The Balkans as Philosophy

  

                                The Balkans as Philosophy

The world turns but usually ends up at the same spot.

The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned an obscure fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”) into an intellectual’s cocktail-party game. In a famous essay, published as a book in 1953, Berlin suggested that the world is divided between hedgehogs and foxes—between those who believe in One Big Thing (one all-sufficient super-explanation), and those who are content with a more modest, irrational and even incoherent idea of history’s unfolding. Karl Marx was a supreme hedgehog: Everything, for him, was about the conflict of economic classes. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a restlessly improvising fox.

It was said in the era of Joe McCarthy that he and his followers saw a communist under every bed. The single-minded ideology of critical race theory sees racism in every white face—a racism systemic, pervasive, inescapable, damning. All white people are racists. The doctrine devolves to the crudest form of what might be called racial Calvinism: Americans are predestined—saved or damned, depending on the color of their skin. This doctrine merely reverses the theory of white supremacy, which damned black people—and consigned them to oppressive segregation—because of the color of their skin.

So critical race theory, protesting the old injustice, embraces its lie. This is not progress but revenge. The motive is not justice but payback, lex talionis—an understandable, if Balkan, impulse. Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing.

The victim wants revenge, and who is more justified in committing any crime or injustice than a blameless victim acting in historic retaliation? Virtue, feeling vengeful and tasting power, grows manic—dogmatic, dangerous. Critical race theory ends by fostering the evil it professes to combat—racism and the hatred that comes with it. “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return,” W.H. Auden wrote. The 20th century taught the lesson over and over again, but it seems to be wasted on the 21st.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr (younger brother of Reinhold) explained the fallacy thus: “There is no greater barrier to understanding than the assumption that the standpoint which we happen to occupy is a universal one.” It is an error embedded in human nature.

When Niebuhr wrote that line, in a 1937 book called “The Kingdom of God in America,” he was arguing against the Marxist hedgehogs’ economic interpretation of the Constitution—their claim that the Founders were nothing more than capitalists protecting their own interests. (No simple coincidence with today's radicals.) Niebuhr meant that it is an error to assume that one’s own particular fixation (whether it be money or race or class or religion or environment or animal rights or transgenderism or whatever) is the One Big Thing. The hedgehog’s most profound character defects are moral vanity and self-righteousness—his fatal, paradoxical intolerance.
(most is from morrow in the wsj)

A subplot is that artistic quality that hopes to define the elements of life. The artist would rather be the loner, the insightful genius, observing from outside the nature of man. It may be a true and Christian concern. But it is certainly self-regarding.

Question 26

Question 
26

I have begun to change my opinion about Biden. What if these executive and legislative decisions which seem so detrimental to the marrow of the nation are not just whimsical, what if he just wants to be important to history? 

The G20 are meeting in Rome, in an old building built by fascists. 

Articles about the plans to decrease trace CO2 elements in the atmosphere are framed as between those who want to save the planet and the avaricious petroleum industry. Lost here is the question of how to manage the devastation throughout the world caused by eliminating the world's energy sources and replacing them with products as yet undeveloped. 

If there has ever been a cause to unify the unfortunate abused citizens of the world, this is it.

“Whatever the price of defeating COVID-19 may be,” the Daily Kos article concludes, “it must be paid.” And that more or less sums up the case for, and against, ‘Zero Covid’. For you can’t take a proposal seriously if there’s no estimate of costs.--Carl

In 2020, health care spending was down relative to 2019, the first time this has occurred since at least 1960. Relative to prepandemic forecasts, the drop in spending was roughly $150 billion, about 5% of personal medical spending. Health care spending rose modestly in the first 5 months of 2021, but not back to prepandemic forecasts, let alone enough to fill in the hole from 2020. If the pattern through May 2021 continues through the rest of the year, the shortfall in 2021 could be another $150 billion.

Astonishing.

Interesting quote from McClosky: No play of Shakespeare celebrates a bourgeois.

Household savings collectively stood at $1.7 trillion in August, up 21% from the February 2020 level of $1.4 trillion, according to research by investment bank Natixis.

“Nobody likes having their freedoms curtailed by measures but it’s prudent to be cautious, in everyday interactions certainly,” Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist, told presenter Sarah Smith, “and wearing masks certainly helps that: it reminds people we’re not completely out of the woods yet.”
So masking is sort of a government psychology plan to keep us on edge?

Nationwide, employment at restaurants and bars was down by 930,500 jobs, or 7.6%, in September from February 2020; hourly pay was up 12.7% between February 2020 and August 2021. Inflation data show some of that is being passed on to customers: Restaurant meals were 7.3% more expensive in September than in February 2020.


The NEA wants (this year) to adopt a resolution to study the effects of “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cis heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, [and] anthropocentrism.”

This is a teachers' union. Does this mean they have figured how to teach everybody and it's time to move on to other things? Even if the U.S. education system was a screeching success--and it does not look like that--there is no reason for this group to branch out into new, unexplored jungles where they have no proven ability. 

In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), National Institutes of Health (NIH) Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak acknowledged that his agency funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The money, channeled through the EcoHealth Alliance, supported scientists who modified bat coronaviruses so that they were "capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model."
Basically, the Chinese researchers modified the spike protein of a relatively harmless coronavirus so that it would function as a key enabling the virus to open and invade cells in humanized mice. As it happens, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic chiefly infects people by binding to our ACE2 receptors.

How can these morons be stopped?

Half of Americans say they prefer fewer government services and lower taxes, while 19% want higher taxes and more services. Twenty-nine percent want taxes and services as they are now.”--Gallup

In no other country do the rich bear a greater share of the income-tax burden than they do in the U.S.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the top 10% of American households earn about 33.5% of all earned income but pay 45.1% of all income taxes, including Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. That progressivity ratio of 1.35 is far higher than in any other country. The ratio in France is 1.10. In Germany it’s 1.07, and in Sweden an even 1. In the last OECD study, in 2015, the top 10% of earners in the U.S. paid 45% of all income taxes. In France, the top 10% only paid 28%. In Germany they paid 31% and in Sweden 27%. Conversely, the bottom 90% of earners in the U.S. paid 55%. The bottom 90% of earners in France paid 72%. In Germany it was 69% and in Sweden 73%.

EV's batteries: it’s not just lithium that can contaminate soil and groundwater. Nickel, cobalt, manganese and other metals found in EV batteries pose an even greater threat than lithium to both human life and the ecosystem. If an average car battery pack weighs 550 pounds, 100 million cars would produce about 55 billion pounds — 28 million tons — of battery waste.

A survey of 40 empirical studies shows that high levels of public debt have a negative impact on economic growth.

Among the roles for government desired by Comptroller of the Currency nominee, Saule Omarova wants to bypass banks in the allocation of capital. The Fed would determine the distribution of capital. Her proposals include one that could break up banks with more than $250 billion in assets and another to have the Federal Reserve offer checking and savings accounts instead of private lenders.
Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, in the interwar years, proved the allowing the State to control capital would severely impoverish any socialist economy.
Mistakes, idiocy and greed are the engines of economic problems. Why the government and its representatives put themselves forward as above these failures rather than a concentration of them is not explained.
The esteemed Ms. Omarov is a graduate of Moscow State University
on a Lenin scholarship. So many of these ideas are so obviously harmful to the nation that one wonders if stupidity alone is to blame. I suppose her being a Chinese disinformation agent is too obvious to be real.

Judge Silberman

                              Judge Silberman

As Deputy Attorney General in the 1970s, Judge Silberman was asked by Congress to testify on the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret and confidential files and so was obliged to read them. In a 2005 op-ed, he called examining those files the “single worst experience of my long governmental service.” He vowed to take the secrets he read about politicians to his grave, and so they have never leaked to this day. Silberman recently received an award, the first annual Justice Clarence Thomas First Principles Award, and I'm sure it was deserved. He is said to be the most influential judge never to have sat on the Supreme Court. A very flattering article appeared about him in the WSJ recently.

But this still worries me: what did Hoover know and why shouldn't we know it? After all, two big questions are unanswered. What kind of people are we electing and how are they being compromised? It would be reassuring if this is a small list of a few peccadilloes. But what if they're not?

Hoover's small pressure points are only a part of the question. Why do these leaders feel we must be protected from the truth?

Question 25

Question 25

 

Governments thrive on the concept of 'legality' and 'precedent' which they use to trump ethics and threats to the commonweal. This is behind the current debate over taxing the really, really rich. Somehow the politicians and their journalist allies believe, or would have us believe, that laws applying to the really really rich--however evil--do not apply to us. But they do and will. 

One thing this political culture is devoted to is making the outlier the norm.

60% of the FDA's 3 billion dollar budget is paid for by the Pharmas. I have no idea if this is meaningful but where else does the regulated pay the regulator? There are many other names for a relationship like this and they are not flattering.

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra testified to a Senate committee about “birthing people.” 

The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine revised “lactation-related language” for mothers by identifying them as “human milk-feeding individuals.”
I'm unsure women will welcome this gobbledegook. The problem here is that language is valuable only if it is descriptive and accurate.
Who benefits from undermining those qualities?

We are going to look like fools to our grandchildren.

I am not following the Hollywood shooting closely but is the implication that live ammo is always available to be in a prop gun? How is that possible?

A good line: What is unhealthy, however, is to conclude that someone who disagrees with your preferred means of helping the poor is someone who really doesn’t share the goal of helping the poor.

A comprehensive 2009 study from the Department of Labor (“An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women”) came to the following conclusion:
"This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
So why are we still hearing about the gender wage gap?

The governor of New York has ordered new graduates from medical and nursing schools be permitted to practice without the required post-graduate training, such as medical internships.to compensate for the virus-inspired shortage of medical staff.

They are delaying the release of the JFK assassination material because of Covid. They apparently didn't have enough time.

An analysis of more than 114,000 tweets about Harry and Megan has revealed a coordinated campaign of targeted harassment of Meghan on Twitter — and that 83 accounts are responsible for approximately 70% of the negative and often hateful content.

The federal government sent around $190 billion in aid to public schools across the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. A survey by ProPublica found, when examining some of the "provisional annual reports…by state education agencies" for about $3 billion worth of the aid from March to September of 2020, that "just over half of the $3 billion in aid was categorized as 'other,' providing no insight into how the funds were allocated." 

So no one can tell where the money went. But we can trust them, right?

A joint Chinese and Russian naval exercise, in which a flotilla of 10 warships completed a near circle around Japan's main island, has been touted by the two countries as a means of ensuring stability in a volatile region. Nuclear powers being provocative.
These people will do and say just anything.

In L.A. County, only 54% of the Black population and 62% of the “Latinx” population have received at least one dose of the vaccine. A lot of questions should arise here. One of them is not, 'were they Trump voters?'

Lurking in the background of all the Covid confusion is a significant question: should we again allow computer generalizations based upon  human observations and assumptions to wreck our economies and our lives?

If every once in a while you wonder at the bizarre positions of journalism, here's a hint. In the massive spending and tax legislation currently before Congress is a trio of tax subsidies, collectively dubbed the Local Journalism Sustainability Act. Sponsored by more than 70 senators and representatives from both parties, they are intended to give a financial boost to local newspapers and other media outlets.
One of the tax breaks is a credit of up to $5,000 for businesses that advertise in a local paper. A second would let individuals who pay for a newspaper subscription lop as much as $250 from their tax bill. The third and most lucrative would give publishers a hefty tax break for each journalist on their payroll. The credit, worth $25,000 in the first year and $15,000 annually thereafter, would be refundable, meaning that a publisher who owed less in taxes than the credit was worth would receive the difference from the Internal Revenue Service in the form of a refund check.

As Deputy Attorney General in the 1970s, Judge Silberman was asked by Congress to testify on the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s secret and confidential files and so was obliged to read them. In a 2005 op-ed, he called examining those files the “single worst experience of my long governmental service.” He vowed to take the secrets he read about politicians to his grave, and so they have never leaked to this day.

So he protected the totally fraudulent 'dignity of the office' and did not reveal the actual nature of those people who rule us. 

We probably need protected.

Uh oh. A new book has a serious charge and it probably deserves some thought, at least because its author, Mollie Hemmingway, has been an editor of The Federalist and is a serious woman. The book is "Rigged." The story is that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen — it was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes. The Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) passed a staggering $419.5 million of Zuckerberg’s money into local government elections offices, and it came with strings attached. Every CTCL and CEIR grant spelled out in great detail the conditions under which the grant money was to be used. Those are non-partisan election positions flooded with partisan money and ideologues. For example, Philadelphia got $10 MILLION and they set up alternative voting centers.

Reviews have been weird. Those opposed to the book's thesis (so far) attack the author's isolated quotes about Trump, years in the past (she opposed his nomination, then supported his presidency). They also raise a defense that always activate my warning signals: the behavior was legal.

Like a loophole. Politicizing the neutral administration of the electoral system is legal.

So they create the great enemy of democracy: despair.

Vaccine Fever

                                                                     Vaccine Fever

Why do people feel so strongly about vaccines? Vaccines are pretty well understood. Is it the incoherence of the policy? Like, for example:
Centner Academy in Florida told parents any student who gets vaccinated must quarantine for 30 days. That's because of a belief that vaccinated students can infect unvaccinated students, local radio reported. This is a school saying this.
An infectious disease expert characterized that belief as "science fiction."

This has become so irrational that there is a question in my mind as to whether or not incompetence is enough to explain it.

Now this:
Los Alamos National Laboratory soon will require its entire workforce to be vaccinated against COVID-19 under a new policy. It is said that scores of top scientists will leave rather than comply.

Now, if I told you that the Chinese had infiltrated the health care system for the purpose of taking advantage of American stubbornness and independence to undermine the culture and the science of the nation, would you think that remotely believable?

Maturation of Virtue

 

                                                         Maturation of Virtue 

Christ was tested often, once about divorce. Christ was asked how he reconciled his view of marriage as inviolable when Moses allowed divorce. Christ said that those hardheaded people at the time of Moses were unable to rise to God's real demands.

So virtue is time-sensitive with a sliding scale? Is there an evolution of virtue?

And, as an aside, someone handing a weapon can not be wrong about it. There is no hierarchy of responsibility, no chain of knowledge.

Question 24

Question 24

The Greeks thought civic virtue could--and must--be taught. What if they were right?

How can governments be viewed with any optimism after the governments around the world, with their various philosophies and leadership criteria, ruined their economies in an inept effort to manage a virus? How can anybody look at these [people with any confidence?

And this: Police in Australia are checking that people’s coffee cups are full to make sure they have a reason to not wear their masks outside.

Funny idea in 'insideSources': Uber enables rapid evaluation of driver and passenger quality, expedites payments, and provides passengers and drivers with precise records of the times and route. Riders and drivers receive information on one another before they meet—imparting a degree of safety that taxis cannot replicate. And Uber makes all of these processes highly intuitive to both driver and rider.
Uberization of healthcare means the development of digital technologies that similarly ease the process of connecting patients and providers, expedite their care, offer clinical advice along the way, simplify record-keeping and payments, enable patients and providers to monitor progress and results, and accumulate indicators of quality and safety—all in intuitive, convenient ways.

Another interesting idea: The vax mandates were supposed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by high patient demand.
Instead, they will lead to hospitals being overwhelmed due to low labor supply. (Jay Bhattacharya)

People are so hard to predict and order.

WokeWorld report:
Passengers on a train near Philadelphia watched as a woman passenger was raped on Wednesday night but did nothing to help or even call 911, police say.

Is that social distancing? Or is it isolated, indifferent, self-absorbed people looking out at the world?

(see "Kitty Genovese" who was the nightmare victim in 1960s of a long, drawn-out murder in a public place. It became a psychology syndrome in textbooks, although its impact was lessened by the gradual revelation that the NYT exaggerated the event and much was made up.)

The 14 percent of Americans who are firmly opposed to getting the vaccine are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white adults, they are much more likely to be insured, and they are more likely to identify as Republican. Remember the pockets of yuppies who refused to vaccinate their kids?
Those firmly opposed to the vaccine are also much more likely to believe misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines. (This is a cause and effect question of less significance.) A Kaiser Family Foundation survey from April found that 81 percent of the “definitely not” group was more likely to believe or was unsure about at least one vaccine myth, including the false ideas that vaccines contain fetal cells, cause infertility or change our DNA. This may explain why they still overwhelmingly think the vaccine is a bigger risk to their health than COVID-19. (The advantage of natural immunity was not raised.)

Not understanding anything about science seems to help.

Two studies, both completed by the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), an economic policy think tank housed at the University of Pennsylvania, project a decrease in private wealth, wages, and America's gross domestic product (GDP) over the next three decades relative to a projection in which the bill is not passed.

Covid is a highly selective respiratory disease variant that honed in tightly on the immunity-impaired aged and co-morbid. Accordingly, the one-size-fits all Lockdown policy was at least mistaken. Now there are shortages; we seem surprised and are looking for causes. Is this really just stupid?

Interesting notion on school choice: As early as 1955, economists such as Friedman began touting vouchers as a strategy to expedite integration. Virginia’s segregationist hard-liners recognized the likely outcomes and began attacking school choice as an existential threat to their white-supremacist order.

Can kindness trump Law? if so, whose kindness and which laws?

From Brownstone: The undisputed fact is that the CDC changed rules for causation on death certificates in March 2020, so now we have no idea whatsoever whether the 713,000 deaths reported to date were deaths because OF Covid or just incidentally were departures from this mortal world WITH Covid. The extensive well-documented cases of DOA from heart attacks, gunshot wounds, strangulation or motorcycle accidents, which had tested positive before the fatal event or by postmortem, are proof enough.

Uniformity casts a wide net. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot's John Carlson Lecture on climate at MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences was canceled when Abbot turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—on a different topic. Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” 

So they canceled his talk on climate.

In reaction to the supply chain problem, some guy named Leary writes we should “withdraw from dependence on the global system and reconnect ourselves to local, tangible, human networks of production and consumption.” He has in mind shopping at farmer’s markets and growing your own food. “We can reject the miracle, as fully as we’re able,” he writes.

The operative word here is 'miracle.' And the informal world organization to mine and grow products to be refined and elaborated and then delivered to a total stranger a zillion miles away deserves awe and praise; it certainly isn't going to draw individual imitation.

This Not Just In....

 

                                    This Not Just In.... 

The current joke is that Craig's Bond series meticulously avoids Chinese bad guys because the movie studio wants to remain on good terms with China and preserve access to their theater seats. Remember the terror that ensued after Cena mentioned Taiwan as an entity separate from China?

So, economic concerns influence content.

Now, all of the major news outlets but one are subsidiaries of major Hollywood studios. So.....

Question 23

Question 23

Is James Bond a bad role model, a misogynist who drinks too much? Should he be canceled?

The reason the B.A. degree is four years is not because of some academic scholarly judgment that was made.  Henry Dunster left Cambridge, England, around 1640 and moved to the United States. He became the first president of Harvard and instituted what he knew from Cambridge, England, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So we got a four-year B.A. degree. Shortly after he departed, Cambridge—the old Cambridge—switched to a three-year B.A. degree, as did Oxford.

Women earned 421 master’s degrees in health and medical sciences for every 100 men, 408 master’s degrees in public administration for every 100 men, and 350 master’s degrees in education for every 100 men. Is that progress?

It was reported recently that the number of children admitted, with Covid, to hospitals since the arrival of the Delta variant “has increased five-fold.” Scary. And true. But the absolute number of such hospital admissions went, during this two-month period, from just over 70 to just less than 400.
In the U.S. today there are 72.7 million persons ages 0-17. So....the “five-fold increase” caused by the Delta variant is 0.00055%.

The Biden administration, whoever they are, wants to nominate Saule Omarova for Comptroller of the Currency.
She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.
Here is a fascinating thought she expressed:
"Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best’."

There's a lot of scary stupidity packed into that. But, apparently, she's the best we've got.

From Will: Progressives, like many others among the highest animals, are situational ethicists. They think parental insurrections against religious fundamentalism are wholesome but that parental objections to anti-racist fundamentalism are impertinent.

Sanders, on the zillion dollar spending bill, says Americans exhibit “overwhelming support for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation” but that “a majority of Americans have very little knowledge as to what is in this bill.” Apparently he thinks this is a strong argument. An American senator.

Spain's coveted book prize was awarded to "Carmen Mola" -- an acclaimed female thriller writer who turned out to be the pseudonym of three men.

In the battle of tender souls, this is long but interesting: https://quillette.com/2021/10/13/the-implosion-of-bostons-pride-parade-is-a-sign-of-things-to-come/

Men are underrepresented in graduate school enrollment overall (only 100 men were enrolled in 2020 for every 148 women), men received fewer master’s (less than a 40% share of the total) and doctoral degrees (47% of the total) than women in 2020 and men were underrepresented in 7 out of 11 graduate fields of study at both the master’s and doctoral levels last year for both degrees and enrollment. If female representation in STEM fields is lower than males and if that is evidence of discrimination, what do these numbers mean?

Capitalism is an accident, not a philosophy. It is a freedom-based, consumer-oriented commodity distribution system selecting out the most efficient and inexpensive pathway. Profit is a motivating by-product. Attacking it must involve attacking those identifying elements.

So the Chinese have a hypersonic missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons. It is faster and more elusive than our defensive weapons can counter. Intel says they are surprised--apparently devoting most of their time to the Steele Dossier. The White House "welcomes the competition." Welcomes the competition? This is a game? These guys are admirable colleagues in the world-ruling clique? The only thing worse than looking like an idiot is sounding like one.

Sunday

 In the gospel Sunday, the two brother apostles, James and John, are indignant with Christ because there is no hierarchy in heaven. So the drive for position and power is so strong in us that even people walking around with Jesus Christ have it. Does that explain why the richest man in the world is a former communist and KGB officer? But our politicians don't have it, right?

Question 22

 Question 22

Is stealing for others less of an outrage?

The US and Canada (424 laureates) and Western Europe (507 laureates) together represent 931 and nearly 80% of the 1,174 country affiliations associated with Nobel laureates since 1901. When the 15 Nobel laureates from Australia and New Zealand are included, the share of Nobel Prizes awarded to laureates in Western countries (946) increases to 80.6%. Does that unequal distribution just 'feel wrong'?

Tory MP David Amess was stabbed to death in church by what is said is a British citizen of Somali origin. Can you wait for the discussion?

Apple has fired Janneke Parrish, a leader of the #AppleToo movement, amid a broad crackdown on leaks and worker organizing. Parrish, a program manager on Apple Maps, was terminated for deleting files off of her work devices during an internal investigation — an action Apple categorized as “non-compliance,” according to people familiar with the situation. It’s the second time in recent months that an employee has been terminated after speaking out about Apple’s company culture.

Are companies required to e complicit in their own destruction?

Is telling your supporters not to vote in crucial times like these egocentric, idiotic or just cynical?

For the 12th year in a row, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities in 2020. For every 100 men earning a doctoral degree last year, there were more than 113 female graduates. That's good, right?

If you, as a leader, feel your citizens can't get along without you do you, with your knowledge of your own limits, lose respect for them?

Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East together account for only 132 Nobel Prizes by country in total (11.2% of the 1,174 total), even though those areas together represent about 85% of the world’s population. Does that unequal distribution just 'feel wrong'?

The table above shows the top ten research affiliations of Nobel laureates at the time of the announcement. Does that unequal distribution just 'feel wrong'?

Will “diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE)” make things better?

Half of Cuba's under-23 baseball team has defected. Why?

C. S. Lewis wrote that “[t]he serious magical endeavor and the serious scientific endeavor are twins.” Is that the reason that scientists are so revered now?

In the 16-to-24 age bracket, the proportion of Brits who want to convert Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London’s Soho into a community lending library, even after Covid is a distant memory, is now a staggering 40 percent. What could this possibly mean?

The American League batting champion bats seventh for the Astros. The best hitter since May bats sixth. Sixth? Seventh?

E.O. Wilson on socialism and communism: "Great idea. Wrong species."

--Is that a terrific line or what?

More than a dozen prominent cybersecurity experts on Thursday criticized plans by Apple and the European Union to monitor people’s phones for illicit material, calling the efforts ineffective and dangerous strategies that would embolden government surveillance. But aren't their intensions good?

Pelosi gave an interview furious that the Press was not doing a better job selling her spending plans. Did you know that was the Press's job?

Does Heraldo Rivera get residuals for the Burger King mascot?

Does the homogenizing of culture through common media and cancel-culture lead to less creativity?

The government has turned upon Moderna, the company that saved their bacon in the Covid pandemic, excoriating them for not sending their vaccine to poor countries. The Left also wants them to give their intellectual property with the world, saving the Chinese the cost and trouble of espionage. These people are on our side, right? 

Question 21

 Question 21

The group of developed nations agreed to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15%. This protects the predatory high tax states from being undercut by the lower taxing states. But haven't we always been told that taxes don't inhibit commercial behavior? And should predatory taxes be protected?

Mookie Betts had only one assist this year. Does that mean he is not a good outfielder?

Jews and people of Jewish descent represent less than 0.20% of the world’s population, but they represent 24.5% of all Nobel laureates (231 out of 944). This year there are five Jewish Nobel laureates: David Julius (medicine) and Joshua Angrist (economics). Is that an example of discrimination?

Men have received 93.8% of all Nobel awards to individuals compared to a 6.2% share for women, which is a male-female Nobel Prize ratio of 15.1-to-1. Is that an example of discrimination?

Are we vaccinating the Taliban?

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is the Tenth Amendment. Is it less important than, for example, the Fifth or the First?

The results from NYC show Black eighth-graders test proficiency 8% in math, 14% in reading. Yet they have cut the gifted program. Do they think achievement is the problem?

A new California law will ban the sale of all off-road, gas-powered engines, including generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers, chainsaws, weed trimmers, and golf carts. And California is requiring large retailers to provide gender-neutral toy sections. Not surprisingly, California is the first state to adopt such a law. LGBTQ advocates have pointed out that marketing methods using pink and blue hues "pressure children to conform to gender stereotypes." Micromanagement is really good, right?

Russia gained mightily --and Great Britain was hurt mightily--by Biden's approval of Nord 2. And by Biden's contraction of America's gas production. Has Biden been more of a friend to GB than Trump, who opposed Nord 2 and encouraged American gas production?



BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

Potemkin Village: Social media users ridiculed Biden on Wednesday after he once again used a fake White House set, this time featuring a digital monitor displaying the Rose Garden with flowers in full bloom. Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec called it the “Truman Show Presidency.” When does mendacious artificial construction become manipulative?

Test scores from the first months of remote learning showed students falling months behind in reading and math. Are you a little surprised that teachers make a difference?

Some thinker named Rabb (D. Pa) has proposed forced vasectomies on the fathers of more than three children. This apparently is a stunt to ridicule the Texas anti-abortion bill. Do you think it wise for a politician in this political milieu to make joke legislation?

But the fact remains that in nearly all other ethnic groups in America, including Mexican Americans with higher levels of poverty than Afro-Americans, and in nearly all other known human societies, including India with its vast hordes of people in grinding urban poverty and unemployment, poverty does not lead to the large-scale paternal abandonment of children. In fact, the best available data show little correlation between job availability and the marriage rate.(Orlando Patterson) So Black American experience is unique?


In an article published by New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli on Wednesday, Times readers were told that “nearly 900,000 children have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the pandemic began.”
A correction issued on Thursday notes that the correct number is 63,000 between August 2020 and October 2021, which means Mandavilli exaggerated the number of child hospitalizations by 837,000 cases. What can be done to separate the propaganda from the staggeringly stupid?

Has the rise of individual choice and the acceptance of peripheral behavior undercut the efforts to have uniform response to the Virus?

Conseil scolaire catholique Providence, a French-language school board for southwestern Ontario, launched an “educational program” in 2019 called Giving Back to Mother Earth. The goal was to replace library books “that had outdated content and carried negative stereotypes about First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.” More than 4,700 children’s books from 30 schools across CSC Providence were destroyed in a “flame purification” ceremony. A video for students explained the ritual: “We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security.”(wsj) It get worse as the bureaucrats turned upon each other over their indigenous credentials. Are there other elements in society that can be 'purified.'

In a 2017 study of over 2,000 doctors published in PLOS One, clinicians reported that over 20% of the care they administered—medication, tests, even procedures—was unnecessary. In almost 60% of cases, doctors said they did it because of patient pressure or request. But wasn't the idea to get rid of medical paternalism?

In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.
Chinese scientists searched for a host in early 2020, testing more than 80,000 animals from 209 species, including wild, domesticated and market animals. As the WHO investigation reported, not a single animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 was found. This finding strongly favors the lab-leak theory.

SARS-CoV-2 contains a key mutation: the “furin cleavage site,” or FCS. This mutation is sufficiently complex that it couldn’t have been the result of spontaneous changes triggered, for example, by a mutagen or radiation. It could, however, have been inserted by nature or by humans.
Now, is someone surprised? (Yes. The WHO. The WHO is launching yet another investigation.) (from wsj and don)

UCLA’s Anderson School of Management lecturer Gordon Klein got suspended, canceled, pilloried, and banned from campus in the summer of 2020 because he refused to change his standard race-neutral, non-discriminatory, color-blind grading policy at the request of one of his white students in June 2020 who requested racially preferential grading for black students in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis while in police custody. Aren't race-based decisions and preferences illegal?

How Government Can Begin to See Itself

 

1. Representative Kelly Cassidy’s (D-IL) bill would place a $10,000 civil award to someone who commits acts of domestic violence, physical assault, unintended pregnancy, or anyone who enables those acts. Unintended pregnancy?
2. California just became the first state in the U.S. to outlaw "stealthing," a slang term for the nonconsensual removal of a condom during sex. (This has a name?)
The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday, makes it a civil offense under state law for someone to remove a condom without their partner's consent.

Are Leftists trying to eliminate the middle man and go directly to The Babylon Bee?

Question 20

Question 20

A former Democratic rising star, a presidential candidate and software entrepreneur, Andrew Yang, has declared independence from the party. He says he believes he can make “a larger effect” as independent. What???

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Covid vaccines are safe for “pregnant people.” The White House budget’s term for mothers is “birthing people.” There is clearly an effort to draw a distinction here; what is it?

Was the January 6th D.C. riot a threat to the nation or do we take a guy wearing antlers and standing on a desk seriously because we take all outliers seriously? 

Jeopardy: Hilary Clinton defending her husband by dismissing criticism of Lewinski Scandal: Where did the phrase 'vast right-wing conspiracy' originate?

Anthony Fauci made national news in 1983 with an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning that AIDS could infect even children because of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” Was that following the science?

A $3.5 trillion spending bill will cost nothing? Why do you have to trust your dentist more than your politician?

Does a successful company promote or discourage competition?

The spontaneous emergence of social cooperation – the emergence of a system vastly more complex, responsive and efficient than any government could organize – is not universally acknowledged or appreciated. It discomforts a certain political sensibility, the one that exaggerates the importance of government and the competence of the political class.(will) Remember the Dept. of Energy managing the distribution of gasoline during Carter?

Getting daily updates on the scientific analysis of viruses or illnesses or the thickness of a glacier is like a Zeno's half-steps to a destination. Are we there yet?

Following people into bathrooms with cell phone cameras: what are the rules of decorum? Could a male activist go into the woman's room because of the activist's higher purpose? Are there inflection points when politics are based upon sensibilities?

Universities seem to demand students, who are at very low risk for significant Covid illness, prefer the less strong vaccine for their students over the deeper and longer-lasting natural immunity of exposure. Who does that decision benefit most?

Only 11 percent of Americans 25 years old have been in a household within the top 20 percent of household incomes. But 70 percent of Americans 60 years old have been in such a household at some point in their lives. So, there's been more economic mobility and equality than people say?

The government is threatening to solve the supply chain problem. Will they use the same people who solved the gasoline crisis?

With the male/female college ratio 40/60, women will be marrying less earning, less educated men. Will this cause cultural problems? Will those men be called gold-diggers? Is there a comedy here?

Many players who had mediocre careers in Pittsburgh have moved on to good careers elsewhere. Does this mean that the Pirate's problems are deeper than simple egocentric avarice?

'Law and Order' icon Mariska Hargitay is Jayne Mansfield's daughter?

If our professors, media leaders and tech CEOs hate us, who is going to help us think our way out of this mess? (somewhere)

An investigation has found that the Canadian military used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to turn on the Canadian people propaganda techniques intended to be used against foreign enemies. The plan was developed by Canadian Joint Operations Command without the direction of civilian leadership. Practice makes perfect?

Is economics no more complex than a man can support himself either by his own work or the appropriated work of others?

In 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show by announcing, “Research studies now project that 1 in 5—listen to me, hard to believe—1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years.” Remember when scientists and politicians spread the belief that AIDS was a heterosexual illness, that people with it did not have to declare it in hospitals and could not be tested for it--even pregnant girls whose child could be protected--without the patient's permission, and if you denied the narrative, people screamed at you and called you homophobic. Is that an example of an illness being politicized?

Do we really expect the company created to grade the physical appearance of coeds will put women's sensibilities above profit?

The day after the whistleblower appeared on TV, Facebook shut down. Coincidence?

Question 19

Question 19

Do corporations pay taxes or collect them?

We are self-absorbed people. Those elements of culture--cohesiveness, common vision, sacrifice, the moral legitimacy of government--are replaced by entrepreneurs in space, bitcoins, and the sheerest of the clothes at the expensive event. Are we whistling past the graveyard or screaming past it?

Speaking of screaming, Biden has nominated for comptroller of the currency a woman who went to the University of Moscow on a Lenin Scholarship. Is stupid always funny?

China's “one-child” policy has resulted in a rapidly aging population that has turned a worker surplus into a dearth and has led to a socially destructive shortage of women. Beijing has found no solution to counteract decades of counterproductive social engineering. Did they have a model?

So the migrants move on. And we move on. The Afghan event will be remembered in history but not this week; this week we have a new Covid scare. And the migrant problem has been replaced by a new Covid scare. Do you think these distractions are random?

Carbon fuel is responsible for 81% of energy use in the world today. In 20 years it will make up 73%, this under the most optimal condition. Do you get the impression from politicians and the news that the shift away from carbon is more successful than it really is?

While most taxes are passed on to consumers, a large portion of corporate tax increases is actually paid by labor down the line. Workers, not owners, pay at least some share of higher corporate taxes.
Psaki’s position—the Biden White House’s position—is that this sort of thing is “absurd and unfair.” Like gravity, for example?

Is just being 'not-Trump,' enough?

The current U.S. top rate of capital gains is 29.2 percent, which is much higher than the OECD average of 19.1 percent. Nine OECD countries do not tax long-term capital gains, while other nations only started taxing long-term gains in recent decades, such as Canada (1972), Ireland (1975), and Australia (1985). Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan testified to Congress in 1997 that the proper tax rate on long-term capital gains is zero.
Biden has proposed doubling the top federal capital gains tax rate. With state taxes on top, that would push the U.S. rate up to the highest in the OECD at 48.4 percent.
Why is taxing savings so important to the Left?

The proposed spending bill contains a segment that empowers and funds the IRS so inspect any American's bank account that has contained $600. What type of person thinks that reasonable?

Although SARS-CoV-2 has proved unpredictable, no virus in history has ever continued to evolve to higher pathogenicity. As we learned from HIV, mutations usually incur costs to viral fitness or render the virus weaker. No vaccine-preventable or immunity-inducing infection has ever raged on as a pandemic indefinitely. And lethality limits viral success. So is the anxiety about the next 'wave' reasonable?

Stanford students on bicycles: 41% are masked, 17% wear a helmet. Is mask-wearing the projection of hypochondria?

Following a long-term historical reality, high school boys have greater math aptitude and out-perform high school girls on the Math SAT, especially for the highest test scores. In 2021, 153 boys scored 700-800 for every 100 girls. Is this proof of discrimination?

[Ezra] Klein’s suggestion that changing the status quo requires conservatives and libertarians to stop denouncing Uncle Sam for big fiascoes like Solyndra, the solar company that infamously went under shortly after receiving a $538 million loan guarantee from a green-energy program under the Obama administration. Denouncing such waste, Klein insists, only serves to embarrass the government for its failures, thus prompting it to be more cautious. As such, Klein would like “to somehow quiet these players looking to point out every failure.” So, the more damage the better?

In 1981, after 190 years of federal spending, the national debt was “only” $1 trillion. Now, just 40 years later, it’s more than $28 trillion. Is that innocuous?

Sometimes the animosity the Left has for progress is hard to understand. The rich will always be rich. A free economy does not benefit them nearly as much as it does the common man. The advantage of a free economy is that production provides for most of the culture, not just the wealthy. This wealth is not Bezo wealth but the wealth of the common man, whose improvement outstrips that of the improvement in the wealthy. So, what exactly is the objection there, envy?

The bill in the House Ways and Means Committee would extend the existing $7,500 EV tax credit through 2031 and remove the 200,000 car per manufacturer cap, which both GM and Tesla have hit. Currently, there’s no vehicle price limit on the credit, so people can use it to buy electric Porsches. Why do we want to tax the rich, yet at the same time subsidize their projects and purchases like green energy?

I think, therefore...

                                          I think, therefore...

Darwin's thesis of the notion of evolution and the pressures that bring it about starts with the phrase "I think..." Einstein's paper on the nature of light starts with the sentence "It seems to me..."
Here the concepts of two of science's giants are introduced with hesitancy. Humility. Wouldn't it be grand to have the leaders of politics, certainly a less objective field and one that has always promised mass homicide, have equal caution?

Question 18

Question 18

Is rodeo bull riding discriminatory? Should there be cow riding?

"...the conflict isn’t over that specific policy proposal, or even about vaccine mandates. It’s not about the politics surrounding abortion or immigration or foreign policy. It’s not about issues of health or eating habits, about sexuality or workout routines. Those are all downstream from the much bigger, and much deeper question: For what purposes may societies condone the use of violent force?" --Book

Fentanyl in the U.S. illegal drug market is mostly supplied by China. China is the world's most controlled police state in the world. So China doesn't know this and can't help?

Under the new proposals, a family with three kids that make 100,000 dollars a year will qualify for 10,000 dollars subsidies annually. One of the unspoken elements in the Founders' creation was that limited government protected us from more than just government power, it protected us from ourselves. Can a subsidy like this ever be revoked?

Dollar Store is raising prices to $1.25. Wonder why?

So how did 14,000 Haitians living in South America end up on our border? What mysterious flocking tendency suddenly arose and forced them to gather together, all look north, then move as a body to the American border? And where did they go?

Adams, Jefferson, Madison, AOC. Ah, philosophy. “The right of property,” Arthur Lee of Virginia declared, “is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.” So property rights are more than an ideal, it's an indicator of freedom. Is this a common opinion of property now?

Does the government work for the majority?

Steak at Giant Eagle is $25/lb. Don't worry, the government plans $1 billion in beef subsidies. Where will the beef lobby and their cronies put that help?

Hinckley has been released?

A 2020 McKinsey report notes that the United States is home to more than 500 pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities—among the highest concentrations in the world—and that the biggest risks to those supply chains are political, not economic. Last week, President Biden issued an executive order initiating a White House-led review of “key” global supply chains (including medical goods and semiconductors) that have been affected by the pandemic. Is that good news? Even the nationalist Trump got out of the way of the development of the Covid vaccine.

A significant source of conflict in this world revolves around how much interference government can make in individual decisions. Sometimes those restrictions come because the government knows what's best for the individual, sometimes what benefits others. Is either of those good reasons?

Apparently, Nobel Prize winners suffer from 'imposter syndrome.' So, a genius looks at previous winners like Einstein and Curie and feels inadequate?

The secretary-general of Nato confirmed that Russia ‘engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations – environmental organizations working against shale gas – to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas’. I'm sure no one is surprised but why is no one mad?

There is a debate at the highest level in Great Britain--literally-- over whether or not women have a cervix. Is this just idiotic or is it scary?

"This odd mix of childlike sentimentality and economic illiteracy makes no room for the obvious truth: that industrialization and market economics transformed the nasty, brutal and short lives of most people into something that at least approached the comfort and security that were once the sole property of those who were the inheritors of privilege. This is the quite shamelessly blatant refrain of the most aggressive elements of the climate change lobby."(Janet Daily) Do we just like aristocracies?

There are serious restrictions coming as not all entitlements will be able to be paid for as new entitlements are being added. Will the future conflict in the U.S. be between competing entitlement groups?

How could the Pirates have a Fan Appreciation Day and not a Fan Appreciation Month or Three Months?

Bonus Chart of the Week