains a rare use of the word "church," in the Greek meaning a religious assembly. It also contains a question by Christ, often startling, for what does Christ not know?


“But who do you say that I am?”
Simon Peter said in reply,
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter,
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.


This is, again, another example of Christ's demanding a conclusion from what has been seen, a collection of observations leading to a result. It is an edgy problem, creating local conclusions from small events when a gigantic, far-reaching event could have convinced the world. And it allows for a profound uncertainty, "Who do you say that I am?" as if part of the story is the quest.



The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


Gerard Manley Hopkins

stats

 Pence attacks "defund the police" movement. So the outliers push center stage.

A Minority Report

 

                                              A Minority Report

If COVID is ten times more dangerous than a ‘normal’ flu, then a response ten times stronger might be appropriate; what we’ve gotten instead is a response that is closer to 1,000 times stronger – one totally disconnected from reality. And this response, I’m convinced, poses a far greater danger to humanity than does covid.

Orders for an indefinite suspension of economic activity are issued by government officials. Even in calm times, these officials routinely display obliviousness to economic realities. They treat material prosperity as if it grows automatically, with the only question being how it is distributed. They operate under the delusion that the economy will remain strong if government floods it with enough money, writes enough checks, and orders that prices not rise and that wages not fall. Most of these officials believe that they increase their fellow-citizens’ access to goods and services by using tariffs to decrease their fellow-citizens’ access to goods and services.

Politicians seem unaware of the unavoidable necessity of making economic trade-offs – and so they incessantly attempt the impossible task of avoidance. But politicians are keenly aware of the boosts to their power that occur whenever people are gripped by what the late Hans Rosling calls "the fear instinct. 

Reasonable people disagree over what is the optimal response to covid. But no reasonable person trusts that the same government officials who in calm times act in utter ignorance of economic reality are, in these panicked times, acting intelligently and prudently. And so every reasonable person stands on solid ground when condemning today’s draconian responses. 

from Bordeaux

Pittsburgh Pirates Jarrod Dyson Picked Off at Second

On the eighteenth of August, in Pittsburgh in the time of the Plague, with the score 3-3 and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, the Pirate's centerfielder, Jarrod Dyson, the winning run, was picked off second base by the catcher. This amazing event was reported nationally as follows:

"Pittsburgh Pirates Jarrod Dyson Picked Off at Second



Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder Guillermo Heredia (5) reacts after being picked off at second base in the ninth inning.
The Pirates had a chance to win it in the ninth when they put runners and first and second with no outs. But speedy Jarrod Dyson was picked off second base by catcher Roberto Perez and the inning eventually ended when Nick Wittgren (1-0) struck out Josh Bell with two on."

While such an event might astonish the average fan, the reporting is more important. The article identifies the player picked off at second as two different guys, first Dyson and then Heredia. Accuracy in the Press is not a high priority but this error is more understandable than most. The Pirates actually do not have a set lineup. In fact in two games I have seen, two separate players who have never played in the outfield before have played center field. 28 pitchers have pitched for them so far in this short season. The Yankees do not have names on their jerseys because everyone knows who they are, the Pirates have names because no one knows who they are and even then can't tell.

I have no problem with the Nuttings making a buck with a small market team. I wish only that they were better at it. The problem here is that every team must have a few capable players to be a real team rather than a group of imposters. Center field is one of those positions. You are morally obligated to have a centerfielder, a catcher and a shortstop. 

Perhaps a social action group should show up at Nutting's house and demand a center fielder.

Greta is Not an Outlier

                            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, we step over the homeless on our way to righteous demonstrations, 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.

 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. The limits placed on political conventions this year are a blessing.

Krugman

                                                          Krugman

SEBASTIAN MALLABY is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. This is from an article assessing Krugman's new book, where everything, hyperbole and straw men, is taken seriously. It's like watching an elderly woman be polite to a vandal.

Krugman is basically right that “almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take.” To state the matter plainly, conservatives lie about this issue because they are paid to lie. Or, in Krugman’s broad and snarling formulation: “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”

Go back to the example of climate change—a topic chosen, remember, because it fits relatively easily into Krugman’s Manichaean worldview. Contrary to Krugman’s assumption, not all Republicans have the same outlook. President Trump has mocked climate science, but Republican senators such as Lamar Alexander and Lisa Murkowski are at least willing to acknowledge global warming and to call for extra research into renewable energy sources. Senator Lindsey Graham, usually an abject Trump defender, recently urged the president “to look at the science, admit that climate change is real, and come up with solutions.” In April, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, another Trumpy Republican, tweeted, “I didn’t come to Congress to argue with a thermometer, and I think that more of my colleagues need to realize that the science of global warming is irrefutable.”

Yet what’s revealing about Graham’s and Gaetz’s statements is that the men’s consciences are still flickering. Writing the lawmakers off as “bad people” is too simple. Some part of them does respect science. And even if Krugman concludes that congressional Republicans are evil anyway, does he really want to imply the same about the broad mass of Republican voters? At one point Krugman writes that the Republican Party is “completely dominated by climate deniers.” But the Pew Research Center reports that 19 percent of conservative Republicans, and fully 43 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans, regard climate change as a major threat. They are not all the demons that Krugman imagines. 

On other issues, Krugman’s caricature of Republicans is even further off the mark. He accuses the party, with reason, of catering to racial animosity—only to then go too far. It isn’t just some Republicans who take this position, in his telling. Rather, the vast majority do. He dismisses the idea that many Republicans might favor small government while rejecting racial intolerance, writing that this combination “is logically coherent, but doesn’t seem to have any supporters beyond a few dozen guys in bow ties.” Yet Pew tells a more mixed story: 53 percent of white Republicans say that America’s efforts to extend equal rights to black people have been about sufficient, and an additional 15 percent say that these efforts have not gone far enough. On taxes, Pew reports that 42 percent of Republicans say that some corporations don’t pay their fair share. And despite Krugman’s assertion that “Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy,” 37 percent of Republicans believe that some of the wealthy should pay more. 

The modern G.O.P. doesn’t do policy analysis,” he pronounces. Yet the reality is subtler. Republicans are more open to reason than Krugman allows. 

In the end, one’s judgment about Krugman the columnist depends on the test that he applies to economic models: Their assumptions are allowed to be reductive, but they must yield a persuasive story. If you accept that almost all conservatives are impervious to reason, you will celebrate Krugman’s writings for laying bare reality. But the evidence from the Pew surveys counsels more charity and caution. Most people cannot be pigeonholed as purely good or purely evil. Their motives are mixed, confused, and mutable. Sometimes conservatives will be venal, but other times they will respond to evidence; like Representative Gaetz, they do not want to argue with thermometers. Krugman’s “ridiculous simplicity” produces writing that is fluent, compelling, and yet profoundly wrong in its understanding of human nature. And the mistake is consequential. For the sake of our democracy, a supremely gifted commentator should at least try to unite citizens around common understandings. Merely demonizing adversaries is the sort of thing that Trump does.

Kamala

 

Barr: opponents said they wanted explanations. I thought there were real questions. but they did everything they could to prevent him from answering. The real question turned out to be "why?"

                                          Kamala

From an article in the WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan containing nuggets about pronunciation, professional wrestlers and Indians as voters.

How do you say Kamala? It’s an Indian name, proof that Ms. Harris’s dual ethnicity can’t be written out of the script in the racially absolutist politics of the U.S. Her mother—as many (though not enough) people know—was an Indian immigrant. The senator’s given name, Kamala Devi—Goddess Kamala—is a synonym for Lakshmi, the Hindu deity of wealth and fortune. The word Kamala literally means “she of the lotus,” the flower on which Lakshmi is said to repose in the Hindu heavens.

As her name floods the news, I wince each time it is uttered by anchors and politicians who mangle the stress of its vowels. It is pronounced “comma-la—like the punctuation mark,” Ms. Harris explains in her memoir, not “Camel-ah,” to rhyme with Pamela, or even “come-AAH-lah,” the commonest mispronunciation.

To make matters complicated: That last sounding of syllables was the way in which James Harris, a professional wrestler from Senatobia, Miss., nicknamed “The Ugandan Giant,” pronounced his stage name—which, bafflingly, was “Kamala.” A giant black man as the Lady of the Lotus? Perhaps his handlers confused the name with the capital of Uganda. That was certainly the case with the autocorrect function on iPhones, which, for much of Tuesday, was changing Ms. Harris’s first name to “Kampala,” so much so that “Kampala Harris” was trending on Twitter. It can only have been by cosmic alignment that Mr. Harris the wrestler died two days before Ms. Harris the politician was nominated. He was 70.

There are other ironies. Ms. Harris’s progressive economic beliefs sit awkwardly with her being named for a goddess of wealth creation. And her mother, Shyamala Gopalan (her first name is pronounced “Shyaa-muh-lah”), was an Iyer Brahmin, at the pinnacle of the caste structure of her native Tamil Nadu, a state in south India. The complex politics of that region have caused many Tamil Brahmins to seek their fortunes elsewhere, including Silicon Valley. Gopalan, who died in 2009, was a medical researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

For an ethnic group that is more successful materially in the U.S. than virtually any other, Indian-Americans are a strikingly anti-Republican bunch: 84% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Ms. Harris doesn’t need to play to that ethnic gallery, especially as it is a tiny fraction of the electorate.

Instead, she must play up her paternal side—African, via her Jamaican father. The Democrats are a party of ethnic hierarchies, in which smaller ethnicities—such as Indians—must efface themselves and wait their turn. It is ironic that the party many Indian-Americans disdain is the one to have given this country two Indian-American governors (Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina).

It’s not inconceivable that in 2024, America could have to choose between Ms. Harris and Ms. Haley for president. Which will it be, the Tamil Brahmin or the Sikh?

Jefferson and Slavery

The conflicts among Americans now is not over who is right or wrong but who is evil.

                              Jefferson and Slavery

From  Kallmes:

When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776.  Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document.  It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.”  Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

The removal of the anti-slavery clause of the declaration was not the only time Jefferson’s efforts might have led to the premature end of the “peculiar institution.” Economist and cultural historian Thomas Sowell notes that Jefferson’s 1784 anti-slavery bill, which had the votes to pass but did not because of a single ill legislator’s absence from the floor, would have ended the expansion of slavery to any newly admitted states to the Union years before the Constitution’s infamous three-fifths compromise.

Culture and History

Government has a responsibility to protect its citizens equally and without favor. It has no more responsibility to the poor than to the rich.

                                                     Culture and History


"Years later, of all the gospels I learned in seminary school, a verse from St. Paul stays with me. It is perhaps the strangest passage in the Bible, in which he writes: 'Even now in Heaven there were angels carrying savage weapons.'" So says the lead character in "The Prophesy," a strange film full of good character actors behaving without moral, practical--or acting--restraint.

The storyline is that of a war in heaven between two angel groups, one rebelliously objecting to the elevation of Man to the status of immortality, the other defending this new divine decree. A third element , the Devil himself--avec minions--is a mildly interested bystander who hopes the rebels lose so he can continue his monopoly on Hell.
It is an actor's dream dominated by Christopher Walken. Viggo Mortensen is terrific as the devil. Poor Virginia Madsen, who is wonderful as an actress, is simply lost in the craziness. And the movie is the home of a great line by Gabriel: "I'm an angel. I kill firstborns ... I turn cities into salt....... and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why."

A lot of people were interested in the take on Angels as fearsome, dangerous and violent beings. But what was of interest to me was the line opening at the top of the page. "Years later, of all the gospels I learned in seminary school, a verse from St. Paul stays with me. It is perhaps the strangest passage in the Bible, in which he writes: 'Even now in Heaven, there were angels carrying savage weapons.'" There is a warning, of course, indicating that even the author was concerned: There is no Bible writing by St. Paul, only epistles. And, indeed, most with even a passing knowledge of the New Testament will not recognize the quote: It is made up.

We often think of religion having an impact on culture. But here it is the reverse.
And it is distressing. Historically, great art was a flowering of the culture. As "DaVinci Code" and Brian Williams have shown, manufactured history can really cause some significant damage to peoples' understanding. And to their confidence in the present and the past.

Conflicts in Conservativism

 

Business has the responsibility to utilize resources and maximize production within the rules of a free and honest culture. Moral responsibility is personal.

                             Conflicts in Conservativism

That human beings start out crooked and prone to sin means we require strong social institutions meant to form us, and that we cannot thrive in their absence. It means the good of the individual cannot be achieved in a society that is not meaningfully attuned to the true common good. But that human beings are made in a divine image and possessed of inherent dignity means that each of us has rights that in practice amount to constraints on what society can do to us. In this sense, the conservative anthropology points toward both communitarianism and individualism, and the tension between the two emerges in every conservative effort to wrestle with real-world governing challenges.

This is a thoughtful and provocative remark by Levin and is worth some reflection. The origin of human dignity, the nature of human error, these are basic elements that any thinking culture must at least consider. If it does not, then the culture has made up its mind on other premises that the culture should be able to express.

Sowell, Child Psychologist

The only outliers in this culture without a platform are the homeless.


                             Sowell, Child Psychologist

From the City Journal on the remarkable Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s work at times does reflect episodes from his life—often painful ones. The most striking example concerns his son, John Sowell. John was born healthy and seemingly normal, but as time passed, it became clear that something was wrong. Well past the age when most kids begin speaking in full sentences, John would scarcely utter a word. To outsiders, and even to Sowell’s then-wife, it seemed a clear case of mental disability. Yet Sowell wasn’t convinced. Speech problems aside, John was unusually bright: he could pick child locks before he could walk, for instance. And he had a prodigious memory: he once knocked over a chessboard mid-game and put all the pieces back in their former places. Given these underlying signs of intelligence, his failure to grasp even the simplest words was all the more mystifying. Yet hope came when, around age four, John slowly started to speak, and final vindication came when he grew up to become a well-adjusted young man.

Decades later, after his son had graduated from Stanford, Sowell set out to explain the puzzle. The result: the first academic study ever to explore the phenomenon of late-talking children who are unusually bright but not autistic. Drawing on this original research, as well as anecdotes, data, and history, Sowell wrote two books: Late-Talking Children, in 1997; and The Einstein Syndrome, in 2001. The second—named after history’s most famous late talker—won praise from Steven Pinker as “an invaluable contribution to human knowledge.” But apart from child-psychology specialists like Pinker, and parents of late talkers, these books received little public notice. Yet they represent a remarkable achievement: in an era of high academic specialization, it’s vanishingly rare for a scholar to break new ground in a field in which he has no formal training.

Folie à deux

                                                     Folie à deux

Folie à deux is a wine from Sonoma. It is also a shared psychosis, or shared delusional disorder, a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief and sometimes hallucinations are transmitted from one individual to another. That is, a madness develops in one, then moves, contagion-like, to another with no previous such history. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille ("family madness"), or even folie à plusieurs ("madness of several").

Not to say when John decides he is Napoleon, Mary plays the part of a pretend Josephine; she does not. Like the citizen of 1984, she is converted to an untruth--not persuaded--converted. She is an active participant in a madness.

This is not a cultural quirk, like belief in an implausible boogeyman or storm god. This is the real possession of a previously reasonable person by something that is patently untrue. One may criticize an individual or community for believing in transubstantiation but it is impossible to disprove that belief. But John is clearly not Napoleon, nor is Mary any less afflicted.


There have been epidemics of hysterical pregnancies. Within the last years several childcare centers were investigated and many went to jail for acts which included sacrifices of large animals and flying in the air. These are recent. Recent.


No one should look at the current social aberrations and be reassured that our species has a reasonable, internal course-correction.

Sunday/The Storm

                                Sunday/The Storm

Today's gospel is the walking on the water episode where Christ, at the end, calms the sea. It is a dense concept where Christ, having multiplied the loaves and fishes, flees the crowd who would make him king. So he rejects the idea of worldly position, but later dominates the chaotic forces of the world.

Here, for the first time, Peter is singled out and he behaves like most men, impulsively, with faith then, on consideration, with terror over the true consequences of faith.

                                    E Tenebris

COME down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,	5
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God’s throne should stand.
“He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name	10
From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.”
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face. Oscar wilde

stats

Solutions to inequality. According to the historian Walter Scheidel, inequality can be solved by the Four Horseman of Leveling: Mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. These are the historical solutions to inequality.

                                              Stats

 

The Downside of Good Taste

The first way to increase poverty in the United States follows fairly obviously from that definition [of poverty as material deprivation relative to the norm in society] – namely, to increase the standard of living. Raise the consumption level of the typical American and you create more poverty. When Ford invented the auto he created poverty. When Zworykin invented TV he created more poverty. Raise the standard decade after decade and you create more (relative) poverty even while you are wiping out the old-fashioned (starvation) kind of poverty. “Solely as a result of growing affluence, a society will elevate its notions of what constitutes poverty.” --Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott


                         The Downside of Good Taste

An observation on the creative act that has a general application by Ira Glass:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

Some Sowell

So, with an election using mail-in ballots, we are going to place the democracy in the hands of the U.S. Post Office.


                                                         Some Sowell


“It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader.
Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing “compassion” for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.”

Mobility: “Only by focusing on the income brackets, instead of the actual people moving between those brackets, have the intelligentsia been able to verbally create a “problem” for which a “solution” is necessary. They have created a powerful vision of “classes” with “disparities” and “inequities” in income, caused by “barriers” created by “society.” But the routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by many, if not most, of the intelligentsia.”

Giving back: “All the high-flown talk about how people who are successful in business should “give back” to the community that created the things that facilitated their success is, again, something that sounds plausible to people who do not stop and think through what is being said. After years of dumbed-down education, that apparently includes a lot of people.
Take Obama’s example of the business that benefits from being able to ship their products on roads that the government built. How does that create a need to “give back”? Did the taxpayers, including business taxpayers, not pay for that road when it was built? Why should they have to pay for it twice?
What about the workers that businesses hire, whose education is usually created in government-financed schools? The government doesn’t have any wealth of its own, except what it takes from taxpayers, whether individuals or businesses. They have already paid for that education. It is not a gift that they have to “give back” by letting politicians take more of their money and freedom.
When businesses hire highly educated people, such as chemists or engineers, competition in the labor market forces them to pay higher salaries for people with longer years of valuable education. That education is not a government gift to the employers. It is paid for while it is being created in schools and universities, and it is paid for in higher salaries when highly educated people are hired.
One of the tricks of professional magicians is to distract the audience’s attention from what they are doing while they are creating an illusion of magic. Pious talk about “giving back” distracts our attention from the cold fact that politicians are taking away more and more of our money and our freedom.”

Government Assistance. “Do people who advocate special government programs for blacks realize that the federal government has had special programs for American Indians, including affirmative action, since the early 19th century — and that American Indians remain one of the few groups worse off than blacks?”

The Wisdom of Generalities

The one commonality between George Floyd and the people and businesses damaged by the riots is that the government can not protect you.

                                                            The Wisdom of Generalities

"Nearly all of the biggest challenges in America are, at some level, a housing problem. Rising home costs are a major driver of segregation, inequality, and racial and generational wealth gaps. You can’t talk about education or the shrinking middle class without talking about how much it costs to live near good schools and high-paying jobs. Transportation accounts for about a third of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions, so there’s no serious plan for climate change that doesn’t begin with a conversation about how to alter the urban landscape so that people can live closer to work."  

One of the problems in modern thinking is the magic bullet thesis, that everything has a single, definable cause and we must work to uncover and reverse it. This is the idea behind Critical Theory: Nonrandom results have nefarious causes.

This quote above is from Daugherty in the NYT, exemplifying the Left's substituting association for causation and their willingness to do a gigantic experiment in its honor.  

Wealth of Nations

The government can not protect you. It certainly can not protect you from the government.


                                              Wealth of Nations

There is actually debate over the origin of wealth.
This is from a letter by Bordeaux on Piketty-Saez-Zucman.

....when I try to understand how anyone could endorse proposals such as confiscatory taxation and the other interventions peddled by Saez and Zucman, I find the task to be nearly impossible. Their proposals reveal a belief that material wealth is created and maintained independently of human effort...

For these writers, because wealth happens independently of human choices and action – because wealth is a mysteriously granted gift of nature – wealth happens independently of economic and social institutions. In the Piketty-Saez-Zucman view, nature’s only real failure is that, although she generously creates wealth and rains it down upon humanity, in her distribution of this rainfall she’s careless. Nature rains too much of the wealth she creates down on – or allows too much of this wealth, as it falls, to be captured by – some lucky people. Too little wealth, thus, is left for the rest of humanity.

If the Piketty-Saez-Zucman understanding of reality were correct, confiscating wealth from the lucky and giving it to the unlucky has no consequence other than a more equal ‘distribution’ of wealth. Because the initial ‘distribution’ of wealth is a result only of nature’s randomness, government orchestrated ‘redistribution’ of wealth neither works any injustice nor affects the amount of wealth available to humanity.

Adam Smith launched economics in 1776 by inquiring into the nature and causes of humankind’s wealth. If Piketty-Saez-Zucman are correct, however, Smith was misguided in looking for the cause of wealth among human attitudes, actions, and institutions. The old Scot could have saved himself the time and trouble of writing a 1,000 page book simply by jotting down on a note pad “Wealth has no human causes. It’s a gift of nature. End of story.”

And so if Piketty-Saez-Zucman are correct, the entire discipline of economics is and has forever been a ludicrous waste of time and energy. The fact that these three writers boast PhDs in economics and serve on prestigious faculties of economics is, therefore, an irony as stunning as ironies get.

Sunday/Loaves and Fishes

                     Sunday/Loaves and Fishes

The gospel today is the Loaves and Fishes Gospel from Luke. It occurs after a day of preaching:

As the day was drawing to a close,
the Twelve approached him and said,
"Dismiss the crowd
so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms
and find lodging and provisions;
for we are in a deserted place here."

A deserted place. Christ answers in that peculiar way:

He said to them, "Give them some food yourselves."

What could He mean by that? Was He kidding them? Being wry and provocative? Raising every question to a monumental concept?

At the Passion, "Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king."

Every opportunity Christ has to close a door He opens one.

stats

The number of US children ever diagnosed with ADHD has changed over time

Estimated number of US children who ever had a diagnosis of ADHD

Figure 3.1. Actual number of acute hepatitis B cases submitted to CDC by states and estimated* number of acute hepatitis B cases — United States, 2013–2017.