Hogmanay

“The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.”--Schumpeter

***

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships.

***

The word pharmacopoeia has four vowels in a row. Some other words with four vowels in a row are obsequious and onomatopoeia. The word queueing has five vowels in a row.

***

AAA tested the range effects of 20F degree weather on several popular EVs and found that temperature alone could reduce range by 10-12%, while the use of in-vehicle climate control could amplify range loss to 40%. Idaho National Labs reported that cold weather can increase charging times by almost threefold.
Wait. What?

***

Hogmanay

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has a number of characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a readying for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. 

Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

The Holy Family

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.--Voltaire

***

A Dominican court convicted 10 people involved in the 2019 attempted killing of baseball Hall of Famer David Ortiz, authorities confirmed on Tuesday.
Ortiz, a Dominican native, was ambushed by a man who got off a motorcycle and shot him in the back at close range while the former Red Sox slugger was at a bar with friends in a well-off neighborhood of Santo Domingo. American private investigators hired by Ortiz said that the slugger affectionately known as Big Papi was targeted by a Dominican drug trafficker who was jealous of him.

***

Pelé has died. When he visited Washington to help popularize soccer in North America, it was the U.S. president who stuck out his hand first.
“My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the president of the United States of America,” the host said to his visitor. “But you don’t need to introduce yourself because everyone knows who Pelé is.”

***

 The Holy Family

Today is the feast of The Holy Family, one of those feasts that are so Catholic; it is not a feast of an event, it is from "The Feasts of Ideas." The gospel involves the astonishing loss of the young child by his parents on a trip back from Jerusalem, something that would be a felony nowadays. He is found teaching the teachers and seems curiously dismissive of his parents' anxiety, as if just outside of empathy, looking in.

This is Thom Gunn's "Jesus and His Mother:"

My only son, more God's than mine,
Stay in this garden ripe with pears.
The yielding of their substance wears
A modest and contented shine:
And when they weep in age, not brine
But lazy syrup are their tears.
"I am my own and not my own."

He seemed much like another man,
That silent foreigner who trod
Outside my door with lily rod:
How could I know what I began
Meeting the eyes more furious than
The eyes of Joseph, those of God?
I was my own and not my own.

And who are these twelve labouring men?
I do not understand your words:
I taught you speech, we named the birds,
You marked their big migrations then
Like any child. So turn again
To silence from the place of crowds.
"I am my own and not my own."

Why are you sullen when I speak?
Here are your tools, the saw and knife
And hammer on your bench. Your life
Is measured here in week and week
Planed as the furniture you make,
And I will teach you like a wife
To be my own and all my own.

Who like an arrogant wind blown
Where he pleases, does without content?
Yet I remember how you went
To speak with scholars in furred gown.
I hear an outcry in the town;
Who carries this dark instrument?
"One all his own and not his own."

Treading the green and nimble sward,
I stare at a strange shadow thrown.
Are you the boy I bore alone,
No doctor near to cut the cord?
I cannot reach to call you Lord,
Answer me as my only son.
"I am my own and not my own."

The Index

“Ultimately, it’s about what it means to be an American and what it means to be an American in nature. To me, it’s not complete and it’s not right without jaguars.”--some ecologist

***

It would take years of evaluations, and environmental and diversity impact studies to get a stop sign on your street, the entire energy basis for the western world is being reversed without a hand vote.

***

What is the actual evidence that TikTok is serving up slanted, pro-Chinese content, or otherwise swaying public opinion in a negative manner?

***

The Index

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, (“Index of Forbidden Books”) was a list of books once forbidden by Roman Catholic Church authority as dangerous to the faith or morals of Roman Catholics. Publication of the list ceased in 1966.

Penalties varied from venial sin to ex-communication for reading or possessing a banned writing.

Books were a source of concern as early as the scriptural account of the burning of superstitious books at Ephesus by the new converts of St. Paul (Acts 19:19). The decree of Pope Gelasius I about 496, which contained lists of recommended as well as banned books, has been described as the first Roman Index.

The first Index Librorum Prohibitorum was published in 1559 by the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition (a precursor to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) in an attempt to combat the spread of some of the writings of the Protestant Reformation.

The Index continued to have official sanction well into the 20th century. The last and 20th edition of the Index appeared in 1948. The list was suppressed in June 1966, when it became a moral guide instead of obligatory law.

The Index was not limited to theology: it banned works ranging from love stories to philosophical treatises to political theory. All the writings of certain authors—including David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Émile Zola, and Jean-Paul Sartre—were prohibited, while only specific books by other authors were proscribed, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. One or more works by nearly every modern Western philosopher were censored in the Index, even those who professed a belief in God, such as Erasmus, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, and Nicolas Malebranche. Other famous writers with banned books included Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, Montesquieu, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Níkos Kazantzákis. That the works of some atheist thinkers, notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, were not listed was because of the supplemental Tridentine ban on heretical works.

Hierarchies always try to manage information, to protect themselves or their citizens from themselves. It implies tremendous fear or arrogance. And is a great complement to the written word. Or a slur on the average citizen who will not be allowed to read and make decisions. The original fear that encouraged the Index was the democratization of dogma and translations. (The Quran should not be translated from Arabic because human opinion would be introduced.)

Our new censors would direct us.

We have fussed over writings in libraries and schoolbooks. But our current direction has gone beyond the pale. Stanford's list of banned words is worth the read for humor but it is a cautionary read if it is a thermometer of our times. Our language is to be sculpted, as we are.

Here is the current Stanford list:

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/stanfordlanguage.pdf

"While I’m all in favor of avoiding the use of genuinely offensive terms, Stanford’s list assumes extreme fragility on behalf of pretty much everyone. I find this assumption insulting, but perhaps I’m not adequately representative of, or in touch with, public opinion."--de Rugy

(some from Cath. Enc. and Enc. Brit.)

Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.”--Kissinger

***

Long Island Rep.-elect George Santos is being pilloried for lying on his resume. 

A politician is being criticized for lying.

***

The Biden administration just cleared a Chinese company to own 370 acres of land within 12 miles of Grand Forks Air Force Base in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Sounds reasonable.

***

Eunoia is the shortest word in English with all five vowels.

***

Sportsmanship, Business, and Entertainment

Colorado Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar is one of the best defensemen in the NHL. It remains open to debate whether he will be allowed to be a sportsman.

During the Avalanche's 1-0 win over the New York Islanders on Monday night, Makar appeared to be tripped as he was skating with the puck out of his own zone. His fall brought an immediate penalty call from the backside referee who naturally assumed he had been tripped by Islanders forward Mathew Barzal.

Makar immediately objected, telling the official that Barzal did not trip him, that he had fallen on his own.

The referees huddled, and then decided that there would be no penalty called on the play.

A sportsman, right?

But, Makar essentially negated a two-minute penalty advantage for his team. And he said after the fact that he felt guilty doing it because he was afraid he was going to let his teammates down while adding “I don’t know if it’s something I’ll do again.”

Sportsmanship has its downside.

More, officials do not like getting shown up by players, and players that have a tendency to dive or embellish do not always get the benefit of the doubt on calls. Lord knows what will happen if the players start taking the higher road with them.

I wouldn't look for another outbreak of sportsmanship to strike again soon.

How to Make a Tiger

We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.--Tiabbi

***

An opinion on the internet: " GPT 3.5 (ChatGPT) is civilization-altering. GPT-4, which is 10x better, will be launched in the second quarter of next year."

***

People who research and treat problem gambling say the line between gambling and videogaming is blurring. Videogames, which are often played on smartphones as well as computers and game consoles, include features that mimic gambling activities like roulette and slot machines.

***

Thousands of residents were without power near Tacoma, Washington, after three electrical substations were vandalized, local authorities said on Sunday, adding that it was not yet clear if the Christmas Day incidents were linked.

***

How to Make a Tiger

How many men does it take to make a tiger? 

Three.

"Three Men Make a Tiger" is a Chinese Idiom ("San Ren Cheng Hu" in Chinese pinyin). There is a story behind this idiom recorded in the Chinese history book Zhan Guo Ce.

During the Warring States period (about 5th century BC) in China, seven prominent states battled each other and sometimes made alliances.

One year, the state of Wei allied with the state of Zhao. To ensure this alliance, the two states had to exchange princes as hostages.

Pang Cong, the minister of Wei, was chosen to accompany the prince of Wei to go to Zhao. He was worried that his political opponents would speak ill of him while he was away, so he came to the king of Wei, saying, "Your Majesty, if someone were to tell you that there was a tiger running in the street, would you believe it?"

"No," the king replied.

"If two people were to tell you there was a tiger running in the street, would Your Majesty believe it? "

"I might suspect it, " the king said hesitatingly, "but I wouldn't believe it." 

"What if three people were to tell you that?"

After thinking for a while, the king said, "Yes, I would."

Pang Cong said, "Your Majesty, it is for sure no tiger is running in the street. But after being told by three people that there was one, you would believe it was so. Now I'm going to Han Dan (the capital of Zhao) far away from Da Liang (the capital of Wei). There will certainly be more than three people speaking ill of me in front of you, and I wish that Your Majesty would give it your discernment."

The king said, "Yes, I will."

However, after Pang Cong left, the king believed the slanderous gossip about him and no longer trusted him.

This idiom, "Three Men Make A Tiger," came to mean a lie, if repeated often enough, will be accepted as truth.  

(N.B. This is a little historical note and has nothing to do with the internet, the Press, or politicians.)

Christmas

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures. -James Thurber, writer, and cartoonist (8 Dec 1894-1961)

***

The CIA has been meddling in Twitter’s internal content moderation for years, according to the latest dispatches from Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” — which also revealed “mountains of insistent moderation demands” from the Democratic National Committee, but not from the GOP.

***

The Marines, for fear of misgendering someone, may drop the terms “sir” and “ma’am.”

***

Scientists have identified two minerals never seen before on Earth in a meteorite weighing 15.2 metric tons (33,510 pounds).

The minerals came from a 70-gram (nearly 2.5-ounce) slice of the meteorite, which was discovered in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever found, according to a news release from the University of Alberta.

***

Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

The Magi

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

***

Unfunded entitlements are more than twice as large as the official national debt. The total of the U.S. national debt, including those unfunded liabilities, is $100 trillion. TRILLION.

***

Today, roughly four-in-ten Americans (41%) say none of their purchases in a typical week are paid for using cash, a July survey found. This is up from 29% in 2018 and 24% in 2015.

***

If recent trends continue, Christians could make up a minority of Americans by 2070.

***

And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Joseph Has a Dream

We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.--Tiabbi

***

An opinion on the internet: " GPT 3.5 (ChatGPT) is civilization-altering. GPT-4, which is 10x better, will be launched in the second quarter of next year."

***

People who research and treat problem gambling say the line between gambling and videogaming is blurring. Videogames, which are often played on smartphones as well as computers and game consoles, include features that mimic gambling activities like roulette and slot machines.

***

Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation. 

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad formed his opinion of Christianity through an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

SOLSTICE

We knew outdoor transmission was insanely rare very early on. We knew unhealthy people were far more at-risk from the virus early on. We suspected exercise would help.
It’s so maddening how many places closed beaches, parks, gyms, masked youth sports. Such unscientific baloney--Lamb on Covid response

***

The Correa contract is staggering. So, what is Shohei Ohtani worth, a half billion dollars?

***

The FBI paid Twitter $3 million dollars over the last few years.

***

On December 18, former FTX executive Ellison struck a plea deal with prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, pleading guilty to seven charges including wire and securities fraud. These charges carry a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison.

***

SOLSTICE

SOLSTICE: either of the two times during the year when the sun is farthest from the equator, about June 21st when the sun is farthest north of the equator and about December 22nd when it is farthest south: The summer solstice has the longest days, and the winter solstice has the shortest.



The seasons have nothing to do with how far the Earth is from the Sun. If this were the case, it would be hotter in the northern hemisphere during January as opposed to July. Instead, the seasons are caused by the Earth being tilted on its axis by an average of 23.5 degrees (Earth's tilt on its axis actually varies from near 22 degrees to 24.5 degrees). Here's how it works:

The Earth has an elliptical orbit around our Sun. This being said, the Earth is at its closest point distance-wise to the Sun in January (called the Perihelion) and the furthest in July (the Aphelion). But this distance change is not great enough to cause any substantial difference in our climate. This is why the Earth's 23.5-degree tilt is all-important in changing our seasons. Near June 21st, the summer solstice, the Earth is tilted such that the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Cancer at 23.5 degrees north latitude. This situates the northern hemisphere in a more direct path of the Sun's energy. What this means is less sunlight gets scattered before reaching the ground because it has less distance to travel through the atmosphere. In addition, the high sun angle produces long days. The opposite is true in the southern hemisphere, where the low sun angle produces short days. Furthermore, a large amount of the Sun's energy is scattered before reaching the ground because the energy has to travel through more of the atmosphere. Therefore near June 21st, the southern hemisphere is having its winter solstice because it "leans" away from the Sun.

Advancing 90 days, the Earth is at the autumnal equinox on or about September 21st. As the Earth revolves around the Sun, it gets positioned such that the Sun is directly over the equator. Basically, the Sun's energy is in balance between the northern and southern hemispheres. The same holds true on the spring equinox near March 21st, as the Sun is once again directly over the equator.

Lastly, on the winter solstice near December 21st, the Sun is positioned directly over the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.5 degrees south latitude. The southern hemisphere is therefore receiving the direct sunlight, with little scattering of the sun's rays and a high sun angle producing long days. The northern hemisphere is tipped away from the Sun, producing short days and a low sun angle.

What kind of effect does the earth's tilt and subsequent seasons have on our length of daylight (defined as sunrise to sunset)? Over the equator, the answer is not much. If you live on or very close to the equator, your daylight would be basically within a few minutes of 12 hours the year around. Using the northern hemisphere as a reference, the daylight would lengthen/shorten during the summer/winter moving northward from the equator. The daylight difference is subtle in the tropics, but becomes extremely large in the northern latitudes. Where we live in the mid-latitudes, daylight ranges from about 15 hours around the summer solstice to near nine hours close to the winter solstice. Moving to the arctic circle at 66.5 degrees north latitude, the Sun never sets from early June to early July. But around the winter solstice, the daylight only lasts slightly more than two hours. There becomes a profound difference in the length of daylight heading north of the arctic circle. Barrow, Alaska at slightly more than 71 degrees north latitude, lies just less than 300 nautical miles north of the arctic circle. Barrow sees two months of total darkness, as the Sun never rises for about a month on each side of the winter solstice. On the other hand, Barrow also has total light from mid-May to early August. And what about the north pole, or 90 degrees north latitude? The Sun rises in the early evening near the spring equinox and never sets again until just after the autumnal equinox, or six months of light. Conversely, after the Sun sets in the mid morning just after the autumnal equinox, it will not be seen again until the following spring equinox, equating to six months of darkness.
(NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE)

A Christmas story

 

“The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.”--Schumpeter

***

So the FBI is more than just a law enforcement agency, it's a social influencer?

***

The Twitter people have thrown Musk into the briar patch.

***

A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Sinterklaas

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine, Biden’s assistant health secretary, who aggressively advocates medicalized gender transitions for minors, said of his own transition: “I have no regrets because if I had transitioned when I was young then I wouldn’t have my children. I can’t imagine a life without my children.”
Huh?

***

The latest evidence is that Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school’s websites and computer code, and provided inclusive replacements. Some banned words?American, Blind studies, Immigrant. Aaster. And "to beat a dead horse."

***

The nervous systems of octopuses and squids — which both belong to a type of mollusk known as cephalopods — evolved independently of vertebrates. Yet, the prevalence of microRNAs in both octopuses and vertebrates suggests a common role for the molecules in advanced cognition.

***

Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.
Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.
The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination last year urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.
Dutch Stamps:

  

Burke's Note-Book

While the popular narrative is that the TOGETHER trial showed that ivermectin didn’t work for COVID-19, the actual results belie that conclusion: ivermectin was associated with a 12 percent lower risk of death, a 23 percent lower risk of mechanical ventilation, a 17 percent lower risk of hospitalization, and a 10 percent lower risk of extended ER observation or hospitalization. We have calculated that the probability that ivermectin helped the patients in the TOGETHER trial ranged from 26 percent for the median number of days to clinical recovery to 91 percent for preventing hospitalization. The TOGETHER trial’s results should be reported accurately.--Henerson

***

On Twitter, the most popular three words in an article headline, based on an analysis of 100 million articles, are “the future of” followed closely by “we need to”.

***

As the liberal group Democracy for America approached insolvency following the midterm elections, staffers faced a related problem: their CEO, Yvette Simpson, was on vacation at a vineyard in California.

***

Burke's Note-Book

Born in 1729, Edmund Burke was in his twenties during the 1750s. Some of his notes from that period were collected in a slim volume called A Note-Book of Edmund Burke, edited by H.V.F. Somerset, published in 1957. An essay in the volume is “Several Scattered Hints Concerning Philosophy and Learning Collected Here from My Papers,” now republished online. This is from it:

"[T]o learn only to be learned is moving in a strange Circle. The End of learning is not knowledge but virtue; as the End of all speculation should be practice of one sort or another. It is owing to inattention to this that we so often see men of great Erudition immersed as deeply as any in the passions, prejudices, and vain opinions of the vulgar; nay we often see them more servile, more proud, more opinionative, fonder of money, more governed by vanity, more afraid of Death, and captivated more by little appearances and trifling distinctions.

It is worth observing that when anything not a principal itself, and cultivated only as an accessory to something else, is diverted from its proper end, it not only does not promote that end, but it goes a great way to destroy it. The Gymnastic exercises among the Greeks were undoubtedly designed to form their people to war; and they seem well calculated for that purpose. But when they forgot that purpose, when they made that art acquiesce in itself, when they sought a reputation from the exercise alone, it lost its use; and the professed Wrestlers always made the worst Soldiers.

I would make an ingenuous and liberal turn of mind the End of all learning and wherever I don’t see it I should doubt the reality of the knowledge. For the End of all knowledge ought to be the bettering us in some manner; and whoever has a sour, splenetick, unsocial, malevolent Temper; who is haughty in his own acquirements and contemptuous of others; ostentatious of his knowledge, positive in his Tenets, and abusive to those who differ from him; he may be a Scholar, —and indeed most of those called Scholars are something in this Character,—but sure he is not a man of learning, nor a philosopher. The more he vaunts his reading, the more loudly he proclaims his ignorance. If a deep and general knowledge does not make a man diffident and humble, no human means I believe can do it.

[W]e ought if possible to keep all our talents subservient to the uses of Life, and not to make ourselves the Slaves of any of them. Those who lay out their whole time on any one Science, are apt to be carried away by it; and are no longer their own masters so far as to decide when and where, and in what measure they shall indulge their Speculations; and therefore are not so generally fit for the world.

There is great reason to believe that being engaged in business is rather of Service to Speculative knowledge than otherwise; because perhaps the mind can do more in sudden starts than in an even progression. Experience may show that an entire application to study alone is apt to carry men into unprofitable Subtilities and whimsical notions. Man is made for Speculation and action, and when he pursues his nature he succeed best in both.

One may know all the maxims of a Science, be perfectly conversant in their Grounds, ready in the reasonings about them, and know all that has been thought, written, or experimented on that Subject, and yet have but a superficial knowledge in that Science. Another who knows but few of its principles, if yet he can extend them, can multiply their resources, can strike out something new, can remedy some defect, he has a deeper knowledge in the Science than the other, if this other should not be able to advance its landmarks,– as thousands well conversant in Arts cannot do, and who therefore have a more superficial knowledge, because a less useful one.

A man who considers his nature rightly will be diffident of any reasonings that carry him out of the ordinary roads of Life; Custom is to be regarded with great deference especially if it be an universal Custom; even popular notions are not always to be laughed at. There is some general principle operating to produce Customs, that is a more sure guide than our Theories. They are followed indeed often on odd motives, but that does not make them less reasonable or useful. A man is never in greater danger of being wholly wrong than when he advances far in the road of refinement; nor have I ever that diffidence and suspicion of my reasonings as when they seem to be most curious, exact, and conclusive."

"The End of learning is not knowledge but virtue..."

Sunday/Beyond Definition

Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced new rules that make it far more difficult for charter operators to receive funding from the Charter Schools Program.

***

SBF came in as the sixth-largest donor overall in this midterm cycle, and the second-largest donor to Democrats. Only George Soros gave more. SBF dumped close to $40 million into political-action committees, outside groups and individuals.

Individuals associated with FTX and its affiliates contributed some $70 million this cycle. They include executives Ryan Salame (at $20 million, the 14th-largest donor this cycle) and Nishad Singh ($8 million, 31st-largest). Given that both received sizable loans from Alameda, it’s possible all the FTX political donations are criminally tainted.

***

Censorship is the default position of Progressives not because they think their position can not withstand scrutiny but because they think their opponents are wicked or stupid.

***

Sunday/Beyond Definition

In the gospel last week, John, from prison, sends some followers to Christ to ask, 'Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect someone else?'

John was not sure. And the evangelists were not afraid to record his uncertainty.

This week the evangelist, recording Christ's birth years before John's ambivalence, is quite sure. As is Paul in his epistle. Neither is describing a great man or an insightful philosopher. They are describing whom they believe is the Son of God, the fulfillment of very specific prophesies in the Old Testament.

When Joseph is uncertain about Mary, he is visited by an angel who says to him,, 'Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because she has conceived what is in her by the Holy Spirit.'

'Conceived what is in her.' 'The one who is to come.'

Beyond words.

Leverage

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise. -Voltaire, philosopher (21 Nov 1694-1778)

***

Fed law now limits the speed of boats over 35 feet to 10 mph. This is said to be to protect the white whale from being struck; four have been hit in the last two years. This will limit safety and range and will impact the pleasure and working boating industry in what is said to be "unintended consequences" of decreased travel, work, and manufacture for those industries.

I wonder if they are 'unintended.'

***

Is Musk really the main story of the day with Ukraine, the laptop, China, Covid, inflation, immigration, drugs, and the crypto conspiracy?

***

Modern life has become Romance Literature, with heroes searching for opportunities to display virtue.

***

Leverage

Leverage allows for impact beyond numbers or justice, like coups and kidnapping. One quality of modern life is the terrific leverage that has emerged in the hands of small numbers of political devotees, many unelected.

'Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce is sounding the alarm on the destructive climate proposal that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is still trying to jam through on a partisan vote.

This week Commissioner Peirce explained that beyond requiring public companies to demand data on climate risks from even small businesses and farmers in their supply chains, the rule could also force changes in how companies operate and even who runs them. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Ms. Peirce noted;

"… the climate proposal mandates disclosure about board oversight of climate-related risks, including identifying board members or board committees responsible for overseeing climate-related risks; detailing board member climate expertise; describing the processes and frequency of discussions about climate-related risks; explaining how the board is informed about, and how often it thinks about, climate-related risks and whether it considers climate-related risks as part of its business strategy, risk management, and financial oversight; and describing whether and how the board sets climate-related targets or goals and how it oversees progress in achieving them. The proposal also includes a corresponding set of disclosures related to management: who is responsible for managing climate-related risks, what their climate expertise is, how they get informed about those risks, and how often the managers responsible for climate-related risks report to the board…"

One comment letter objected that the “disclosures usurp the decision-making authority of corporate boards and executive management, authority specifically granted to them by state corporate law.”

Washington would essentially be forcing every public company, regardless of industry, to focus on climate, while also pressuring them to hire leaders who share this obsession. But even the most climate-obsessed ought to recognize that such change requires a new law, not unelected financial regulators suddenly deciding to appoint themselves ministers of global warming.' (WSJ)

Pest

“Order is not a pressure imposed upon society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.”--Ortega y Gasset

***

Charade. Mendacity. Posturing. What would be good training for a politician?
Trump was inducted into the celebrity wing of the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013. Jesse Ventura was the Governor of Minnesota.

***

There are stories about 'long Covid,' persisting symptoms of fatigue, headache, and the like, subjective and vague. An ongoing study compares long-term exams and, so far, there are no diagnostic findings that would allow you to even say for sure that post-Covid even exists, biochemically.

***

Taking religion's place as a source of meaning, purpose, community, and ritual are various ideologies: Mindfulness/yoga, tarot/astrology, social progressivism, LGBTQ+, wellness/self-care, online communities like Reddit & the Rationalist community, new age spirituality

All of these originated in California.

***

Pest

"Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”

With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences. Foucault’s central idea was that the ways we understand ourselves as human beings aren’t timeless or natural, no matter how much we take them for granted. Rather, the modern concept of “man” was invented in the 18th century, with the emergence of new modes of thinking about biology, society, and language, and eventually it will be replaced in turn.

As Foucault writes in the book’s famous last sentence, one day “man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” The image is eerie, but he claimed to find it “a source of profound relief,” because it implies that human ideas and institutions aren’t fixed. They can be endlessly reconfigured, maybe even for the better. This was the liberating promise of postmodernism: The face in the sand is swept away, but someone will always come along to draw a new picture in a different style.

So, apparently, Foucault thinks the condition of man is not a condition at all, it is a collection of circumstances engendering new, shallow responses by an old, but shallow homo sapien. This notion has led to a lot of modern confusion about humanity as insubstantial, unstable, and arbitrary.

And, of course, dangerous. Man is more than erratic, he is a threat to himself and his environment. This view has great appeal among the Guardians of the Earth who stand like St. Michael with a flaming sword protecting the Garden. Two groups have emerged that agree mankind should go, but in very different ways.

The first is Anthropocene anti-humanism, inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment. This view would sacrifice human existence for the greater good of safeguarding the world.

Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that anti-humanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. So humans would develop their successors. Those successors would presumably be designed in a way superior to their creators with better motives for protecting the earth.

So much of the thinking of the future is led by people who hate the very nature of mankind, believe he is a disease contracted by an innocent Earth, and are eager to destroy or replace him.

(Adapted from an article in The Atlantic)

Race

Civil forfeiture is the power to seize property suspected of being produced by, or involved in, crime. The property owners must prove that they and their property are innocent of such involvement. Proving this can be, and government has a motive to make it be, a protracted, costly ordeal against a government that has unlimited resources. The government entity that seizes the property often is allowed to keep or sell it. Lucrative law enforcement involves blatant moral hazard — an incentive for perverse behavior.--will

***

Inequality.
In three recent studies, existential significance, or the feeling that one’s life matters, was the facet of meaning that primarily explained the link between attractiveness and meaning in life. In addition, a person’s view of their own attractiveness is more indicative of their well-being than outsider ratings.

***

Governments.
Papua New Guinea’s prime minister says he does not know the exact size of his country’s population after a report suggested that the number of people living in the Pacific nation could be almost twice the official figure.

A new study compiled by the UN Population Fund has implied that Papua New Guinea’s population may have ballooned to 17mn compared with the official figure of 9.4mn, according to a report in The Australian newspaper. James Marape, who was re-elected as Papua New Guinean prime minister in August, told the newspaper he believed that the population could be 11mn but admitted he might be wrong.

The lack of clarity around the size of the country’s population has serious implications for its economic status and raises doubts over its ability to provide services to its people.

***

A study on the effect of direct cash subsidies to Chinese firms:

"Our results provide little evidence to support the view that government subsidies have been given to more productive firms or that they have enhanced the productivity of the Chinese listed firms."

Hayek lives.

***

Race

Distortion results in distortion, often creating what it was created to prevent.

In his new book, Charles Murray discusses how he believes identity politics, with its manifold prejudices, squashes honest scientific and medical research, misleads our lawmakers, misdirects our policies, and creates division by separating people into groups rather than looking at them as individuals.

He then raises some valid questions about the future. What if, for example, working-class and middle-class whites adopt identity politics, as some will surely do? What if our universities, corporations, and governments continue to place more emphasis on racial preferences than on talent and skill? Fighting white privilege may appeal to some faculty members in an Ivy League university or to the Disney board of directors, but as Murray writes, most white citizens:
"believe that everyone has a God-given right to be treated equally. Now all of them are being told that they are privileged and racist, and they are asking on what grounds. They are living ordinary lives, with average incomes, working hard to make ends meet. They can’t see what ‘White privilege’ they have ever enjoyed."

Or does identity politics assume the good humor or kind passivity of the white community or sensible non-whites?

Some News

 

Some News:

CNN (12/8, McPhillips) reports hospitals in the US “are more full than they’ve been throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of data from” HHS. CNN adds, “More than 80% of hospital beds are in use nationwide, jumping eight percentage points in the past two weeks.” This comes as “the broader respiratory virus season is in full swing across the US.”

***

A top MEP has been suspended from her party after police launched an investigation into alleged illicit lobbying activities by Qatar, in what threatens to blow up into a major crisis at the heart of the European Union.

Belgian police searched 16 homes and detained at least four people in and around Brussels on Friday as part of an inquiry into what prosecutors called “criminal organization, corruption and money laundering,” as first reported by Belgian media and confirmed to POLITICO by Belgian federal police.

European Parliament vice-president Eva Kaili, from the Greek socialist party Pasok, was said to be among those detained. She was suspended from the Socialists and Democrats group in the parliament “with immediate effect, in response to the ongoing investigations,” the EU-level group tweeted late Friday. Kaili was also expelled from the center-left Pasok party in Greece.

Kaili, one of the parliament’s 14 vice-presidents, recently called Qatar a “frontrunner in labor rights” after meeting with the country’s labor minister...

Qatar is accused of targeting officials “with a significant political and/or strategic position” at the Parliament, sending them “substantial amounts of money” and “important gifts,” according to the prosecutor’s statement.

“This is the most shocking integrity scandal in the history of the EU,” said Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at HEC Paris and outspoken activist on transparency issues.

(Politico)

***

Closing out a 25-day voyage around the moon, NASA's Artemis 1 spacecraft closed in on Earth Saturday, on track for a 25,000-mph re-entry Sunday that will subject the unpiloted capsule to a hellish 5,000-degree inferno before splashdown off Baja California.

If all goes well, NASA plans to follow the Artemis 1 mission by sending four astronauts around the moon in the program's second flight — Artemis 2 — in 2024. The first moon-landing would follow in the 2025-26 timeframe when NASA says the first woman and the next man will set foot on the lunar surface.

Some Stats

Inflation was “transitory” and therefore of little concern until it eventually topped an annualized 9%. Let’s not stumble into a recession because the White House has political priorities that conflict with economic reality.--Magness

***

Gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships would be allowed to donate blood without abstaining from sex under guidelines being drafted by the Food and Drug Administration, people familiar with the plans said.

***

What was so provocative about the Harry and Megan interviews?

***

Some guy really went after Guentzel last night.

***

 The White House is sending $36 billion to buttress the Central States Pension Fund, one of the biggest and most troubled funds that manage the pensions of over 350,000 union workers and retirees.

***

Some Stats


1.

Each year the US Census reports comprehensive survey data on incomes of various ethnic groups. Its latest report shows that between 2017 and 2019, median income for black households rose from $40,594 to $46,073, a rise of 13.5 percent over just two years. Adjusted for inflation, the increase was a respectable 8.8 percent. For Hispanic households, median income rose from $61,372 in 2917 to $68,703 in 2019, an 11.3 percent increase; inflation adjusted, the increase was 7.3 percent.

How does that compare with progress for white households over those same two years? Their median income rose from $65,273 in 2017 to $72,204, an increase of 10.6 percent. Adjusted for inflation, their median income rose by 6.1 percent.

2.

Page views in November:

---

 

The Overlord's Place at the Table

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von mises

***

Harvard hosted an adaptation of Macbeth that the school designated as “an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members.” (The performance “examines what it means to be an ambitious Black woman through the lens of one of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters,” according to the announcement.)

***

Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population.

***

It is somewhat misleading to describe China as “the world’s second-largest” economy, as the Wall Street Journal and many others do. This is true only as far as total GDP is concerned because there are so many individuals living in China. But each of them has relatively low productivity so the GDP per capita or standard of living is low.

On the basis of GDP per capita in purchasing power parity (IMF data), China comes at the 90th rank of 220 countries, between Belarus and Thailand.

***

The Overlord's Place at the Table

There were 30,000 attendees at the Climate Conference. The elite of rich and poor countries were flying in and out, eating sushi, sharing deals. And, like Samuel Bankman-Fried, they have 'kind plans.' Weaponizing the unspoken but assumed altruism of their subjects, they are going to save and rebalance the world.

The rescue will be a forceps delivery. There will be wrenching, pain, and some residual damage. And, of course, the diagnosis is a bit vague. But fear stimulates action, however risky. And the elites know their subjects are up to the challenge.

Yes, there are some problems. 

Resource-poor places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have lifted themselves out of poverty. Resource-rich places like Russia or Congo have struggled. Why?

And the new and weird 'climate reparations' offered by the rich, elite countries to the poor countries--for what? Compensation for keeping them in the 16th Century?

And just where will the 'compensations' go? To the poor, energy-deprived average guy? Or to his overlord, his palaces, and his army?

And the shortages that will result everywhere---shortages always stimulate the ugliest of competitions.

But, the visionaries just must carry on. A sigh at the table. A knowing thin-lipped nod. Uncomplaining, noble, and stoic. Perhaps symbolically declining a dessert. The elites know their subjects are up to the challenge.

Price Controls on the Enemy

As there should be, there is a limited supply of political energy in this country, and for some reason, the American Right has decided to spend an inordinate amount of it defending a man who is now serving nothing except for his own boredom and his own ego. At some point, conservative-leaning voters are going to notice that all Trump cares about now is the pretense that he won the election of 2020, and that, in order to push that idea, he will happily destroy anything and everything that gets in his way. Until then, I must ask: Are you not tired of this crap?--Cooke

***

According to Macmillan Cancer Support, around 30,000 fewer people in England started cancer treatment between March and August 2020 than in the same period in 2019. Two years on, the UK is counting the tragic cost in additional deaths and a health service struggling to catch up. As the country with one of the worst records in cancer survival in Europe before Covid, the UK now lags yet further behind.

***

GM recently projected the IRA tax credits will add $3,500 to $5,500 in profit to each EV.

***

Price Controls on the Enemy

The Europeans have capped the price of Russian oil at $60 a barrel. The Russians will be damaged but may refuse to be dictated to and might withhold oil which will cause shortages.

The customer has capped the price of a product.

It is a product it can not do without. And shortages will result.

Why is it that the elites know that price controls will hurt producers when they are enemies but not when they are fellow citizens?

And why are they certain they will cause shortages only when they are enemies?

Our Pandemic Response Model

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” ― G.K. Chesterton

***

The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) recently voted to remove Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the nation’s leading cardiologists, from his certifications in cardiovascular disease. Mr. McCullough’s sin had nothing to do with his performance in caring for patients, but rather with questioning the necessity of the COVID-19 vaccine for younger populations.

***

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10 to the 24th bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars.

***

Caplan on Magness’s and Michael Makovi’s thesis that Karl Marx’s prominence is due chiefly to the fact that his name was used in a successful coup by totalitarians in 1917:
To speak plainly, academics after 1917 tacitly applied a “might makes right” or at least a “might makes credible” heuristic. When Marx’s followers were an inbred cult, academics treated them like an inbred cult. Once they took over a major country, however, academia “reassessed.” Predictably, they found that the only philosopher whose adherents ruled a country was actually worth reading on his merits.

***

There are more than 3,000 federal crimes and an estimated 300,000-plus federal regulations that can be enforced by agencies empowered to seek criminal punishments.

***

Our Pandemic Response Model

Nothing is easy. And everything is interconnected. Even failure has a legacy.

Here is Jay Bhattacharya on Biden’s pandemic 'plan:’

'The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population “safe.”

…..

This policy effectively guarantees that lockdowns will return to the U.S. in the event of a new pandemic. Though the lockdowns did not work to protect populations from getting or spreading COVID—after 2.5 years, nearly everyone in the U.S. has had COVID—public health bureaucracies like the CDC have not repudiated the strategy. Imagine the early days of the next pandemic, with public health and the media fomenting fear of a new pathogen. The impetus to close schools, businesses, churches, beaches, and parks will be irresistible, though the pitch will be “130 days until the vax” rather than “two weeks to flatten the curve.”'

It should be remembered that these programs so decried by the Right were initiated by Trump.

Sunday/Free Will

[Foreign aid is] “an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.” ― Lord Peter Bauer

***

There is a parliamentary investigation linking slavery opponent Edmund Burke to slavery through his Caribbean plantation-owning brother. Error used to be a fault. Now it's infective. Or genetic. Or geographic. But one thing is sure, it's not personal

***

A subtler truth is that a lot of the cheating will be modest and marginal rather than blatant. Consider computer cheating in chess. If you find a way to consult the computer every move, you will win every game with near-perfect play. You will also be caught immediately. So you might cheat for only a few moves every game — enough to help but not so much to be detected. Given that both sides will employ countermeasures, and detect suspicious instances of clearly superior performance, a lot of cheating will be pretty mediocre, and deliberately so.

As decisive moments approach, games and competitions might become less honest — and tensions in the crowd will rise as people wonder whether they are watching the real thing or some AI-aided simulacrum. Brilliancies will forever be called into question. Dishonest players, in turn, will have to carefully consider when to exercise their de facto “cheating privileges.”

***

Foucault argued that children could give sexual consent. In 1977, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and other intellectuals, Foucault signed a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalization of all "consensual" sexual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen, the age of consent in France.

Intellectuals.

***

Sunday/Free Will

Eve's Question regarding free will in "Paradise Lost" is, "Can anyone unequal be free?" Her question is one that challenges hierarchy and appears on every page of Milton's epic. 

Milton, a Puritan, was asking if politics is moral.

Notions of freedom held by most classical liberals are generally regarded by modern political scientists as negative in that freedom was defined as the absence of coercion by individuals against one another. This is the freedom of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and Jefferson.

But in the 1800s, there was a profound, and influential, new approach.

The concept of freedom associated with what most people in Britain and America today call liberalism is often attributed by political scientists to the Hegelian philosopher T. H. Green (1836–1882). Appalled by abject poverty, unsanitary living conditions, and growing alcoholism among Britain’s industrial working class, Green challenged the classical-liberal concept of freedom in his speech “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract” (1881), wherein he coined the terms negative freedom and positive freedom and defined the latter as “a power which each man exercises through the help or security given him by his fellow-men, and which he, in turn, helps to secure for them.” 

So Green transformed liberty into a collective condition and thus created a semantic nexus between modern liberalism and socialism. As Hayek observed in Constitution of Liberty (1960), “This confusion of liberty as power with liberty in its original meaning inevitably leads to the identification of liberty with wealth; and this makes it possible to exploit all the appeal which the word ‘liberty’ carries in the support for a demand for the redistribution of wealth.”

So is individual freedom possible without material equality? And can material equality be created and enforced without restricting freedom? Milton wrote pamphlets justifying regicide and had great faith in the uninfluenced individual. But that was early in his life. He eventually lost faith in individual decision and supported government run by more and more concentrated elites.

The rigidly moral Milton came to believe it was better to serve on Earth, especially if he could rule.

Equity Markets

The omnicompetence assumed in a policy science is regularly accompanied by a lack of ethical reflection. I ask, Where do you get off, Ms. Economist, in thinking that you are qualified in science or entitled in justice to “nudge” liberated adults?--McCloskey

***

Income inequality has declined. Are the poor happier or better off now that the rich are less rich?

***

Students in Beijing protest via equations, holding up papers with math equations, usually the Friedman equation.

Translations:

1. They can't use words, so they use equations instead.
2. Friedman = "Freed man"
3. It's a statement about reason and truth. Math is irrefutable. Reality is what it is, no matter what you say about it. No matter what the government says about it.

Cross-cultural punning in different languages? Maybe.

***

This is interesting.

Violent clashes took place in Belgium after the Morocco-Belgium football match during the World Cup in Qatar.

Riots took place in Brussels, Antwerp and Liege, where a police station was attacked by about 50 "youths", and also in several cities in the Netherlands. Beyond these incidents, the popular jubilation in the predominantly Moroccan neighborhoods of Brussels, especially in Molenbeek, revealed that in these areas, the Moroccan identity has remained much stronger than the Belgian one, even though most of the inhabitants have dual nationality.

***

Equity Markets

Consider three major global equity markets: China, India, and the US. Of the three, would you believe India has been the second-best performer over the past 30 years, well ahead of China? It’s true.

And look at the S&P.

Qatar

A]bout 830, the Hindu numerals entered Eastern Islam, at about 1000 Gerbert brought them to France; in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew mathematics streamed into Western Europe through Spain and Sicily, and came with Italian merchants to Venice and Genoa, Amalfi and Pisa. Transmission is to civilization what reproduction is to life.--Durant

***

In 2021, there were 5,981 unruly passenger reports, and the FAA proposed $5 million in fines against unruly passengers last year, according to the administration.
Last year, 1,099 investigations were initiated, a large increase from 2020, when there were 183 investigations into unruly passenger incidents.
This year, there have been 2,178 reports of unruly passengers, as of Nov. 1.

***

At least six Russian military aircraft have crashed since September due to what appear to be internal malfunctions.

***

"Unless we manage to reduce energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably," VW's CEO Thomas Schäfer wrote in a Monday LinkedIn post, "investments in energy-intensive production or new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically unviable."

***

Qatar

Smaller in total area than Connecticut and with fewer people than Kansas, Qatar is easily dwarfed by the 17 countries to previously host the World Cup. There are nearly 3 million people in the country, but only 300,000 of those are Qatari citizens. The rest are expatriates hailing from the likes of Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, all imported laborers.

Qatar spent 12 years building around $220 billion worth of new infrastructure, including stadiums for the tournament and an underground metro. The eight stadiums hosting matches are all within a 35-mile radius of Doha, situated in and around the capital city.

A report published last year by The Guardian found that 6,500 of those workers had died since the country was selected in 2010 to host the tournament.

“Everything is new,” said The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal, who is staying in an apartment with Tenorio outside of Doha. The ground floor of the apartment building features a Kentucky Fried Chicken and Krispy Kreme, both of which just opened. “It feels sort of like a country that’s being unboxed for a World Cup,” Stejskal said.

Organizers have imposed restrictions on where and what media outlets can document, prohibiting filming or photography of residential properties, private businesses, and government facilities. The government’s hardline posture has already led to incidents. Last week Qatari security officials interrupted a Danish television crew’s live shot on the streets of Doha and threatened to break their camera equipment; organizers for the World Cup later apologized and said it was a mistake.

“There’s a genuine hostility between media, fans, and host nation that I’ve never known before,” said Ronay, who is covering his third men’s World Cup this year. 

--Barney Ronay, the chief sports writer for The Guardian

“Sports and the geopolitical power of these tournaments are indivisible. This is a tournament that was brought here for the glorification of a very tiny, very wealthy nation-state that has preoccupations with its standing in the world. That’s why we’re here. There is not a chance we would be here if not for the politics of sport.”--Wallace