National Socialists

                    National Socialists

There is a strange argument online over whether or not the Nazis were socialists.

They said they were socialists. Were they kidding?

Hitler said, "We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions."

Of course, people seeking power over others lie all the time but
the objections to the Nazis being socialists seem to be that they were really bad guys, as if a socialist could not be a racist or a bigot or a homicidal maniac. Apparently, socialism attracts people who are high-minded, noble people of good intentions and not people like Hitler--or Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Lenin, Gueverra, Trotsky, Mao--well, you know what I mean.

Philosophy and the KGB

 

                         Philosophy and the KGB

“There is no happiness in life,” Putin said in a press conference after discussions with Biden. “There is only a mirage on the horizon. So cherish that."

Was he just depressed after talking to Biden or is that how the leader of one of the nuclear powers thinks? Some countries have leaders that actually direct social thinking, or embody the social thought of the land. So Putin's view of life is nihilistic, hopeless, and without reward. Simple happiness is a fantasy. But the little people should cherish it when they are fortunate enough to come across it and be deceived.

So is he a spokesman for the Russian people? Or does he hope to infuse the Russian people with a depressing insight they have not yet realized?

The idea of hopeless, unhappy people who think that happiness is a self-deceiving placebo sitting around in the UN trying to make decisions for all of us sounds really great to me. 

Austin in Wonderland

 

                   Austin in Wonderland

The political, social, and academic elite of Austin is the primary relevant constituency for permitting homeless camping, and they receive the most unambiguous benefits of the policy through smug self-satisfaction while bearing none of the costs. True, these total benefits are dwarfed by the costs to those living in lower-income areas, but the relative political power of the two groups leads to the policy being enacted despite the costs outweighing the benefits.

…..

The Governor of Texas should immediately instruct the Department of Public Safety to clear out all campsites from highway right-of-ways while at the same time prohibiting the University of Texas from enforcing any prohibitions on camping, loitering, or solicitation. Transportation of persons and property from the right-of-ways to campus could be provided free of charge.

This policy might lead to some disruptions on campus, but it would be no worse than the disruptions faced by lower-income Austinites who find such camps popping up near their homes and places of work. And, certainly, faculty at UT are at the pinnacle of the social elite in Austin and among the strongest supporters permitting homeless camping. They benefit the most, and they should pay the costs. It would be admittedly jarring to see faculty harassed and threatened on their way to teach classes, but faculty themselves have enthusiastically supported policies that have imposed such harassment and threatening behavior on less privileged Austinites, as is well documented in the viral video below circulating regarding the Windsor Park neighborhood. Surely “marginalized” working-class individuals who provide important services to our economy deserve to have at least the same level of safety and security as those who write about the tribulations of the marginalized classes from the comfort of their own offices. (somewhere)

Sunday/"Who touched my clothes?"

 

            Sunday/"Who touched my clothes?"

God did not make death,
    nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.--The Book of Wisdom

In today's gospel, Christ raises a child from the dead. While astonishing, an equally astonishing event occurs in the folds of the story, the curing of the woman who suffered from hemorrhage and "had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors." She approaches Christ in the crowd.

'She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.”
Immediately her flow of blood dried up.
She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him,
turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?”'

What is happening here? In a crowd, a lot of people are probably touching his clothes. Typically, this passage is taught as Christ calling attention to the event, emphasizing the importance of approaching God with faith.


This could be a very disturbing passage. Christ is on the way to raise a girl from the dead and the entourage is interrupted by this woman and the Son of God asks, "Who touched my clothes?" "Power had gone out from him?" It is as if Christ, who is about to raise a dead person and violate a universal law of life, has to ask questions about his immediate surroundings, the man who tells the future does not know the present. And this "power" did not just heal her, it sought her.


The point here is Faith. But there is more implied: the duality of Christ and the positive nature of his power, all in this small incident. Then Christ goes and performs the big event.

SatStats

 

                                              SatStats

A college survey.

The survey does not define the word "offensive," so it's impossible to know what kind of speech the respondents had in mind. That said, there is clearly a belief in the value of censorship and the willingness to assign that power to some apparently arbitrary power. This, among the educated.

Some Immigration Info and Allegations

                                    

           Some Immigration Info and Allegations

Building “the Wall” would cost less than half of what we spend to educate illegal immigrants every year.
Illegal immigration costs American taxpayers $116 billion a year.
62 percent of naturalized immigrants are for the Democrats; only 25 percent are for the Republicans.
Competition from immigrants costs American workers $450 billion a year
The Founders wanted to admit only immigrants who would make a net contribution—and assimilate.
Millions of nineteenth-century immigrants who couldn’t make it in America went back home. (This is actually interesting.)
The percent of foreign-born in the United States today is the highest since World War I—and this time we’re not doing “Americanization”
After Reagan’s 1986 Amnesty, the illegal population went from 3.2 million to 11 million.
Over 700,000 foreign visitors to the United States in 2016 overstayed their visas.
80 percent of Central American women and girls who enter the United States illegally are raped along the way.
Noncitizens are only 9 percent of our population but 27 percent of federal prisoners. (it is a crime, after all.)
147 million more people from around the world would like to move to the United States.

Black Deaths

                             Black Deaths

The commonest cause of death in the cohort of Black males under the age of forty-four is homicide, Well, here's a really cynical opinion on MLM's attitude toward Black culture and lives by some guy named Salzman:

"Two-parent families are even more prevalent among Asians of all origins, who are today among the most successful people in America, not because they are “people of color” or “adjacent white,” but because their culture emphasizes family values and educational achievement. But BLM doesn’t want any of that for African Americans. As members of the African American elite, BLM is quite happy to have African Americans segregated, weak, and dependent upon them. The members of the BLM elite are doing quite well, thank you.

The facts are that very few African Americans are killed by police, and African Americans are not overrepresented in being killed once the African American crime rate is taken into account. At the same time, African Americans are highly overrepresented as victims of shootings, murders, rapes, assaults, carjackings, and other serious violent crimes. African Americans are almost 50% of the murder victims, although they make up around 13% of the population. But it is not police or white nationalists who are to blame. Ninety percent of African American murders are perpetrated by other African Americans. In short—although it is now regarded as “racist” to say this—the greatest violent threat to African Americans is African American criminals."

What is happening is that somehow the perpetrators are now being seen as something other than criminals.

Shooting the Analyst

 

                Shooting the Analyst

Professor Sandra Sellers of Georgetown Law School, in what she thought was a private conversation with a fellow faculty member after a virtual class, said, after discussing the performance of a black student in her mediation class:

"You know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester, that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. It happens almost every semester, and it’s like oh, come on. You know, we get some really good ones but there also are usually some of them that are just plain at the bottom."

Unbeknownst to the professors, the conversation was still being recorded and was uploaded, along with the rest of the class, into a digital database.

Georgetown Black Law Students Association (BLSA) became aware of the conversation and immediately BLSA claimed:

"These racist statements reveal not only Sellers’ beliefs about black students in her classes, but also how her racist thoughts have translated to racist actions. Professor Sellers’ bias has impacted the grades of black students in her classes historically, in her own words."

In fairness to Sellers, that looks like a bit of a reach. Sellers' statement looks like an observation, not a conclusion. No matter. Off with her head. Georgetown fired Professor Sellers and put the other professor on leave.

The lesson here is uncertain. Silence? Uninvolvement? Take no notice? And is the endpoint here that the Good Samaritan should turn a blind eye?

Maher

 

                           Maher

Bill Maher recently sounded normal.

The comedian Kevin Hart had recently told the New York Times “You’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.”

Maher commented, “This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts, or ever be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism.”

He added: “Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?” He acknowledged that “racism is unfortunately still with us,” and its “legacy of injustice” lingers. “I understand best I can how racism singes a person’s soul so much they might see it everywhere. But seeing clearly is necessary for actually fixing problems, and clearly racism is no longer everywhere. It’s not in my home, and it’s probably not in yours if I read my audience right, and I think I do. For most of the country, the most unhip thing you could ever be today is a racist.”

Hyperbole is very successful in advertising but it risks diminishing the truth of the matter when challenged.

 

                         Democracies

Belarus used to be part of the Soviet Union. It`s only had a president since 1994, and the same man, Alexander Lukashenko, has been president there since they established the office of president 26 years ago. He`s the only president independent Belarus has ever known.

Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin have talked about joining their two countries together.

In August, Lukashenko was facing election. So he threw the most promising opposition candidate who was running against him into prison.

The candidate`s wife, a teacher who had never been involved in politics before, ran for president in her husband`s place while her husband was in prison. And citizens of Belarus went to the polls in August, and she apparently won.

Lukashenko declared victory for himself and people turned out in the streets by at least the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, protesting. Tens of thousands of people were arrested. Some died in custody. Hundreds of people made credible allegations of torture by police in custody.

The candidate is in exile now, in Lithuania. All the opposition leaders, all the protest organizers have been arrested or chased out of the country.

And Lukashenko sent up a MiG fighter jet to intercept a commercial passenger plane that had taken off from Greece and was flying to Lithuania. Those are two E.U. countries. It was over Belarus` air space. The fighter jet forced the plane to land inside Belarus. And the 26-year-old they took off that plane was the editor of NEXTA, the opposition newspaper.

You can have democracies in name only.

Sunday/Storms

                    Sunday/Storms

In today's gospel, Christ rebukes the wind and the sea.

"Then it began to blow a great gale and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped.
But he was in the stern, his head on the cushion, asleep.
They woke him and said to him, 'Master, do you not care? We are lost!' And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Quiet now! Be calm!' And the wind dropped, and there followed a great calm.
Then he said to them, 'Why are you so frightened? Have you still no faith?'"

This must have been quite a moment for fishermen but it is more than magical, it is a reordering of hierarchies and laws. Paul writes:

"From now onwards, then, we will not consider anyone by human standards: even if we were once familiar with Christ according to human standards, we do not know him in that way any longer.
So for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation: the old order is gone and a new being is there to see."

Paul humanizes this revolution, as he would, but, of course, it has universal implications. This is a submission of natural laws to Christ. Think Newton and Einstein.

SatStats

 

                        SatStats

Some new research — “Evidence of The Unintended Labor Scheduling Implications of The Minimum Wages” — shows that every $1 an hour increase in government-mandated minimum wages (“political wage-setting”) leads to the following (mostly) adverse outcomes:

-a 27.7% increase in the total number of workers scheduled to work each week

-a 20.8% decrease in the average number of hours each employee worked per week
-For an average store in California, these two changes above translated into four extra workers per week and five fewer hours per worker per week, resulting in a 13.6% decrease in the total wage compensation of an average minimum wage worker
-a 23% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 20 hours per week (making them eligible for retirement benefits)
-a 14.9% decrease in the percentage of employees working more than 30 hours per week (making them eligible for health care benefits)
-a 33% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per week
-a 9.5% increase in fluctuations in the number of hours worked per day
-a 9.8% increase in fluctuations of shift start times and
average net losses of at least $1,590 per year per employee, equivalent to 11.6% of workers’ total compensation (assuming that workers were able to use their reduced hours to work a second job — an assumption which may not hold true for many employees).

Here’s a summary of the research from the authors in the Harvard Business Review (“Research: When a Higher Minimum Wage Leads to Lower Compensation“):

While proponents of increasing the minimum wage have grown increasingly vocal in the U.S., new research suggests that raising the minimum wage can actually have a significant negative impact on the total compensation of hourly workers. Researchers analyzed a detailed dataset of wage and scheduling data for more than 5,000 employees at a single national retailer, and compared outcomes for workers in California (which had several minimum wage increases during the study period) and Texas (which had zero increases). They found that in the stores that experienced a minimum wage hike, workers on average worked fewer hours per week, were less likely to qualify for benefits, and had less-consistent schedules. These factors corresponded to an average 11.6% decrease in total compensation for every $1 increase in the minimum wage. Based on these findings, the authors argue that policymakers should consider minimum wage hikes with caution, and should be sure to complement them with policies designed to ensure consistent schedules and adequate hours for workers — or risk harming the very people they’re aiming to support.

And here’s the conclusion from the HBR article:

When it comes to assessing the impact of minimum wage on worker welfare, economists and policymakers tend to emphasize employment rates alone. But our study shows that other factors, such as benefits and worker schedules, can make a major difference. Even if overall employment rates remain constant, increasing the minimum wage can lead firms to make strategic shifts in their labor scheduling practices that can ultimately have a substantial, negative effect on the welfare of the very workers these policies aim to protect.

Someone is probably surprised.

Counting on the Government's Self-Restraint

 

        Counting on the Government's Self-Restraint

South of the equator, northeast of New Zealand, east-northeast from Australia, there is an American territory. It's the only inhabited American territory that is in the southern hemisphere. About 45,000--50,000 people live there. It`s called American Samoa.

American Samoa, that U.S. territory, is not to be confused with the nation of Samoa, which is an independent country in that same group of islands. Where the American territory of American Samoa has 45,000 or 50,000 people, the nation of Samoa is much larger, about 200,000 people live there.

Samoa gained its independence from New Zealand in 1962. It was admitted to the United Nations in 1976.

For most of the time they have been an independent country, for nearly 40 years of the 60 years they have been a country, Samoa has been run by the same ruling party. In fact, the same guy, the same individual man, the prime minister from that party, has been in power as prime minister for the last 22 years. But he lost the last election this year.

After being prime minister for almost 22 years, his party ended up with one less seat in parliament than the opposition did. And in a parliamentary system, that means, since the opposition has a majority, they get to form the new government. And that party`s leader gets to be the new prime minister.

And that transition in Samoa was supposed to happen. Parliament was supposed to gather to swear in its new members. With the new party in the majority, they would then swear in the leader of that party as the new prime minister. Samoa would have a different party in charge for the first time in 40 years, a different prime minister in charge for the first time in 22 years. That big, important transfer of power was supposed to happen in Samoa. It did not.

Instead, there was a shocking announcement in Samoa: the parliament would be dissolved. They would not convene to swear in anyone, let alone the new prime minister.

The parliamentary system requires the leaders to be good citizens, to put the nation above their own interests, to have reverence for the structure and rules of the nation. 

But the people can never trust government or the people who are attracted to it.

The Obligation to Testify Against Yourself

 

          The Obligation to Testify Against Yourself

Just when you thought that the country had no standards. 

The editor in chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the country’s pre-eminent medical research journals, is stepping down after the publication produced a podcast episode and a tweet that questioned the existence of racism in medicine.

On Feb. 24, JAMA’s official Twitter account posted a message that read in part, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?” The message urged readers to listen to an episode of a JAMA podcast hosted by Edward Livingston, a top editor at the journal, in which, according to several news reports, he said, “Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

The podcast episode and the tweet have since been deleted. In place of the podcast on the JAMA website is a recording of Dr. Bauchner apologizing for the discussion.

“Comments made in the podcast were inaccurate, offensive, and hurtful, and inconsistent with the standards of JAMA,” Dr. Bauchner said in the recording. “Racism and structural racism exist in the United States, and in healthcare.”

In a JAMA statement Tuesday, Dr. Bauchner said as top editor he was ultimately responsible for the incident, despite not having been involved in the production of either the podcast episode or the tweet. His departure is effective from June 30.

Dr. Livingston, who resigned as deputy editor of JAMA on March 10, couldn’t be reached to comment.

And no wonder. Defending yourself from charges of racism can get you fired. After you've lost your job, who knows what's next.

Racial Determinism

                                 

                          Racial Determinism

Robin DiAngelo, the author of "White Fragility," has a new book that Whites can torture themselves with. A quote from her new book: “Perhaps on my way to Whole Foods, I must pass an indigenous man who appears to be lying on the sidewalk.” "Must" presumably because White cultural, social, and economic forces demand it. "Appears"....I have no idea why the "indigenous man" "appears" to be lying on the sidewalk.

Callahan summarizes the old book this way: "The onus is solely on white America to bring about structural and economic change — except white America can’t, because as whites, we can never change for intrinsic, unfixable, immutable reasons."

Writing in the Atlantic last year, John McWhorter, the esteemed black linguist, author, and Columbia professor, said that with “White Fragility,” DiAngelo “openly infantilized black people” and “simply dehumanized us.” On NPR, McWhorter called it an “Orwellian indoctrination program” that “is racist . . . If you write a book that teaches that black people’s feelings must be stepped around to an exquisitely sensitive degree that hasn’t been required of any other human beings, you’re condescending to black people. In supposing that black people have no resilience, you are saying that black people are unusually weak. You’re saying that we are lesser . . . that’s discriminatory.”

Ms. DAngelo, who is white, has a consulting business that teaches groups and corporations why they are racist and why they can't do anything about it. At $15K a session.

This "thesis" violates every American concept of optimism about the individual, the ability to control your life without the guiding hand of politicians and do-gooders, and ignores the incredible sacrifices made by countless individuals, families and communities to guarantee these precepts for everyone in this country.

But sometimes entrepreneurship must be its own reward.

Truth in Variables

 

                 Truth in Variables

Here is part of a weird article from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, about the racial background and sexual behavior of medical journal editors, things you probably weren't thinking about. The concept must be important, though, because they wrote about it. Maybe height is the next variable.

"At 25 leading medical and scientific journals, our survey found nearly equal numbers of men and women editors, more than 75% White editors, about 15% Asian editors, very few Black, Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin editors, and no editors that identified as American Indian or Native American. For the US-based journals, the percentage of editors who identified as Black (1.1%) can be compared with 3.6% of US medical school faculty, 5.0% of practicing physicians in the US,³ and 13.0% of US adults⁴ who are Black; the editors who identified as Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin (3.8%) can be compared with 5.5% of medical school faculty, 5.8% of practicing physicians,³ and 16.4% of adults⁴ with these ethnicities. Data about sexual orientation and gender minority individuals (ie, nonbinary, transgender) in comparable populations are limited. About 11% to 12% of US medical school students identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer⁵; this can be compared with approximately 9% of editors, although none identified as transgender.

Our findings, although limited to a sample of 25 journals, provide novel data on multiple aspects of editor diversity via self-report, not assumptions about an editor’s identity based on a name or photograph. We could not, however, determine if the 368 editors who responded have similar characteristics to the 286 (43.7%) who did not. "

There was one brave comment, supportive of what the writer felt was an important article. No one commented on the curious rate of homosexuality that is almost 10x the reported national average. And neither the article nor a commentator suggested what, if anything, made these demographics important.

Construction-free Destruction

               Construction-free Destruction

Although the often-cited opposition in Islam to the depiction of human and animal forms holds true for religious art and architecture, in the secular sphere such representations have flourished in nearly all Islamic cultures.

But redlining is a universal phenomenon, is often more than self-imoposed, and can be done retrospectively.

Iconoclasm was previously known in the Byzantine period and aniconism was a feature of the Judaic world. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Iconoclasm literally means “image breaking” and refers to a recurring historical impulse to break or destroy images for religious or political reasons.

In the Byzantine world, Iconoclasm refers to a theological debate involving both the Byzantine church and state. The controversy spanned roughly a century, during the years 726–87 and 815–43. In these decades, imperial legislation barred the production and use of figural images; simultaneously, the cross was promoted as the most acceptable decorative form for Byzantine churches. Archaeological evidence suggests that in certain regions of Byzantium, including Constantinople and Nicaea, existing icons were destroyed or plastered over. Very few early Byzantine icons survived the Iconoclastic period; notable exceptions are woven icons, painted icons preserved at the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, Egypt, and the miniature icons found on Byzantine coins, including those of Justinian II.

The Iconoclastic debate centered on the appropriate use of icons in religious veneration, and the precise relationship between the sacred personage and his/her image. Fear that the viewer misdirected his/her veneration toward the image rather than to the holy person represented in the image lay at the heart of this controversy. Old Testament prohibitions against worshipping graven images (Exodus 20:4) provided one of the most important precedents for Byzantine Iconoclasm. The immediate causes for this crisis have been hotly contested by scholars. Among the many suggested causes are the rise of Islam and the emperor’s desire to usurp religious authority and funds.

Historically, iconoclasm has been aimed at how to worship. But it appears as who to venerate as well.
For example, in ancient Egypt, the carved visages of some pharaohs were obliterated by their successors; during the French Revolution, images of kings were defaced. This was personal. Sulla dug up Marius's body and burned it. 

But defacing history is different. Pol Pot's Year Zero, like the French Revolution's Year One, signaled an obliteration of the past, the deracination of the present and replanting of the future. And, of course, there is Zero hour (German: Stunde Null), a term referring to midnight on 8 May 1945 in Germany. It marked the end of World War II in Europe and the start of a new, non-Nazi Germany. It was partly an attempt by Germany to dissociate itself from the Nazis.

Those cultures were "Born Again." Being "born again" can be very dangerous to the older, the unarmed, and those who did not get the memo to adopt protective coloring. Often attempts to be born again politically fail because self-appointed revolutionaries can often see the aura of the past hanging on you.

Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is one of art’s most provocative figures, and his practice often calls into question ideas of value and consumption. In 1995 the artist nodded to Duchamp with “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” a piece he called a “cultural readymade.” As the title implies, the work consisted of dropping, and thus destroying, a 2,000-year-old ceremonial urn. Not only did the vessel have considerable monetary value (Ai reportedly paid several hundred thousand dollars for it), but it was also a potent symbol of Chinese history. The willful desecration of a historic artifact was decried as unethical by some, to which the artist replied by quoting Mao Zedong, “the only way of building a new world is by destroying the old one.” It’s an idea Ai returns to, painting a similar vessel with the Coca-Cola logo or bright candy colors as people debate whether he’s using genuine antiquities or fakes. Either way, his provocative body of work has inspired other acts of destruction—like when a visitor to a Miami exhibition of Ai’s work smashed a painted vessel in an illegal act of protest that mirrored the Ai’s own, a wonderfully symbolic event.

Probably not exactly what Schumpeter meant.

(some from The Met, a bit from wiki, some from I don't remember)

Sunday/The Marrow of Civilization

 

              Sunday/The Marrow of Civilization

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.

Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”

A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.

Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.--Byock

SatStats

       

                          SatStats

Chart of inflation-adjusted per-capita economic output in the United States, which comes from Oxford University’s Our World in Data.

The obvious takeaway from this data is that Americans are much richer today than they were after World War II. Adjusted for inflation, we’re now about four times richer than our grandparents.

Back in 1997, Micahel Cox and Richard Alm wrote an article for the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s Annual Report.

Here are some of their findings.

What really matters…isn’t what something costs in money; it’s what it costs in time. Making money takes time, so when we shop, we’re really spending time. The real cost of living isn’t measured in dollars and cents but in the hours and minutes we must work to live. …A pair of stockings cost just 25¢ a century ago. This sounds wonderful until we learn that a worker of the era earned only 14.8¢ an hour....

In calculating our cost of living, a good place to start is with the basics—food, shelter, and clothing. In terms of time on the job, the cost of a half-gallon of milk fell from 39 minutes in 1919 to 16 minutes in 1950, 10 minutes in 1975, and 7 minutes in 1997. A pound of ground beef steadily declined from 30 minutes in 1919 to 23 minutes in 1950, 11 minutes in 1975, and 6 minutes in 1997. Paying for a dozen oranges required 1 hour 8 minutes of work in 1919. Now it takes less than 10 minutes, half what it did in 1950.

What Can be Known

 

             What Can Be Known

But the economy is not a car or boat: there is no helm, there is no wheel to steer it. Benevolent people at the “helm” are not enough to take a better direction, though bad or ignorant people messing with it can take it in a disastrous direction. The economy is more complex than anything a single set of benevolent human beings can steer, if we want to keep the economy rich and the society free. And non-benevolent people, of which sadly there is no shortage at any price, are very willing to use emergencies to seize riches and to crush liberty.--McCloskey

This is McCloskey channeling Hayek. It's an argument of the complexity of groups versus the limits of individuals to assess those complexities. This sounds so reasonable it makes opposition to it sound pathological.

But hubris is not pathological, it is the basis of every human failure from the Old Testament to the ancient Greeks. It is perhaps a flaw, but it is basic to us. 

That we do know.

What Are These People Thinking?

 

                                    What Are These People Thinking?

Ms. Harris met with Guatemala’s former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, despite Ms. Aldana’s two outstanding Guatemalan arrest warrants on charges of corruption.

Former Guatemalan high-court judge Gloria Porras was at the same meeting, though there are scores of legal complaints against her at home for allegedly refusing to obey the constitution. These include complaints from a qualified majority of the association of representatives who drafted the constitution in the mid-1980s.

In 2014 and 2015, insiders at Guatemala’s National Registry of Persons and at the attorney general’s office presented evidence to Ms. Aldana suggesting that permanent residency cards were fraudulently issued for people from places like Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Iran, Libya and Syria. Such cards can be used to secure Guatemalan citizenship, which can then be used to apply for U.S. visas. Rather than investigate the person who signed those documents, Ms. Aldana promoted her to deputy attorney general.

Now Vice President Kamala Harris visits Guatemala as part of her laughable effort to address the “root causes” of migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle. Root causes are apparently not known by these people. And one of Ms. Harris’s "goals" is to drum up investment for the region.

Imagine. 

Presumably, investors will join right in with the corruption. And they will not be alarmed the fact that all the native citizens are trying to leave.

Groups

 

                        Groups

The biological continuity of the generations lends plausibility to the notion of group compensation—but only if guilt can be inherited. Otherwise there are simply windfall gains and windfall losses among contemporaries, according to the accident of their antecedents. Moreover, few people would accept this as a general principle to be applied consistently, however much they may advocate it out of compassion (or guilt) over the fate of particular unfortunates. No one would advocate that today’s Jews are morally entitled to put today’s Germans in concentration camps, in compensation for the Nazi Holocaust. Most people would not only be horrified at any such suggestion but would also regard it as a second act of gross immorality, in no way compensating for the first, but simply adding to the sum total of human sins.--Sowell

If you get a creepy feeling about "collective guilt" and "inherited guilt"--as if it is a watered-down obverse version of the old "national soul"--you are right. These collectivists never seem to have confidence in the unifying, imaginary factors they concoct, they always resort to an enemy to congeal those factors. "Collective" and "inherited" qualities are no different than the sins of the Kulaks, or the Jews, or the genetic inferiority of whoever you want to invade and/or eliminate. Individual responsibility and value are nowhere to be seen.

USS Liberty

 

              The Amazing Story of the USS Liberty

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Damaged USS Liberty. Photo: US Navy.

(This is from St. Clair, mostly a summary of "Assault on the Liberty," a first-hand account by James Ennes Jr. whose book of the event is hair-raising story of betrayal by America's presumed friends and its own leadership. On this day in history, June 8, 1967.)

'In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel’s attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.
Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.
Soon more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.
A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship’s top officers.
The Liberty’s radio team tried to issue a distress call, but discovered the frequencies had been jammed by the Israeli planes with what one communications specialist called “a buzzsaw sound.” Finally, an open channel was found and the Liberty got out a message to the USS America, the Sixth Fleet’s large aircraft carrier, it was under attack
Two F-4s left the carrier to come to the Liberty’s aid. Apparently, the jets were armed only with nuclear weapons. When word reached the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara became irate and ordered the jets to return. “Tell the Sixth Fleet to get those aircraft back immediately,” he barked. The planes turned around. And the attack on the Liberty continued.
After the Israeli fighter jets had emptied their arsenal of rockets, three Israeli attack boats approached the Liberty. Two torpedoes were launched at the crippled ship, one tore a 40-foot wide hole in the hull, flooding the lower compartments, and killing more than a dozen American sailors.
As the Liberty listed in the choppy seas, its deck aflame, crew members dropped life rafts into the water and prepared to scuttle the ship. Given the number of wounded, this was going to be a dangerous operation. But it soon proved impossible, as the Israeli attack boats strafed the rafts with machine gunfire. Nobody was going to get out alive that way.
After more than two hours of unremitting assault, the Israelis finally halted their attack. One of the torpedo boats approached the Liberty. An officer asked in English over a bullhorn: “Do you need any help?”
The wounded commander of the Liberty, Lt. William McGonagle, instructed the quartermaster to respond emphatically: “Fuck you.”
The Israeli boat turned and left.
A Soviet destroyer responded before the US Navy, even though a US submarine, on a covert mission, was apparently in the area and had monitored the attack. The Soviet ship reached the Liberty six hours before the USS Davis. The captain of the Soviet ship offered his aid, but the Liberty’s conning officer refused.
Finally, 16 hours after the attack two US destroyers reached the Liberty. By that time, 34 US sailors were dead and 174 injured, many seriously. As the wounded were being evacuated, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence instructed the men not to talk about their ordeal with the press.
The following morning Israel launched a surprise invasion of Syria, breaching the new cease-fire agreement and seizing control of the Golan Heights.
Within three weeks, the Navy put out a 700-page report, exonerating the Israelis, claiming the attack had been accidental and that the Israelis had pulled back as soon as they realized their mistake. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara suggested the whole affair should be forgotten. “These errors do occur,” McNamara concluded.'

The Children of Israel are never alone. But sometimes it's hard to see why.

Western Civilization is a Construct

 

                         Western Civilization is a Construct

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics prof. at Princeton, is probably one of the people driving the self-demolition of their classics department. At the annual meeting for classics (in San Diego) a few years ago he admitted that he would like to see classics “die as swiftly as possible” if it becomes (again) a field that promotes “western civilization.” Ending the language requirement is part of their plan to erase the “white supremacy” (Peralta’s phrase) in classics. But the ultimate goal is to destroy the discipline entirely, since it is irredeemable. Peralta has written,

“Why not invest (say) in an Afro-pessimistic critique that, in recognizing the inescapability of white supremacy in the discipline’s phylogeny and ontogeny, kept all options for reparative intellectual justice — including the demolition of the discipline itself — on the table?”

The University of Vermont just decided to eliminate its classics department. The demolition continues.

Operation Overlord

 

                              Operation Overlord

On this day in 1944, Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, occurred--the Allied invasion of northern France. The memorials of this world-changing event are getting smaller.

The business of fighting a war is probably not best done as an individual effort. Nor as a startup. Indeed, the very notion of democracy is probably antithetical to war. War demands structure, forced sacrifice of individuals, obedience, and the centralization of decision-making. After the decision-making has been handed off in a democratic manner it's time for the state to get on with it. But the process of democracy has nothing magic about it; it is a defensive system aiming at minimizing the damage to the citizen. In war, that's gone.


D-Day was the beginning of the end. The democracies organized, rose up, and destroyed two totalitarian princes of darkness  However, the success of power in war, the success of the militarized state, gives the state undue credit. In every war, one militarized system loses.

SatStats

 

 

From Thomas Sowell’s 1989 article in Commentary “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster“:

The contemporary socioeconomic position of groups in a given society often bears no relationship to the historic wrongs they have suffered. Both in Canada and the United States, the Japanese have significantly higher incomes than the whites, who have a documented history of severe anti-Japanese discrimination in both countries. The same story could be told of the Chinese in Malaysia, Indonesia, and many other countries around the world, of the Jews in countries with virulent anti-Semitism, and a wide variety of groups in a wide variety of other countries. Among poorer groups as well, the level of poverty often has little correlation with the degree of oppression. No one would claim that the historic wrongs suffered by Puerto Ricans in the United States exceed those suffered by blacks, but the average Puerto Rican income is lower than the average income of blacks.

Zero Risk

 

                                       

                                Zero Risk

From Purdue University president Mitch Daniels' remarks to that school’s graduating class of 2021.

"This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish.

Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication. I feel confident your Purdue preparation won’t let you fall prey to it.

But there’s a companion quality you’ll need to be the leaders you can be. That’s the willingness to take risks. Not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered."

The leadership is seeking zero risk for itself.