Some Reflections on 2023

 

Some Reflections on 2023

The quality of football is dangerously low.

The Amendment 14 attack on Trump's candidacy in Colorado--and the crazier one in Maine--reveals a truth about government: It will deny its very nature to advance itself, even if that advancement is, on its face, shameless and stupid.

In a similar vein, individuals who see themselves as visionaries, moral advocates, and righteous will subvert law and commonsense to achieve their aims.

No one believes Joe Biden is conceiving and developing the massive government programs and policies his administration has presented over the last years. America has a shadow government, unelected and organized, that develops policies that proceed, gradually and inevitably, toward an agreed-upon end.

Democracies are inherently unstable. Given enough time, they will vilify even their best and brightest, undermining their history, and call into question their present.

Human qualities: Faith. Hope. Charity. The greatest is charity, the commonest is hope. But, in motivation, the strongest is fear.

Pro-Hamas demonstrators are following a long tradition of importing outside problems to the U.S. and making them domestic. They're like the anarchists of the late 1800s who, once here, could not find a target that reminded them of home. And, as they are never arrested, we don't get a chance to know them, their numbers, or their sponsors.

Science, like democracy, is very poorly understood by the public.

The election of Trump and Biden should carve in stone the basic American idea that government is dangerous and needs constitutional structure and limits. Both men have needed supervision in office by people the voters did not choose.

America is not a melting pot of culture. This basic, difficult concept is more important now than ever.

The current culture is obsessed with acceptance and so will drive the peripheral to the center. For example, gender dysphoria in women is 1/5th as common as dwarfism, yet these unfortunate outliers have become quotidian.

Hierarchies are never expunged, they are always replaced by another hierarchy. 

Anyone who knows anyone with a genetic defect or severe illness knows the truth: equality is a philosophical concept--spiritual or political--not a quality of life.

The debate over the behavior of the head of Harvard is clear. She is in the wrong. But she is isolated from both judgment and responsibility, as all elites are. That is to say, she is immune to self-criticism.

Capitalism is not a philosophy, it is the awkward outgrowth of the commercial behavior of a free people. Thus the attack on capitalism requires a subversion of the liberty that made it possible.

Coal use is up globally. Some people are taking the CO2 problem of the world less seriously than others.

The border problem is astonishing as it is clearly dangerous, a signal of significant failure, and is certain to cause a severe crisis that will have to be managed with great sadness and pain. Perhaps a modern metaphor. Like Social Security. Like the deficit. Delaying today what you can put off for others to do.

Has anyone told the developing nations the sacrifices they will have to make with the forced substitution of expensive, unavailable energy sources for cheap, available ones?
 

A disparity is the result of a hierarchy. It is rarely personal.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have stated publically that the Constitution should be ignored in certain circumstances. This is who they are, their uniting credo.

Wanting what someone else has earned is envy. Anger over the success of others is jealousy, what Middle Ages philosophers called 'sadness.'

Is disparity bad if, nonetheless, all boats are raised? We'll see with baseball.

 

Hogmanay

With Trubisky's tenure in Pittsburgh not panning out as expected, there may be an opportunity for McSorley (from Penn State) to ascend from the practice squad and secure a spot as the third quarterback on the depth chart. --from a Steeler site

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 several 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.

Roatán

Japan and U.S. Steel:

Claims that the deal is a threat to national security aren’t convincing either. Opponents on Capitol Hill are urging Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to use the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or Cfius, to block the sale. This doesn’t make sense. Japan, unlike China, is an important American ally. Earlier this month, the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recommended that Congress put Japan on the Cfius “whitelist” of close allies. Countries already on the list include Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. Being on this list exempts qualifying investors from Cfius jurisdiction over noncontrolling transactions, real-estate transactions, and mandatory filing requirements.--Chou

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In an age of artificial intelligence, they [teachers] are creating artificial stupidity. --Sowell

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Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager and Harvard megadonor who has led calls for her ouster, said he was told that the search committee that chose Ms. Gay “would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria,” using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. There is little reason to doubt him.--Riley in wsj

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Roatán 

Roatán is an island just off the coast of Honduras. It is typical of those places of a great divide: luxury and staggering poverty.

Medical tourists are coming to the island to receive a homegrown gene therapy made by Minicircle Inc., a small US startup. The therapy, delivered via injection using plasmids, turbocharges the body’s production of follistatin, a protein that helps manage production of other proteins and hormones. The company’s founders say the therapy can reduce inflammation throughout the body, increase muscle mass and bone density, extend exercise endurance and improve hair and skin. It is, according to Minicircle, “the holy grail of muscle, bone and fat” and one of humanity’s best hopes for “extreme longevity.”

Minicircle—backed by the venture capital billionaire Peter Thiel, OpenAI Inc. co-founder Sam Altman and other technologists—is an uncontrolled experiment. The company is based in Austin but works out of Roatán because Honduras granted the island considerable regulatory freedom when it comes to technological and scientific ventures.

The follistatin is meant to subdue another protein— myostatin—which tempers muscle growth. Studies of mice have shown that damping myostatin production results in much beefier, longer-living rodents.

The follistatin therapy is the first in a series of products Minicircle plans to roll out, including therapies for DNA repair and tissue rejuvenation.

The project is localized at Las Verandas, a vast resort with white villas, palm trees, and a pair of infinity pools overlooking the endless turquoise ocean. It is one of the main hubs of Próspera, a city-building project that made Johnson’s gene therapy adventure possible. The backstory is strange: About a decade ago the Honduras government approved the creation of a handful of special economic zones that, while governed by Honduran criminal law, could have more latitude to create their own economic, political and civil law systems. The country hoped to give rise to its own Shenzhen or Dubai, which were established almost as city-states with singular business philosophies. The financial backers of these projects are unknown.

Crystallizing

Fox News reported this week that during the four-day Christmas weekend, there were more than 35,000 migrant encounters. Since Dec. 1, there have been over 250,000 migrant encounters at the southern border -- meaning December could break the monthly record for encounters set in September (269,735).

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An inspection of Waterworks Cinema on Freeport Road found an active pest infestation inside the complex.

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A paper argues that identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.


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Crystallizing 

We--or maybe "I"-- may be underestimating the impact of computer learning. Computing gives more than answers, it develops platforms for further investigation. The following is from a paper on crystals, an astonishing insight into the potential of the technology. And, secondarily, the potential--and risk--of having such information generally available.

(From a release published online explaining the recent results of a new research tool.)

"Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.

With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.

GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.

We’ve made GNoME’s predictions available to the research community. We will be contributing 380,000 materials that we predict to be stable to the Materials Project, which is now processing the compounds and adding them into its online database. We hope these resources will drive forward research into inorganic crystals, and unlock the promise of machine learning tools as guides for experimentation."

And a more complex view of Christmas

Georgia Taxpayers Lose $160,000 for Every Job Created by Film Tax Credits.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on a Los Angeles low‐​income project, Lorena Plaza, that has taken 17 years to complete because of neighborhood opposition, lawsuits, and zoning and environmental rules. The Plaza’s 49 units are costing $34.2 million to build, or about $700,000 each.

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Now, as Professor Mises has emphasised, given central ownership and control of the means of production, the registering of individual pulls and and resistances by a mechanism of prices and costs is excluded by definition. It follows therefore that the decisions of the executive must necessarily be “arbitrary.” That is to say, they must be based on its valuations – not on the valuations of consumers and producers. This at once simplifies the form of choice. Without the guidance of a price system, the organisation of production must depend on the valuations of the final organiser.--Robbins

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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

Stupidity in Plain Sight

Japan's SLIM space probe entered the moon's orbit on Monday in a major step towards the country's first successful lunar landing, expected next month.
If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully landed a probe on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China, and India.

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Two men were shot outside of a GetGo near the Edgewood Towne Center overnight. It happened just before 3:30 a.m. Sunday off Braddock Avenue. One victim was hospitalized in stable condition, and the other was last listed in critical condition.

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In our analog world, where everything is put on a fluid spectrum, why is nationalism on single binary default?

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Stupidity in Plain Sight

Kamala Harris, our Czar of Artificial Intelligence, at the Essence Festival of Culture:

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment.
And we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy, because as you know, it comes in the morning.
We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too."

One heartbeat away--and miles away from criticism. That this nonsense is tolerated implies very low standards in the political culture and its observers--and the possibility that they just are not very good at what they do. Can you imagine this woman negotiating with the Israelis or the Iranians?

Christmas

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.

Virginia

New York City Mayor Eric Adams reportedly carried 293 "special assistants" on the over-burdened city payroll during his first fiscal year in office, the New York Post reported. The aides, who were listed under vague titles, made up about one-third of the Mayor's Office, costing taxpayers $24.3 million, according to payroll records reviewed by the newspaper.

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According to Anthony de Jasay the word “fair” (and its derivatives) exists only in English “and has not even remote foreign equivalents.” In de Jasay’s view, “fair” is an empty and chameleonic word that means “nice” and has served mainly to corrupt “justice” into “social justice.” In a classical liberal perspective and in de Jasay’s anarchism, justice lies in voluntary contracts and interactions.

Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

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So many things are easy to say. "Justice now." "End war now!"

“To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.” --Biden

So, how will that nonviolent pacification be done? How will the cat be belled?

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From the First Things First Department:

A group of House lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest made public a court-approved confidential mediation between the Biden administration and environmental groups pushing to remove four hydroelectric dams in Washington to protect salmon. Salmon.

The document, which has yet to be made public, was drafted on Nov. 2 as part of an agreement in which activist groups agreed to pause their litigation against the federal government. The groups have argued in favor of breaching the four federally managed dams amid declining salmon populations in the lower Snake River, which winds through Idaho and Washington before feeding into the Columbia River and then into the Pacific Ocean.

I wonder what they were promised.

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Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

Centralized Repurposing

It was [in the late 1930s] a little-known oddity of American life that the United States, unlike other nations, actually had no “national” holidays established by law. Under the federal system the legalizing of holidays had been left to the states.

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In fact, however, a reasonable consensus of experts on NPOs [non-profit organizations] agrees that their governance is generally abysmal, worse than that of for-profit corporations. NPO directors are mostly ill-informed, quarrelsome, clueless about their proper role, and dominated by the CEO — as proponents of shareholder primacy would predict.--a paper

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Inequalities between human beings in general, in the West, have increased at the same rate as the decrease in inequalities between men and women. This paper implies the rise of women's influence has paralleled anti-collectivism, which they champion.

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Centralized Repurposing

The Biden administration last month began laying the groundwork for a misguided plan that threatens to misallocate vast amounts of capital, encumber natural resources, and destroy rural economies by removing land from productive use in the name of solving climate change.

On Sept. 27, the New York Stock Exchange quietly submitted a substantial and financially material proposed change to its rules. The proposal would allow the formation of a new type of company. Natural Asset Companies, or NACs, would purchase the rights to control public and private lands, such as parks, forests and farms. But a NAC wouldn’t be able to put the land to economic use. Instead, it would preserve its acquisitions to maximize the value of the land’s “ecological services.”

NACs would register to go public on the NYSE. The money raised would purchase land and effectively lock it away from human impact. Grazing, energy extraction and other economically critical activities would disappear on NAC-protected land. Farmland used to feed the nation and world would go back to natural landscape, erasing human activity. The resulting conversion of investor money into unusable wildlands has the potential to be one of the most significant misallocations of capital in history.

Normally, corporations are formed for investors to make money. But since NACs are clearly noneconomic, a rule is required to allow their formation. The land placed in a NAC, a private entity, must support only “replenishable” activities. Since no economic activity can occur, the property is assigned an arbitrary value and traded on that basis. In any other situation, this proposal would be identified as sanctioning fraud.--oaks

And so the unelected Left's war against productivity inches along in always innovative ways toward its grim, hungry, and cold utopia.

Fighting Inequality

A student opened fire Thursday at a university in Prague, killing at least 14 people, officials said, and injuring more than 20 in the Czech Republic’s worst mass shooting.

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Police in Alabama arrested Crimson Tide offensive lineman Elijah Pritchett on Wednesday for allegedly knowingly passing on a sexually transmitted disease.

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United Launch Alliance received buyout bids from Blue Origin, the space-exploration company owned by Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos, and Cerberus, the private-equity firm led by billionaire Stephen Feinberg, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. ULA is jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and had dominated rocket launches for the U.S. ULA has faced delays in the development of its new rocket named Vulcan Centaur, which will carry Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander in its first launch in January. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine powers the spacecraft's first stage. 

In recent years, ULA's launch dominance has first been challenged and then supplanted by the rise of SpaceX and its less expensive and highly reliable Falcon 9 rocket. ULA has developed the large Vulcan rocket, which is intended to be more cost-competitive with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles while also ending ULA's dependence on Russian-made rocket engines. The Vulcan launcher uses the BE-4 rocket engine manufactured by Blue Origin.

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Less than half the employees in the U.S. public education are teachers.

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Fighting Inequality

There are some new distortions that recent studies have exposed the demon inequity in the American culture, specifically in scholastic and demographic analysis.

First, the Chicago school system produces very different results depending on the school attended. Its charter system--which has to be tested into--produces better students with higher scholastic achievement, testing, and progression to higher education and better earnings than the regular public system. Different outcomes. Bias.

Secondly, the children of married parents with two-parent households outperform other children in education accomplishment and advancement--and eventual earnings.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has recognized this education disparity and vowed to stop it and restore "equity" by moving to end the selective enrollment process at Chicago schools. This will create a more homogeneous education experience and eliminate the distortions that develop in such a biased system.

This blow for equity could be applied elsewhere, like the marriage bias. There is, without doubt, better academic performance in households with two parents. An obvious solution is to eliminate it by randomizing the children among married and unmarried families or, more efficiently and less bureaucratically, outlawing marriage and two-parent households altogether.

AI and Your Government

Interest rates in Turkey are 46%.

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Astrobotic announced this week that its Peregrine lunar lander will launch on Jan. 8, 2024. The Pittsburgh company said the lander completed all integration milestones and was mated with United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket payload adapter in November.

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It only took three hours for Shen Yang, a professor at the Beijing-based university’s School of Journalism and Communication, to generate the award-winning submission to a sci-fi writing contest.

The Chinese-language work, entitled The Land of Machine Memories, won second prize at the 5th Jiangsu Popular Science and Science Fiction Competition.

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The Trump ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court should clarify the risks in government that the Founders recognized and hedged against. Its lesson has nothing to do with the aims of the decision. Rather it shows that people are willing to sacrifice the ideals and ethical structure of the nation to realize their own desires. There is no willingness to sacrifice one's ambitions for the greater good or the nation's integrity.

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AI and Your Government

The Biden administration is up to date. They want to monitor and control AI, something everyone knows is a threat. As if people were not involved. 

So Biden has responded. He has signed an Executive Order to save us from AI. Of course, it's important how this rescue is going to occur. They are going to make requirements of how the dreaded AI will behave. 

Essential to good AI is that the demand for 'equity' be incorporated into its innards. So AI allows the government to make policies that could go on forever.

The government order demands that AI act like ...the government.

The web of anti-terrorism

In roughly the same decade-long period of the cancel culture counterpart, that number is 200—almost double the number of people who were fired during the Red Scare. This is historically unprecedented. Historians will be looking back someday, recognizing that firing 200 professors, many of whom were actually tenured, is shocking. 91% of professors say that they self-censor, which is shocking to me. 16% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and 7% say that they've been investigated for their speech.--schlott

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Hamas killed 31 Americans that we know about. That death toll of Americans on the October 7 massacre ranks as the eighth-highest death toll of any terrorist attack against Americans — more dead Americans than the Fort Hood shooting, the San Bernardino attack, or the Pittsburgh synagogue attack.

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A former FBI counterintelligence chief who played a pivotal role in launching the Trump-Russia probe was sentenced to just over four years in prison for assisting a sanctioned Russian oligarch after leaving his post in 2019.

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The web of anti-terrorism


An alleged plot to attack Jews in Brazil has been foiled following the arrest of two men suspected of being linked to the Islamist group Hezbollah.

The arrests were made in São Paulo on Wednesday during what police said was an operation to "disrupt the preparation of terrorist attacks".

Brazilian authorities added other raids were carried out across the country.

The Israeli Prime Minister's office said its spy agency Mossad worked with Brazilian law enforcement.

So an Israeli Special Forces unit was running a Brazilian police crime operation?

Visions and Hallucinations

The flaw in the official poverty measure is that it doesn’t count most government subsidies, such as Treasury checks beneficiaries receive from refundable tax credits, debit cards loaded with food-stamp allowances, and Medicaid payments as income to the recipients. When all benefits are counted, the percentage of Americans living in poverty falls to only 2.5%.

So, why would the government want to increase the appearance of poverty in the country?

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At least eight cities—including Chicago, Newark, N.J., San Diego, and St. Paul, Minn.—are using leftover Covid relief money to finance guaranteed income experiments.

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There is a notion that the problem in Israel will be solved if everyone went back to where they came from. One observation was that the estimated 16 million descendants of Genghis Khan—who are now genetically identifiable—will have to “go back where they belong” and live among the current 3.3 million residents of Mongolia.

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Visions and Hallucinations

“Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down—even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt—it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned, imploring them to “giv[e] the American consumer a break.”

So inflation is caused by price gouging.

If this were sincere it would fall somewhere between whipping the rebellious ocean waters and sentencing gravity for the deaths in a plane crash.

But it is not sincere. Even Biden is not that dumb or impaired. This is mendacity, plain and simple. And lying is so commonplace and routine, it is becoming exhausting. People don't even respond to it anymore.

A Christmas Story

President Joe Biden was safe on Sunday night after a car collided with a motorcade SUV that was part of the president's security detail, a Reuters witness said.

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According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Councilman Bruce Kraus and Councilwoman Erika Strassburger have teamed up on bills to ban the production and sale of fur-related items in the city and the sale of foie gras, while Kraus has introduced his own bill to ban horse carriages.

Sometime in the darkest night, a bright light of optimism will shine.

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday that he could help fix the out-of-control migrant crisis if he was the one sitting in the White House.

Speaking of bright lights...

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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?

Fathers Day

Shohei Ohtani on Saturday announced that he will leave the Angels and join the Los Angeles Dodgers; he will sign a contract of $700 million over 10 years. The 29-year-old Japanese star established himself as a modern-day Babe Ruth. He can pitch, he can hit, and he does both at an elite standard at the highest level of the game. Ohtani, a two-time American League MVP, hit 44 home runs in 2023, while also making 23 starts as a pitcher until his season was cut short by an elbow injury. The injury will keep him off the mound for at least the 2024 season, but he is expected to be the designated hitter while his elbow heals throughout the year.

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chimerize

MEANING:
verb tr.: To form something from parts that are very different.

ETYMOLOGY:
After Chimera, a fire-breathing female monster in Greek mythology who had a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. From Greek khimaira (she-goat), ultimately from the Indo-European root ghei- (winter), which also gave us chimera (literally, a female animal that is one winter or one year old), hibernate, and the Himalayas, from Sanskrit him (snow) + alaya (abode). Earliest documented use: 1651.

Also: chimera

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There are said to be 600,000 homeless in the U.S., 37% Black, 27% Hispanic, 90% men

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Fathers Day

The world of gambling often gives fascinating insights into human beings, a mix of the heart and 'analytics.'

One area I think would be worth looking into is hockey's 'Dads' Week' where the team members' fathers travel with the team for a while. There's usually an anchor home game and then the fathers follow the team to several away games, stay and eat with the team, and have their own section in the away arena.

I have not been able to find much info on these trips and how the sons do but the Golden Knights(Vegas!) are 9-0-1 on Father's Night. And the struggling Pens are 2-0 this week. (Just ignore last night's disaster.)

A new betting indicator!

Intermarriage

Ketamine appears to have killed Matthew Perry. It is used mainly in hospital as an anesthetic. It has several hours of activity. It is also used in lower doses for depression and pain. It is used illegally as a hallucinogenic. It is a cardiac stimulant and respiratory depressant. Perry's dose was more than therapeutic and was clearly not given under supervision, especially when he was taking a therapeutic narcotic antagonist which would exaggerate the respiratory suppression of the ketamine.

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Germany may have to wage a defensive war against Russia in the future, German television news program Tagesschau reported on Dec. 9, citing Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) Inspector General Carsten Breuer.
Breuer expressed concern about Russia's rearmament and the behavior of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, saying there will be no return to the times before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Germany will have to get used to the idea "that one day we might have to fight a defensive war," he said.

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The X-37B is a spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall, with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose— it looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle — is the Pentagon’s most mysterious spacecraft.

Intermarriage

Intermarriage in the U.S. is surprisingly hard to review. The topic interests me because of the high number of interracial couples that appear in television ads.

Whites make up 75.5% of the population, Hispanic and Latino 19.1%, Blacks 13.6%, Asian 6.3%

In 2019, 11% of all married U.S. adults had a spouse who was a different race or ethnicity from them, up from 3% in 1967. About 31% of married same-sex couples were interracial in 2022, much higher than the 19% of married opposite-sex couples that were interracial.

As of 2015, the largest share of intermarried couples includes one Hispanic and one White spouse. Some 15% are White and Asian, 12% are White and multiracial and 11% are White and Black.

That means that White-Black marriages would be 11% of the 19% interracial marriages plus, perhaps, 12% (multiracial) of the 19%--or a little over 4%. 

These are older numbers, mix the older and newly married, and do not include cohabitation so they may not be very accurate but they are lower than I expected, especially since the idea of advertising is to create identification between the audience and the ad.

Murph

Murph

Yesterday's notebook entry had already been written when I came across reports of the chaos in the administration that bothered me so much that I rewrote the blog and saved the blog I had planned to send.

In that blog was this line: Everyone should wear black armbands. On this day in 1799, George Washington died on his Mount Vernon estate.
I was going to rewrite that for today when another event occurred: early this morning our extraordinary family dog, Murphy--who can only be described as Chris' companion--died. He was a sweet, loving guy and had a small life well worth celebrating for how giving he was and for the warmth those around him, especially Chris, provided him. This gave him a soulful glow that warmed even strangers. His was a life that joined, inextricably, with others.

Loss is always painful, and should be. It is a measure of the original, living attachment, and if tight, like a string instrument, is more tuned, beautiful, and meaningful.

Loss, of course, has a hierarchy. It is a function of give and take. A drachma is only a drachma. And Washington, perhaps one of modernity's most important men, has tremendous significance in our minds--but not our hearts. And it is in our hearts where life lives and flourishes.

Lives should not just collide with other lives. Each life, if meaningful, should merge and change the other, creating an alloy that continues on.

Such a life is immortal.

Feckless

Feckless

I had a little story on hockey betting planned for this morning when I came across these three very lightly-covered stories.

--White House interns have written a letter that "demands" Biden support a ceasefire in the Israeli war. ("We, the undersigned Fall 2023 White House and Executive Office of the President interns, will no longer remain silent on the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. We are Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Black, Asian, Latine, White, and Queer. We heed the voices of the American people and call on the Administration to demand a permanent cease-fire. We are not the decision makers of today, but we aspire to be the leaders of tomorrow, and we will never forget how the pleas of the American people have been heard and thus far, ignored.")

--White House staffers held a White House candlelight vigil supporting Hamas.

--The State Department has embargoed rifles the U.S. had planned to send to Israeli police.


The strange preoccupation with making war more gentle aside, what are we to make of this public administrative chaos? The administration is supposed to effect policy; we clearly don't have a policy. We have public statements and actions that disagree with them. It would be one thing if this ineffectual behavior was in a foolish city council meeting but this is the public face of the world's leading democracy.

What if watching illegal immigrants pour across the border is the policy. What if opening doors for people robbing stores is the reflection of their beliefs. What if saying and doing contradicting things is what they are.

What if this is the best they can do. And, if so, imagine how this reflects upon their other lofty publicly stated aims.

Meat

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere has barely started, and already more of the European Continent is under snow cover as of the first week of December than in any year for more than a decade. Many members of the planetary emergency rescue elite on their way to the summit were stranded in Munich, where a snowstorm dumped 17 inches of the white stuff and canceled most outbound flights. 

Good thing COP28 was held in Dubai.

***

The Constitution divided power in large part to protect propertied people from the predations of the masses or a dictator. This vigorous protection of property not only encouraged entrepreneurialism at home, because people had a reasonable certainty of keeping their gains, it also encouraged foreign investors to put their money in America on the grounds that they wouldn’t see their capital stolen and their contractual rights ignored.--Greenspan

Think of this when you see Moore v. U.S.

***

Once you understand this, the rational way to consume news is to constantly ask yourself questions like: “In a well-functioning society of 8 billion people, how much bad stuff would be reported anyway?” I never sympathized with BLM, but when I learned that the total number of unarmed blacks fatally shot by U.S. police in 2019 was 14, even I was astounded by BLM innumeracy. Hundreds of kids drown in U.S. swimming pools every year, but there will never be riots about that. Nor should there be.--Caplan

***


Meat

Why do so many significantly revolutionary ideas have such difficulty getting traction? Usually, it's from a collision with the practical. Here's a piece on the anti-meat clique.

Transitioning from pandemic-era policies to a more typical economic environment, firms again need strong business fundamentals to survive in a competitive landscape.

Among the casualties are a growing number of plant-based meat substitute companies that initially garnered substantial investor interest but have since grappled with low and diminishing consumer demand. In June of this year, UK-based Meatless Farm shut its doors not long after Heck, a maker of meatless sausages, announced that it would substantially reduce its consumer offerings. Nestlé-owned Garden Gourmet also pulled its vegan offerings from UK shops in March 2023. Canada’s Very Good Food Company, a vegan food producer which soared 800 percent on the day of its public offering in 2020, recently collapsed after revealing it had never been profitable.

By far the biggest turnabout has occurred in the most prominent plant-meat substitute enterprise, Beyond Meats. The corporate flagship of the sector conducted its IPO in May 2019 priced at $25 per share, opening at $46 and rising to as high as $72 on its first day of trading. By July 2019 the stock price briefly surpassed $230 per share, spiking above $150 per share several times during the pandemic. But since mid-2021, the stock price fell from over $100 to recently close below $6. For six consecutive quarters, the company has reported negative sales growth amid not only a loss of market share but a contraction in the size of the fake meat market. Nearly one-fifth of the firm’s non-production workforce was laid off early in November 2023. Financial analysts have characterized the firm as in survival mode, with its financial deterioration bringing about a “going concern” risk.--from AIER

Buffett and the Money Supply

The U.S. is subsidizing 1/3 of the government costs of Ukraine. That includes teachers and pensions.

***

Debt costs as a share of total outlays over the next 30 years 

***

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a lawsuit against Meathead Movers for alleged age discrimination.
In a new release announcing the suit, the EEOC alleged that “since at least 2017, Meathead Movers failed to recruit and hire applicants over 40 into moving, packing and customer service positions. Meathead maintains a pattern or practice of recruiting and hiring young college students, intentionally excluding older workers regardless of their individual abilities.”

Interestingly, there was no complaint; the agency generated the case themselves.

***

Buffett and the Money Supply

Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway sold $28.7 billion of stock in the first three quarters of 2023. Buffett's and Berkshire Hathaway's recent lightening up on stocks and accumulating a pile of cash—$157 billion.

Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University who served on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, said, "The money supply of the United States, broadly measured [M2], started contracting in July 2022, and has been falling like a stone. Since last year, the U.S. money supply has contracted by 3.3 percent."

According to Hanke, there have been only four periods in U.S. history—in 1920-21, 1929-33, 1937-38 and 1948-49—in which the money supply has had significant contractions.

"Each of those four episodes was followed by a serious recession," he said. "The current monetary contraction is clearly going to lead to precisely what monetary contractions always lead to: a recession."

Official Poverty

The Telegraph is being taken over by Abu Dhabi. Does that make it a state outlet?

***

Levy, the French philosopher, has a film on Ukraine. He says the Ukranians see themselves as "the Sentinals" of the West.

***

In the first month, Israel has dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs.

***


Official Poverty

The official poverty measure doesn’t count most government subsidies, such as Treasury checks beneficiaries receive from refundable tax credits, debit cards loaded with food-stamp allowances, and Medicaid payments as income to the recipients. 

Why would that be?

When all benefits are counted, the percentage of Americans living in poverty falls to only 2.5%. Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame arrived at a similar figure by comparing the actual goods and services consumed by poor households in 1980 with the actual level of consumption of households that were being counted as poor in 2017. They found that only 2.8% of households in 2017 were consuming at or below the actual poverty consumption level. 

These findings also agree with the Census American Housing Survey, which has found that 42% of poor households own homes with an average of three bedrooms, 1½ bathrooms, a garage and a porch or patio. The average poor American family lives in a home larger than the average home of middle-income families in France, Germany and the U.K., and 80% of poor American households have air conditioning.

For those who are healthy, "Poor" in this country no longer means "impoverished;" its meaning is closer to "less than someone else."

Liberal

Pirates’ opening-day payroll was just $46.9 million at the start of last season, according to Cot’s Contracts. That was the second-lowest figure in the major leagues behind the Oakland Athletics at $33.9 million.

***

A white female student at the University of Virginia was accused by a black student activist of telling Black Lives Matter protesters that they would “make good speed bumps.” The accused, Morgan Bettinger, faced disciplinary charges for threatening other students’ “health and safety.” She was ultimately expelled in abeyance—even though two separate investigations, one by students and one by the campus civil rights office, concluded there was no evidence she had actually made the offensive comment.--camp

***

In Moore v. U.S., the justices focused on the question of whether the 16th Amendment’s authorization of “income” taxes allows for the taxing of unrealized gains. It has long been understood that income taxes apply only to realized gains—those that have been actually received by the taxpayer, or effectively so such that the taxpayer has control over the funds, which is called “constructive realization.” This is a seriously destructive idea, dangerous to investment and the economy. But success will always be the enemy of some.

***

Liberal

An interesting topic and article:

“Liberal” from “Libertas” means, at bottom, freedom. In the 19th century, “liberals” were devoted to personal, economic, and increasing social freedom from government restraint. “Conservatives” wanted to maintain aristocratic privileges, and government interventions in the traditional way of doing things. The debate was not so obvious. Conservatives defended their view of aristocratic power in a noblesse-oblige concern for little people that the unfettered free market might leave behind, in a way quite reminiscent of today’s elites who think they should run the government in the name of the downtrodden (or “nudge” them, if I can poke a little fun at Sunstein’s earlier work).

But by the 1970s, the labels had flipped. “Liberals” were advocates of big-state interventionism, in a big tent that included communists and marxists. It became a synonym of “left.” “Conservatives” became a strange alliance of free market economics and social conservatism. The word “classical liberal” or “libertarian” started to be used to refer to heirs of the enlightenment “liberal” tradition, broadly emphasizing individual liberty and limited rule of law government in both economic and social spheres.

But broadly, “liberal” came to mean more government intervention and Democrat, while “conservative” came to mean less state intervention and Republican, at least in rhetoric.

But a new force has come to the fore. The heirs of the far-left marxists and communists are now, .. what shall we call them.. perhaps “censorious totalitarian progressives.” Sunstein calls them “post liberals.” The old alliance between center-left and far left is tearing apart, and Oct 7 was a wake up call for many who had skated over the division.-- Sunstein in, if you can believe it, the nyt

…..

Big Sandwich

South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018, to 0.8 after the pandemic, and now, in provisional data for both the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”--nyt

***

Results are consistent with the larger literature that finds “Across the developed world today, support for welfare, redistribution, and government provision of public goods is inversely correlated with the share of the population that is foreign-born and diverse.” (Nowrasteh and Forreseter 2020). Similarly, one explanation for the smaller US welfare state is that white-black salience reduces people’s interest in universal redistribution.

Contra Milton Friedman, it is possible to have open borders and a significant welfare state but it may be true that the demand for a welfare state declines with immigration, especially when the immigrants are saliently different.

***

An interesting project trying to understand what young people in the West understand about Socialism.

A quote: There’s also the question of what its 21st-century supporters actually mean by “socialism.” The traditional definition—government controlling the means of production—garners the least support among socialist supporters today who, instead, think of socialism as more government programs or even a guaranteed minimum income.

***


Big Sandwich

Some observations on the esteemed Sen. Elizabeth "Big Sandwich" Warren:

Elizabeth Warren's attack on America’s alleged “sandwich shop monopoly” scores new points for pettiness. It also shows just how broad (and therefore meaningless) the word “monopoly” has become in modern political discourse.

The FTC and the Senator will no doubt face a great deal of skepticism around the idea that Subway’s new owner can prevent competitor Jersey Mike’s from continuing to serve consumers. But there is a critical, logical point: how can any company exert monopoly control over a product that consumers easily make on their own? (culled from somewhere)

This silliness has no shame. And, like the testimony of the Ivy League presidents, it has a cult-like isolation and protection. All of those people thought they were making good points to Congress despite how insane it sounded. And so, too, with Big Sandwich.

Isolated, reinforced, uniform, hostile to opposition--these positions are as weak and inevitable as algae. The secret of their success is they are trivial and innocuous in small doses. And they never stop.

Atheism

It's weird watching Trump in court under the eye of the Secret Service.

***

The Biden administration has determined that it has the authority to seize the patents of certain high-priced medicines, a move that could open the door to a more aggressive federal campaign to slash drug prices.

***

On this day John Lennon was shot to death outside his Manhattan apartment building.

***

The pilot who tried to cut the engines on a flight has been released from jail. All better?

***



Atheism

John Gray answering the question "Hasn’t atheism become more theological than theology itself?"

No, not the kind of atheism I hold. But what you say is, of course, very true of many traditions of atheist thinking, perhaps even the dominant ones, because the dominant traditions of atheist thinking in Europe and America and elsewhere — remember, atheism in this sense is something that comes from within theism, from within monotheism — reproduce the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs. A lot of atheism is categories taken from theism but then turned upside down.

So, what you say is true of that, but my atheists I’m influenced by would include writers like Schopenhauer, who was an atheist and a pessimist, of course. And the key kind of atheism I attack in my new book — but I’ve been attacking for 20 or 30 years — is the one which attributes to the human species some of the characteristics that used to be attributed to the deity, to God. That’s to say they think that the human history is a narrative with some kind of built-in structure. Doesn’t necessarily produce inevitable results, but there is a providential move from ignorance to knowledge which has consistently greater benefits over time.

That seems to be a secularization of Christian and other ideas of divine providence in history. For me, there’s no providence of any kind in history. There’s no logic in history, although particular situations may have a logic of their own. But the logic, of course, may not be benign. It may be, to use your word, absurd. That’s to say, we may find human beings recurrently trapped in situations in which what they do is bound to produce results different from, or even opposite from, the ones they want. I think that is a recurring human situation.

There’s no logic like Hegel thought or Marx thought or even Mill thought, taking that idea from Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism. There’s no logic in which history develops through a series of successive stages to some higher and higher levels. There’s nothing like that. My atheism and the atheism of Schopenhauer or Samuel Beckett, or a number of other writers I could cite, isn’t the same as the theological atheism to which you refer, which, as I say, that’s been around for an awful long time. It’s not just recent.

Of course, you are right in another sense, which is that the highest, I would say the highest point of recent science, recent physics, might be a recognition that the world is finally unintelligible or absurd. But that, of course, is a view that an atheist like Samuel Beckett or Schopenhauer and I would endorse, too. There is a convergence in that sense, but it’s an anti-theological convergence, not a theological convergence.

A Pearl

Pearl Harbor Day. And, in 1988, an earthquake in Armenia killed an estimated 100,000 people

***

The woman attacked and killed by a shark while vacationing with her husband in the Bahamas was a University of Pittsburgh alumna.

***

The ambiguities voiced by the college presidents before Congress might be a bit more explainable with this little fact: Carnegie Mellon has received $750 million--MILLION--from Qatar. Arabic countries have given at least $8 billion to elite and Ivy League universities in America over the past few decades.

***



A Pearl

After Pearl Harbor, the country was terrified, especially along the West Coast. The proximity of the attack was exaggerated by the large presence of the American Japanese in California. Since there was no evidence of any Japanese-American involvement in the attack, the argument was made that the Japanese were lying low, waiting to pounce. 

Thus, the absence of something was proof it existed. 

Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible removal of Americans of Japanese descent from the Pacific coast, was signed by the liberal President Roosevelt in 1942. 120,000 American citizens--Americans--were moved out of their homes into squalid camps and ancient Indian reservations.

This is another example of a rule in politics that should caution anyone expecting government to do the right thing: "When the going gets tough, everyone loses their principles."

Conscription

Contrary to popular belief, just one-quarter of practicing physicians in the United States are members of the American Medical Association.

***

Income is simply compensation received in exchange for productive services supplied to others. People who earn large incomes provide others with lot of things that they value. If they did not, other people would not be willing to pay them so generously. There is a moral here. If you want to earn a large income, you had better figure out how to help others a great deal. The converse is also true. If you are unable and unwilling to help others very much, your income will be quite small.--Gwarthney (Kardashianism excepted)

***

Former Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop Cole Tucker has gotten married to Hollywood star Vanessa Hudgens and the couple is honeymooning in Mexico, according to multiple reports.

***

Conscription

Economists can apply their analysis to anything. With the new Napoleon film, they are reevaluating conscription. Conscription is more expensive than all-volunteer armies. Volunteers--soldiers who want to be there--are easier to train, are less prone to discipline costs, are better educated, and score higher on entrance exams.

Volunteers stay in the army longer. Often the draft takes men away from more productive wartime pursuits. And, of course, there is the economic injustice: drafted men work cheaper than volunteers.

And this point made by German economist Johann Heinrich von Thunen in 1850.

Here’s what he wrote:

'The reluctance to view a man as capital is especially ruinous of mankind in wartime; here capital is protected, but not man, and in time of war we have no hesitation in sacrificing one hundred men in the bloom of their years to save one cannon.

In a hundred men at least twenty times as much capital is lost as is lost in one cannon. But the production of the cannon is the cause of an expenditure of the state treasury, while human beings are again available for nothing by means of a simple conscription order. . . .

When the statement was made to Napoleon, the founder of the conscription system, that a planned operation would cost too many men, he replied: “[Ce n’est rein.] That is nothing. The women produce more of them than I can use.”'

Men as capital. Napoleon was an innovator.

Sinterklaas

A protester with a Palestinian flag self-immolated on Friday outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta, injuring a security guard who attempted to intervene, authorities said.

***

The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.

***
 
…the most significant destruction on the Korean Peninsula was wrought by the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Nearly two million Koreans, a staggering 20 percent of the population, perished during the Imjin Wars, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaigns of 1592-1598 to subjugate the Korean Peninsula. Hideyoshi’s object was the conquest of Ming China (1368-1644) but the result was to turn Korea into a ruined land.--meyer

***

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, 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:

  

Wind and Hot Air

Power is the natural monopoly of politics.

***

Sub-Saharan Africa's GDP per capita peaked in 2014, and since has fallen ~10%. On current trends, it would not retain the 2014 level until 2033, implying a second lost decade.--Blas

***

India, the second-largest sender of students to the United States, is fast catching up to China.

***

24% of consumers are still paying off their Christmas debt from 2022

***

Wind and Hot Air

Today’s installment in the endless epic about the exciting surprises involved in industrial policy concerns wind. Not the vagaries of its occurrences, but the predictable problems that are startling governments and their corporate accomplices as they attempt to harness wind to wean humanity away from less pristine means of generating electricity.

Your federal government is using taxpayers’ money to bribe, with various subsidies, automakers to make more electric vehicles than taxpayers want. So, the government is bribing taxpayers with their own money to buy EVs; the bribes are substantial because EVs typically cost more than other vehicles. Simultaneously, the government is using taxpayers’ money to drive a conversion to, among other renewable energy sources, wind-generated electricity, which potentially will increase taxpayers’ electricity bills.

What (else) could go wrong? New Jersey, which is controlled by Democrats and hence is enthusiastic about wind, is disappointed. The Danish company Orsted, the world’s biggest developer of offshore “wind farms,” was planning to build two of them off portions of the state’s 130 miles of Atlantic coastline. Orsted has changed its mind. It prefers a write-off of as much as $5.6 billion rather than proceed with the projects, which have become too expensive.

…..

Russia, Iran and Venezuela — among other unsavory actors — might reap a windfall from green energy policies. Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute notes that the Biden administration has proposed for the five years after 2024 just three sales in its offshore oil and gas leasing program, the smallest number in the program’s history. The plan would block additional leasing off Alaska and in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.--will