Graphs

                                                                    Graphs

Big and bad:

A new concept in the evaluation of Covid deaths:

Strange numbers, especially when seen in the context of Obama:

People voting with their feet in California:

Interesting:

Reeducation

 

                                                              Reeducation

Critical Race Theory--above all, the idea that impartiality is itself racist -- has colonized the boardrooms and human resource departments of major corporations. They have also, as the journalist Christopher Rufo has detailed, made astonishing inroads into major institutions of the federal government, where a cadre of highly paid consultants run consciousness-raising workshops whose constant theme is the perfidiousness of American society, especially its free-market orientation and, most particularly, the white, male actors who have dominated its history.

Theory and kindred ideologies in the federal government. An ominous sign of how deeply ingrained those teachings are is the news, just out as we write, that the Centers for Disease Control have flouted that order and are proceeding with a thirteen-week program under the tutelage of Critical Race Theory in order to challenge America's "white supremacist ideology," dilate on racism as “a public health crisis” and expose the country's supposed “systemic racism”

One of the agencies affected is the U.S. Treasury, where a consultant named Howard Ross for a combined fee of more than $5 million - ran training sessions to inform employees that “virtually all white people contribute to racism. The 8,900 employees of the National Credit Union Administration were treated to a similar catechism. America was “founded on racism,” they were told in a scripture right out of The 1619 Project, and “built on the backs of people who were enslaved.” America's nuclear arsenal is manufactured at the Sandia National Laboratories. You might think that such an institution would be careful to distance itself from radical, anti-American sentiment. But Rufo has shown that Sandia held a "three-day reeducation camp for white males,” teaching them to "deconstruct their white male culture' and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of color.

Rigorous

                                                                  Rigorous

Donna Riley, is head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Prof. Riley's contribution to our merriment was her attack on the very idea of rigor. In an article for Engineering Studies called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit” she argued that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” “The term, she wrote, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular-are undeniable. ”There is also the matter of making sure that the bridge you design doesn't collapse, but Prof. Riley doesn't bother herself with such pedestrian concerns. “Rigor," she intones, “may be a defining tool, revealing how structural forces of power and privilege operate to exclude men of color and women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, first generation and low-income students, and non traditionally aged students.” 

And Prof. Riley gets extra credit for extending her attack on rigor to the notion of “Scientific knowledge itself," which, according to her, “is gendered, raced, and colonizing."

China Hand

                                                              China Hand

From the book: ‘Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World’ via The Epoch Times,.

In 2018 the well-connected Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin pointed out that China had been building networks of influence in the United States over many years, and that the U.S. government “is preparing for the possibility that the Chinese government will decide to weaponize” them to get what it wants. (Although Beijing is not known to use Russian-style “active measures” in the West, deploying them is only a matter of political calculation.)

One of the CCP’s most auda­cious penetration operations, Chinagate in 1996, saw a top intelligence operative meeting a naive President Clinton in the White House, along with donations to the Clinton campaign made through people with ties to the Chinese military.

Until recently, almost all players in Washington D.C. and beyond were convinced by the “peaceful rise of China” trope, and the value of “constructive engagement.” The common belief was that as China developed economically, it would naturally morph into a liberal state. This view was not without foundation, because the more liberal factions within the CCP did struggle with the hardliners, but in the U.S. it reinforced a kind of institutional naivety that was exploited by Beijing. Many of those who stuck to this view even after the evidence pointed firmly to the contrary had a strong personal investment in defending Beijing.

The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin argued that “his [Bloomberg’s] misreading of the Chinese government’s character and ambitions could be devastating for U.S. national security and foreign policy. He would be advocating for a naive policy of engagement and wishful thinking that has already been tried and failed.”

In May 2019 Joe Biden distinguished himself from all of the other candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination by ridiculing the idea that China is a strategic threat to the United States. “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” he told a campaign crowd in Iowa City. Biden had for years adopted a soft approach to China. When President Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was taking a tougher position towards China’s adventurism in Asia, Vice President Biden was urging caution. Biden had formed a warm personal relationship with Xi Jinping when Xi was vice president and president-in-waiting.

So does it matter if Joe Biden has a different view of China? It does, because there is evidence that the CCP has been currying his favor by awarding business deals that have enriched his son, Hunter Biden. One account of this is given by Peter Schweizer in his 2019 book “Secret Empires.” Some of his key claims were subsequently challenged and Schweizer refined them in an op-ed in the New York Times (famous for fact-checking). In short, when Vice President Biden traveled to China in December 2013 on an official trip, his son flew with him on Airforce Two. While Biden senior was engaging in soft diplomacy with China’s leaders, Hunter was having other kinds of meetings. Then, “less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter’s firm … which he founded with two other businessmen [including John Kerry’s stepson] in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners, whose largest shareholder is the government-run Bank of China, even though he had scant background in private equity.”

The Bank of China is owned by the state and controlled by the CCP. Hunter Biden’s exact role in the company is disputed, but one expert has said that his share in it would be worth around $20 million.

However, the point here is not the ethics of the Bidens (as the news media have framed it) but the way in which the CCP can influence senior politicians. This “corruption by proxy,” in which top leaders keep their hands clean while their family members exploit their association to make fortunes, has been perfected by the “red aristocracy” in Beijing.

In the crucial years 2014 and 2015, Beijing was aggressively expanding into the South China Sea while Obama, Kerry, and Biden were sitting on their hands...

One guy's opinion...

Institutionalized Charity

 

                                                              Institutionalized Charity

What is the relationship between profit and social values? Does the modern world identify profit with usury and sin? Is profit possible in a religious community or is the only trade barter?

If so, can charity make up for these errors? Can a plaintiff lawyer gain credit by starting a charity, however insincere?

Is there a break-even point? Is there a point where a business can be excessive in its charity? Or is charity by its very nature so good that there can be no excess? That even bankruptcy is acceptable in a good cause?

Or is it possible that individuals can be charitable but institutions cannot? That institutions mimicking charity is like a dog in a tutu or a bear dancing--the denigrating and inappropriate application of one entity's characteristics to another? Like blackface.

Human appropriation.

.

Sunday/The CliffsNote

 

                                                 Sunday/The CliffsNote

Today's gospel is the Two Great Commandments gospel, the love of God and the love of neighbor.
The love of God was written, literally, in the Jewish life of the time--and continues in some households. The Old Testament has admonishments to write the commandment of the love of God on doorposts, arm, and forehead and many did. This is the "Phylactery," the written inscriptions of the bible in leather boxes on house doorways, and the forehead and arm of believers. So the notion that the love of God and neighbor be ever-present became literal.

There were 613 laws in Christ's time that governed Judaic life. Sometimes genius shows in the insightful simplifying of reality.

Abou Ben Adhem

by Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Happy Birthday Earth One Day Late

 

                                        Happy Birthday Earth One Day Late

This is one of my favorite days of the year. Today is the birthday of the earth.

James Ussher was born in Ireland in 1581. His mother was Catholic but he grew up a Calvinist. He became a priest, was a well regarded academic and scholar. He became Bishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland in 1625 and continued so until his death in 1656.

But, while a powerful and influential political and religious figure, he is known best for his historical research into the age of the earth. He started with Adam. The bible records an unbroken line from Adam to Solomon. There were some estimates necessary because not all of the information correlates perfectly, and there is some guesswork from begat to begat.

After Solomon, more historical resources were necessary but good historic points existed up to the Destruction of the Temple. After this--the so-called Late Age of Kings from Ezra to Jesus--the Bible offered little help and most of the dates had to be taken from independent history. For example, the death of the Chaldean King Nebuchadnezzar II, who conquered Jerusalem in 586 B.C., could be correlated with the 37th year of the exile of Jehoiachin (2 Kings 25:27).

He finally published his most famous work, the Annales veteris testimenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650, and its continuation, Annalium pars posterior, published in 1654. In this work, he calculated the date of the Creation to have been nightfall on October 22, 4004 B.C.. Probably at 6 p.m..

Before you roll your eyes, be aware that his estimates do not differ much from other such bible-based estimates of the time, estimates from significant thinkers, notably Johannes Kepler who estimated the birth of the earth as 3992 B.C. and Isaac Newton as 4000 B.C.. And Ussher was a very accomplished man; his collected works make up eighteen volumes.

The annoying and disappointing Stephan Jay Gould would write in "Fall in the House of Ussher" in Eight Little Piggies:

I shall be defending Ussher's chronology as an honorable effort for its time and arguing that our usual ridicule only records a lamentable small-mindedness based on mistaken use of present criteria to judge a distant and different past

Ussher represented the best of scholarship in his time. He was part of a substantial research tradition, a large community of intellectuals working toward a common goal under an accepted methodology…

So times change. Methodologies change. And brilliant minds work within their contexts. And some, despite their greatest efforts, will be remembered only for their errors.

Happy Birthday, Earth!

Elephants

 

                                            Elephants

So now Giuliani shows up looking like a lecherous fool in the new Borat film. And Hilary has a foundation that melts away when she doesn't become President. And Bill Clinton, steeped in assaults from Arkansas, hooks up with an intern which would have been the end of any responsible executive. And a Sofitel New York Hotel maid claimed the International Monetary Fund chief had sexually assaulted her while she was working in his room. And countless politicians travel countless miles with Epstein. And Trump's egocentric foolishness. Now Biden, after looking like a Mafia boss in the Ukraine, looks like a petty grifter in China.

When can we discuss the elephants in the room here? Maybe after the newsman masturbating on Zoom is finished.

Theory

 

                                                               Theory 

Postmodern Theory is so difficult to understand. It's as if it was conceived after some bright humanities student was badly damaged after sitting in on a science survey course and hearing about Heisenberg. What results is an idea that seems self-negating. 

This is an angle on it:

Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another. Liberalism sees knowledge as something we can learn about reality, more or less objectively; Theory sees knowledge as completely created by humans—stories we tell ourselves, largely in the unwitting service of maintaining our own social standing, privilege, and power…. Liberalism values the individual and universal human values; Theory rejects both in favor of group identity…. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth; Theory rejects these as ways of reinforcing dominant discourses that suppress certain perspectives [and] promotes the idea that truth is a “language game”…. Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized

• —Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

Close Encounter

                                  Close Encounter

Politicians receive strange regard from us mere mortals.
Consider this from Bordeaux on a report by Peggy Noonan writing on a recent exchange between the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject was yet another proposed covid-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines.

Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them and we know them. We know them. We represent them.” “Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

And yet most people continue to defer to people such as Pelosi … and to Trump, and Biden, and Cuomo, and Newsom, and to other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.

Revolution R Us

 

                               Revolution R Us

A new entry in the field of entrepreneurial revolutionary activism.

Colin Kaepernick is calling for abolishing the police and prison institutions as part of a new series of essays.

The series titled "Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons" is a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and the Medium publication Level that builds on a rich tradition of Black organizing and freedom-fighting, according to the website.

"Over the next four weeks, we will publish 30 essays from political prisoners, grassroots organizers, movement leaders, scholars, and family members of those affected by anti-Black state violence and terrorism," Kaepernick wrote in the debut essay titled "The Demand for Abolition" that was published on Tuesday.

A Social Shift

                                                                 A Social Shift

An interesting and surprising bit from Brooks on societal changes:


the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice.

. . .The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

High national distrust is a sign that people have earned the right to be suspicious. Trust isn’t a virtue—it’s a measure of other people’s virtue.

Over the past 60 years, we have given up on the Rotary Club and the American Legion and other civic organizations and replaced them with Twitter and Instagram. Ultimately, our ability to rebuild trust depends on our ability to join and stick to organizations.

Sunday/Caesar

 

                                                         Sunday/Caesar

A comment on the "Render unto Caesar" gospel dismissed it as comic; when given a difficult either-or choice the answer is "Yes." It is a profound underestimation. 

In it, the wolves are circling. Christ has delivered three parables since his return to Jerusalem and all involve grim assessments of the organized Jewish religion and in one, the middle one about the tenants and the vineyard, he identifies himself as the Son of God. The question is asked to isolate him either from Rome or from his religious followers. While his answer is brilliant, it is seen as a more clever verbal twist than cosmic. 

But it is not. Christ shows himself to be very understanding of our lives. Christ is willing to give the material world--the bustling business and marching political world--its place. But he reveals it as just a small place. The world has its demands, practical and real--like working on the sabbath to rescue the family cow from a ditch. Christ does not begrudge us our practical anxieties. But he follows with the hugely diminishing clincher: While you understandably must render to Caesar what is his, so must you render what is God's to God. And so the great Caesar and giant Rome are allowed to throw a shadow in their little world.

Graphs

                                                             Graphs

Tesla runs on coal.

 

[86]

[95] [96]

[323]

[305] [306]

[244]

Reinfection

 

                                   Reinfection

Some info on re-infection, optimistic.

For months now, people have been watching closely to see if it’s possible to get re-infected with the coronavirus. It’s taken a while for the signal-to-noise to get better, but by now there’s no doubt that the answer is yes, it’s possible. We’ve just had the first of these in the US, a man in Nevada who was infected twice six weeks apart, with the second round being worse than the first. And in the Netherlands, the first fatality from a reinfection has been reported. All this sounds immediately like bad news, but I’m going to break out the same advice I was handing out yesterday: don’t panic.

Why not? Because from everything we can see, re-infection is a very rare event. The confirmed examples worldwide could possibly be counted on your fingers (depending on whose count you believe) out of at least 38 million total cases. Looking at the Netherlands case, this was an 89-year-old patient with Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a type of leukemia that affects two different varieties of B-cells. She was being treated with chemotherapy to impair. B-cell production, and was thus immune compromised, and the second infection occurred two days after her latest round of treatment.

in each of these cases, the unfortunate patients involved were infected by different variants of the coronavirus than they had the first time around. That’s pretty much what you have to show to be sure that it’s a real re-infection – otherwise you’d always wonder if the virus had just never really been cleared the first time. The first-round versus the second-round sequences show some real differences – not gigantic ones, but real. Second, these two second-round viruses were different from each other as well, so it’s not like some particular new supervirus is stomping around re-infecting people around the world. Third, in neither of these reports was it the widely publicized D614G strain coming back around the second time. That mutation really doesn’t figure into either of these cases at all, so watch out for anyone who’s mixing those stories together.

Fourth – and here’s where we start digging into some details – note that the mutations in both of these new re-infection cases have nothing to do with the Spike protein. There’s no change in the Spike in the Nevada sequences (they both had D614G), and the changes in the Netherlands sequences are conserved ones that don’t lead to changes in the protein in that region. Antibodies don’t care about genetic sequences; they respond to the eventual proteins that are displayed, and from what I can see, the Spike proteins of all of these strains are identical.

That’s important for several reasons. For one, the vaccines under development are all raising antibodies and T-cells to the Spike region. That was identified early on as the most promising antigen, building on the work during the SARS and MERS outbreaks. Note also this new paper, a thorough look at the various antibody fractions in patients who have recovered from coronavirus infection. The authors find that Spike-targeting neutralizing antibodies persist out to the limits of their study (five to seven months) while antibodies to the nucleocapsid region (N), which are also raised in most people by infection, disappear more quickly.

--From an article by Lowe

So, reinfection occurs. It is rare. It involves a mutation of the organism, not a reestablishment of the original organism and the areas of the organism being targeted by the current research does not mutate so the proposed therapies should still work.

Methods in Madness

 

                                                   Methods in Madness

From Henderson's review of Casey Mulligan’s new book, You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President.

"Like many people who have been appalled by some of Trump’s tweets, I had assumed that he was up in the wee hours carelessly knocking out his bombastic messages. I’m still not a fan of many of Trump’s tweets, but a chapter titled “I Wish That He Would Stay Off Twitter” tells two important things about the economics tweets. First, Trump’s economic advisers gave him a lot of input on the economics tweets. Second, whereas I had thought that Trump’s exaggerations undercut him, Mulligan argues, with evidence, that they were part of a strategy for getting good news covered. If Trump told the truth about good economic news, the media would often not cover it. But if he exaggerated, “the press might enjoy correcting him and unwittingly disseminate the intended finding.” My Hoover colleague John Cochrane, in a recent post about the book, notes that Trump’s tweets are his version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. Recall that, hard as it is to imagine today, FDR faced a largely hostile conservative press. Trump faces hostile left-wing media."

So there is no way to get covered honestly in the American Press except by dishonesty?

What Politics Has Become

 

                            What Politics Has Become                  

These are very disturbing observations. How could people take these politicians so seriously? It must be that a country where government is not the be all and end all has changed.

A 2019 working paper by Sergio Pinto, Panka Bencsik, Tuugi Chuluun, and Carol Graham finds that the loss of well-being experienced by partisans when their party loses is significantly larger than any well-being gain experienced by the winners. And seeing one's side lose an election can have surprisingly devastating results. Immediately after their candidate lost the 2016 presidential election, the decline in life satisfaction experienced by Democrats was greater than the adverse effects of losing a job—a life event that has some of the worst documented effects on people's well-being. Estimates based on recent survey data suggest that roughly 94 million Americans believe that politics has caused them stress, 44 million believe that it has cost them sleep, and 28 million believe that it has harmed their physical health.

 ..research by University of Memphis political scientist Eric Groenendyk indicates that "partisans' identities are increasingly anchored to hatred of the outparty rather than affection for their inparty."

13 percent of Americans blocked friends on their social media accounts due to political disagreements. Sixteen percent stopped talking to a friend or family member because of politics; 13 percent ended a relationship with a friend or family member. Over a quarter of Americans limited their "interactions with certain friends or family members" as a result of politics. Nearly 30 percent of Americans consider it important to live where most people share their political opinions.

About 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans believe that members of the other party "are not just worse for politics—they are downright evil." Twenty percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans agreed that "we'd be better off as a country if large numbers of" the opposing party "just died." 

A study by Vanderbilt University's James Martherus and others found that more than half of partisans rated members of the opposing party as less evolved than members of their own party—they located out-party members farther away from an image of a modern human on a scale showing the stages of human evolution.

18 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans "feel violence would be justified" if the other party wins the 2020 presidential election.

Viral Notions

 

                                                                Viral Notions

Several opinions on the Virus:

 This seems as if it ought to be more controversial: yesterday the state of California implemented a COVID-19 “health equity” metric mandating that counties demonstrate that they are investing in “eliminating disparities in levels of transmission” affecting disadvantaged communities, or have already eliminated such disparities, as a condition of being allowed to reopen economic activity any further. Simply achieving a satisfactory overall low rate of transmission will not be enough.--Olson 

So the draconian limits in the society have to meet all sorts of unrelated elements before being removed.

As of Wednesday, some 3,700 medical and public-health scientists had signed the Great Barrington Declaration calling for a more balanced approach, which would allow “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Donald Trump and most Republican governors would sign that declaration. Joe Biden and the Democrats would not, ever. If Mr. Biden wins—throwing in as well his intention to raise taxes amid the pandemic should Democrats gain control of the Senate—the return of the U.S. to economic and social normalcy is going to take a very, very long time.--Henninger. Why this is not more regarded is obscure to me; petitions signed by people with degrees is a coup de grace in climate arguments.

If we are missing 90% of cases in the U.S. and 95% in the world, this has obvious implications for the death risk from Covid—it is flu-like. And yet responsible news organizations and institutions like Johns Hopkins continue to invite their audiences to compare Covid’s death tally against a “confirmed” case count devoid of systematic meaning. This is the statistical equivalent of sampling subjects at the morgue and in kindergartens to estimate the fatality rate of people involved in car accidents. You will certainly find individuals who survived and didn’t survive car accidents, but your computed rate will be nonsense. I have news for Americans: All of our data about the prevalence and deadliness of the flu are estimates, except for pediatric deaths, which are actually counted. If, as we do with Covid, we relied on “confirmed” flu tests for how many are infected and what percentage die, we would be wildly and catastrophically misinformed about the flu’s real prevalence and its real deadliness.--Jenkins. Estimates? We are destroying the economy on a guess?

“The remedy for this self-imposed economic harakiri, this desperate and destructive attempt at self-harm that is governments’ pandemic response, is exactly that: end it. Abolish. Abandon. Cease and desist. Have governments get out of the way and individuals make choices of their own, choices adjusted to their own risks and risk tolerance – not a mindless one-size-fits-all solution that takes very little account of real people’s lives.” – Joakim Book.

And, just to stir the pot, there are cases of reinfection emerging.

Sports TV

 

The popularity of TV sports is the topic of a lot of debate. Has it lost its social element? Its diversion element? Is there some hierarchy here that is being revealed in restaurants?

Decline in sports viewership is not just the NBA.:

• US Open (golf) final round: down 56%
• US Open (tennis) was down 45% and the French open is down 57% so far
• Kentucky Derby: down 43%
• Indy 500: down 32%
• Through four weeks, NFL viewership is down approximately 10%
• NHL Playoffs were down 39% (Pre Stanley Cup playoffs was down 28% while the Stanley Cup was down 61%).
• NBA finals are down 45% (so far). Conference finals were down 35%, while the first round was 27% down. To match the viewership, activity on the NBA reddit fan community is also down 50% from the NBA finals last year.

Sunday/Feast

 

                                Sunday/Feast

Today's gospel is the Wedding Feast, where the king invites his people to his son's wedding and no one comes. Worse, the people kill his messengers. So the king kills his people, burns their cities and invites strangers and wayfarers to the celebration instead. "Bad as well as good." Not flattering to us gentiles.

It is pretty harsh, with a curious ambiguity. Christ couches prophesy and the union of the king with his people in a very human ceremony, one of diversion, carelessness, and fun. This is a far cry from the strict admonition to abandon your father and the plow. Much more like Cana with its respect for humanity, its daily life, and its continuity.

And, of the ignored prophets, here is the Scottish Wm. Drummond:

WILLIAM DRUMMOND

Saint John Baptist

THE last and greatest Herald of Heaven's King,
Girt with rough skins, hies to the deserts wild,
Among that savage brood the woods forth bring,
Which he than man more harmless found and mild.
His food was locusts, and what young doth spring
With honey that from virgin hives distill'd;
Parch'd body, hollow eyes, some uncouth thing
Made him appear, long since from earth exiled.
There burst he forth: 'All ye, whose hopes rely
On God, with me amidst these deserts mourn;
Repent, repent, and from old errors turn!'
—Who listen'd to his voice, obey'd his cry?
        Only the echoes, which he made relent,
        Rung from their marble caves 'Repent! Repent!'

Stats and Graphs

                                                      Stats and Graphs

 In the U.S. over the past two decades, black people comprised:

• 13% of the total population.
• 52% of murder perpetrators in cases where law enforcement identified the race of the culprit.
• 42% of the death row population.
• 32% of death penalty executions:

Some spending and debt numbers:

Trump and Expectation

                                            Trump and Expectation

There have been many attempts to explain Trump's success in 2016. Certainly, a large anti-Hilary vote did as much damage as the anti-Trump vote will likely do this year. But the animosity toward Trump reveals an additional positive notion about Trump: I think Trump signalled a rejection of the idea that the government was wise and perceptive, could do boundless positive things and needed wise and perceptive people to guide it. Trump was the declaration of politicians' limits.

Could things change so quickly? Could a new candidate, a virtual hereditary politician of scores of years of elected office, a presumed stalking horse for an unknown group of advisors, emerge to offer government leadership and expertise just three and a half years later?

Look at how the West has accepted the virtually random--but forceful--handling of The Virus. There is no real science available. Information, as it should in science, is constantly changing, yet every nation--all with varying degrees of constitutional liberties--have rushed in with definitive and crippling solutions. Economies have been shut down. Lives, if not ruined, changed. And its citizens have been more than accepting, they have been militantly accepting. We are all centralized power believers now.

Trump's election was not a retrenching of old principles of liberty, it was those principles' last gasp.

Post-Debate Analysis

 

                                                           Post-Debate Analysis

So what can be done? We invite these politicians on prime time, as if they were as important as the baseball playoffs, so they can do advertisements for themselves. And it is undeniable; people--especially young people--watch and analyze them as if they were legitimate, reasonable people interested in our welfare rather than their own.

Maybe if we made them wear bells and, when they walk, required them to cry out "Unclean! Unclean!"

Business Myth

 

                                                          Business Myth

    One of the many shibboleths unmasked by the Virus is the powerful influence of business upon government. The two are always seen hand in glove. But any government that has the ability to shut its economy down with its inevitable economic and business infrastructure destruction is clearly autonomous. Such a self-inflicted wound would be impossible if the government allowed any business biased--or even sensible--input.

    A mortal enemy could not hope for as much.

Scientists and Politicians

 

                                                    Scientists and Politicians

Nothing is more emblematic of the current state of affairs than the picture of a scientist and a politician on the same stage discussing the same topic.

The scientist makes progress through trial and error. He learns as much from a negative result as he does from a positive one. And he is neutral. The politician has a peculiar relationship with results: The actual results are not really factors for him. Rather he simply declares success regardless of the results and the Press praises or vilified him without any regard for the results at all. Negative results are not in any politician's world. Which is to say, learning from behavior and events is not within the politician's purview. And, while his motives are hidden, he always presents himself in the costume of concern for some unproven greater good.

Scientists and politicians are from two different worlds, one objective and one fantastic. They not only have nothing in common, they are exclusive.

Disparities

 

                                                                     Disparities

Critical Race Theory argues that disparity in racial results in society can be explained by the presence of bigotry. But what if there are other possibilities.

Data demonstrate that there are three simple behavioral rules for avoiding poverty: finish high school, produce no child before marrying or before age twenty. Only 8 percent of families who conform to all three rules are poor; 79 percent of those who do not conform are poor. 

Could that imply that some disparities might be the result of bad choices? And not someone else's fault?  That one disparity begets the other? Perhaps not. But one basic notion of Critical Theory is that, on one hand , your life is out of your control for some and, for those same people, their life can be stabilized and improved only by someone else.

Sunday/Cornerstones and Towers

 

                                             Sunday/Cornerstones and Towers

Today's gospel is one of the many vineyard parables, in which a man makes a vineyard to lease and creates a tower to overlook it. It's the "cornerstone" parable, threatening, at least.

"He will put those wretched men to a wretched death
and lease his vineyard to other tenants
who will give him the produce at the proper times."
Jesus said to them, "Did you never read in the Scriptures:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
by the Lord has this been done,
and it is wonderful in our eyes?
Therefore, I say to you,
the kingdom of God will be taken away from you
and given to a people that will produce its fruit."

This is from The Tower by Yeats:

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse –

Pride, like that of the morn,

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus' thought

And cry in Plato's teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul,

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things 

And the proud stones of Greece, 

Poet's imaginings 

And memories of love, 

Memories of the words of women, 

All those things whereof 

Man makes a superhuman 

Mirror-resembling dream.

As at the loophole there

The daws chatter and scream,

And drop twigs layer upon layer.

When they have mounted up,

The mother bird will rest

On their hollow top,

And so warm her wild nest.

I leave both faith and pride 

To young upstanding men 

Climbing the mountain side, 

That under bursting dawn 

They may drop a fly; 

Being of that metal made 

Till it was broken by 

This sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soul,

Compelling it to study

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body,

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come –

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath – 

Seem but the clouds of the sky 

When the horizon fades;

Or a bird's sleepy cry 

Among the deepening shades.