Tariffs and Trade

The Trump PAC has spent $40 million on legal costs this year.

***

...a President Burgum would not regard fighting it as part of his job description. He would be a presidential rarity, acknowledging the 10th Amendment. (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”) Cultural issues are, he says, irrelevant to presidential duties.--Will on wokeness

***

WOD

messiah: noun: A savior, liberator, or leader of a group or a cause

ETYMOLOGY: 

From Latin messias, from Greek messias, from Hebrew mashia (anointed), from Aramaic masiah (the anointed one). Ultimately from the Semitic root msh (to anoint), which also gave us massage and masseur. Earliest documented use: 450.

NOTES:
Someone anointed is one on whom a liquid is smeared, literally. The word anoint is from unguere (to smear), which also gave us ointment, unguent, and unctuous. In a religious context, the liquid is typically some plant-based oil applied to a person to consecrate them or make them sacred. In Christianity, the Messiah or the anointed one is Jesus Christ (from Greek christos: anointed).  

***

The death rate from COVID for those aged 0-19 years is 0.0003%.

A 1-in-333,333 chance of dying.

Tariffs and Trade

"There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.

From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farm workers instead of American auto workers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just the same for us if there really were a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles.
 
Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers—from other American workers."--David Friedman

So, if we make our own Hondas, will our grain exports decline?

Witches 2

The Left in the U.S. says the Supreme Court is too strong. The Right in Israel--whom the U.S. Left hates--says the same thing. The target in both is the protection of minority rights.

***

McConnell's moment of 'absence' has raised questions about his competence. Not being able to speak at all does not seem to be as much of a problem.

***

It's nice to see retired politicians doing over-the-counter ads. Selling nonsense is so consistent.



Witches 2

(Continuing from O'Neill)

Witch-hunts in mid-millennial Europe were inextricably linked with concerns over climate change. This was the era of the Little Ice Age, the period that roughly spanned from 1300 to 1850 during which the Northern Hemisphere experienced exceptionally cold winters. The impact of the Little Ice Age was devastating. The frigid weather violently disrupted harvests in Europe, especially the grain harvest. Following particularly cold periods in the 1500s, it took 180 years for grain harvests to return to their previous levels. The result, in the words of German historian Philipp Blom, was ‘a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis’. And this led to a staggering spike in witch-hunts. Blom describes how in northern Europe in particular, ‘the accumulation of bad harvests and the constant fear of famine and illness’ led to the rise of ‘a particularly cruel collective hysteria: witch trials’. Thousands of women, and occasionally men, were burnt for their alleged role in stoking contrary weather, in causing climate change.

For a long time, says Blom, historians wondered why witch persecutions were ‘especially cruel’ between the years 1588 and 1600 and again between 1620 and 1650. It’s because these were the times of the most extreme cold and most dreadful storms, and the evil cause of such climatic calamities had to be found and extinguished. ‘Religious tensions certainly played a role [in that period]’, he writes, ‘but the correlation among extreme weather events, ruined harvests and waves of witch trials asserts itself most forcefully’. It is no coincidence that around 110,000 witch trials took place in Europe during those most climatically unstable of centuries, with around half of those trials ending in conviction and execution. As the cold, starving peoples of northern Europe knew from the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, especially a witch with such power that she can conjure storms in which ‘sea and sky became one’. Johann Weyer, the 16th-century Dutch physician who opposed witch-hunting, describes one woman being forced to admit essentially that she had brought about climate change: ‘[A] poor old woman was driven by torture to confess – as she was just about to be offered to Vulcan’s flames – that she had caused the incredible severity of the previous winter (1565), and the extreme cold, and the lasting ice.’ 

The cries of those tortured women should echo down the ages. Their persecution for the crime of causing contrary weather should give us pause for thought today. For as German historian Wolfgang Behringer convincingly argues, the weather-related witch hysteria of the early modern period shows how perilous it can be to moralise discussions about the climate. A section of European society during the Little Ice Age held witches ‘directly responsible for the high frequency of climatic anomalies’, he writes. And the ‘enormous tensions created in society as a result of the persecution of [those] witches demonstrate how dangerous it is to discuss climatic change under the aspects of morality’.

Witches

With the relentnessness of the investigations that Trump generates and the damage that spills over into those around him, how does he get people to work for or with him?

***

59% of democrats think the Huntrt Biden computer is calculated misinformation

***

Are differences always disparities?

Witches

(There have been a number of funny articles out there comparing current climate change intensity to the Middle Ages Witch Trials. The next two days are from a typical such article from O'Neill.)

In 1590, in Scotland, an elderly woman named Agnes Sampson was arrested. She was from East Lothian. Earlier in her life she had been a midwife and a healer, but lately she had been living in poverty. She was tried, found guilty and taken to Edinburgh Castle where, on 28 January 1591, she was strangled to death by rope and then burnt at the stake. Her offence? Climate change.

Sampson was charged with stirring up ‘contrary winds’, among other things. Her persecution stemmed from the troubles of King James VI whose attempts to bring his new wife, Anne of Denmark, to Scotland were continually thwarted by hellish weather. ‘Unusual’ winds capsized ships of the royal fleets. Twice did Anne’s ship have to dock in Norway due to the ‘fierce storms’. James, inspired by reports from Denmark of witches being burnt for their supposed part in the frustration of Anne’s journey, became convinced of a witches’ plot in Scotland, too. He pushed the idea of ‘weather magic’, where witches use their demonic power to cause ‘unusual’ storms, hails and fogs to descend on Earth.

The end result was the North Berwick Witch Trials, one of the deadliest episodes of witch-hunting in the history of Great Britain. Taking place a hundred years before the better-known witch-hunts of Salem in Massachusetts, the hysteria in North Berwick involved 150 accusations, copious amounts of torture to extract confessions and 25 deaths. Mrs Sampson’s was just one of those deaths. She and many others had been accused not only of the usual witchy things – mysterious healings, issuing curses and so on – but of something else, too. That they had changed the climate. That they had whipped up destructive weather. That they had deployed their malevolence to the end of ‘conjur[ing]’ terrible storms ‘in cahoots with the devil’. For in the words of Danish admiral Peter Munch, who had been tasked with transporting Anne to Scotland, what his ships had encountered was no normal climatic event – no, ‘there must be more in [this] matter than the common perversity of winds and weather’.


The women of North Berwick can be seen as among the earliest victims of climate-change hysteria, of that urge to pin the blame for anomalous weather on wicked human beings. And they weren’t alone. In Europe between the 1500s and 1700s, climate change was often the charge made against witches. In his 1584 book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, an English MP and author, outlined the common view of witches as climate changers. Many believe witches can ‘raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull weather’, he said, as well as being able to ‘inhibit the sunne, and staie both daye and night, changing the one into the other’. Scot was a witch-sceptic. He called for calm during witch-hunts. His view was that weather was a natural, or heavenly, phenomenon, not the plaything of allegedly evil people. ‘[It] is neither a witch, nor a devil, but glorious God that maketh the thunder’, he wrote. ‘God maketh the blustering tempests and whirlwinds’ as well, he continued. But his plea for reason fell on deaf ears. Too many people were far more enamoured of the view, soon to be promoted by James VI, no less, that a witch could ‘rayse stormes and tempestes in the aire’.

Stuff

 

Stuff

When Watts plays, the Steelers win 59%, when he doesn't play, 9%.

***

According to the latest figures, Japan’s population declined by 800,000 in the last year. That makes 14 consecutive years during which deaths outnumbered births.

***

Ohtani pitched a 9-inning 1-hit shutout yesterday and hit two home runs. 

His day should be reported every day with the regularity of the weather or the stock market.

***

Does anybody believe that Biden is making government decisions? So, if he's not, who is? And did we elect him? And, as an aside, are the people who support Biden's 'leadership" the same people who always talk about the risk to democracy?

***

A 17-year-old boy was stabbed and killed in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park.
The stabbing happened a little before 12:30 a.m. Thursday below the Panther Hollow Bridge.

***

Originally a radical leftist, Vargas Llosa embraced neoliberalism long ago, but in the past few years, he has shocked many by endorsing Latin America and Spain’s rising authoritarian far-right movements.

***

Only four of the 100 most-cited scientific papers on AI in 2022 were German. That compares with 68 for the U.S. and 27 for China.

The Norm

Paris Saint-Germain forward Kylian Mbappe is not interested in joining Saudi Pro League club Al-Hilal, according to multiple reports.Al-Hilal reportedly made a world record €300 million bid to sign Mbappe and also offered the player €700m.

This, with the buying of the world golf game, seems to be an astonishing effort on the part of the Saudis to buy culture. And, possibly, for some elements of the Western world, to sell it.

****

Interesting interview with an immigrant woman who, incidentally, mentioned that every year she celebrates the day of her naturalization.

***

This is a fascinating--if small--story: PragerU has made an announcement on Twitter that its teaching materials have been approved for use in Florida Public Schools.

***

Three members of a Colorado family died while attempting to live "off the grid" in the Rocky Mountains, family members and investigators say.
The emaciated remains of sisters Christine and Rebecca Vance and the latter's 14-year old son, were found in a remote campsite this month.
On Tuesday a coroner ruled that they probably died from starvation or exposure during the cold winter.

The Norm

As difficult as success is to attain, a certain mindset is preoccupied with why everyone isn't successful. The expectation of homogeneity. The suspicion of a thumb on the scale.

"In a wider view of the history of the human race since its beginnings, the entire species was very poor, primitive and densely ignorant for more than 90 percent of its existence. The decisive innovation of agriculture, within the last 5 percent or so of the existence of the human species, opened up vast new possibilities for creating cities, civilizations and the progress in many dimensions that has been built on that foundation. As we have seen, that progress was never equally accessible to all people in all geographic locations or equally sought by all cultures, much less equally compatible with all social conditions or political systems.

It is not poverty that needs to be explained but what combinations of circumstances, come together in particular places and times to enable economic progress to take place."--Sowell

Still, the miracle of progress and success is always viewed with suspicion, as if the escape from our benighted past is possible only with distortion. Success is the land's only unpopular outlier.

Government Divestment

Why no Blinkin and Nod parody?

***

Should Trump receive reparations for the calumny of the last years?

***

$280 billion was stolen from Covid relief program.

Government Divestment

Solyndra can make a guy cynical. How about this.

There is an interesting sidelight to the Higgs discovery made by the mostly European team and announced, provocatively, on the Fourth of July. The Superconducting Super Collider built at the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland was, in the 1990's, funded by American money and the decision to withdraw the money delayed the advances and removed Americans from prominence there. More, Fermilab, built outside of Chicago in 1967, was one of the original potential sites for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but federal funding was withdrawn and the new collider was awarded to Geneva. The Fermilab collider was closed down for lack of funding in 2011. University of Michigan physicist Gordon Kane says that had the funding been maintained, the Higgs would have been an American discovery with its eventual collateral advances.

I know that sounds a bit wistful--and regressively nationalistic--but cultures that don't achieve without aspiration. With all the talk about "government investment," this looks like a good one not done.

If you search Fermilab now you get articles about local bison.

Influential institutions

A Chinese marketing firm likely organized and promoted protests in Washington last year as part of a wide-ranging pro-Beijing influence campaign, according to new research.
The Chinese firm also used a network of over 70 fake news websites to promote pro-China content in an example of the more aggressive efforts by pro-China operatives to influence US political debate in recent years, according to security firm Mandiant, which analyzed the activity.

***

Health officials have “virtually” eliminated HIV transmission in parts of Sydney that were once the center of the Australian Aids epidemic, raising hopes of conquering a disease that has killed more than 40mn people.
HIV diagnoses in inner Sydney plunged 88 percent from the 2008-12 average to just 11 cases last year, a decline on a scale never before recorded in a former Aids hotspot.

Much of this will be attributed to education but these new meds are incredible.

***

In the spring of 1954, Oppenheimer endured an exhaustive four-week interrogation that questioned his US loyalty and ultimately stripped him of his security clearance. (The US government would ultimately clear his name 68 years later.)

Influential institutions

This study makes three primary contributions to a fuller understanding of the contemporary landscape of incarceration in the United States. First, we assess the scope of decarceration. Between 1999 and 2019, the Black male incarceration rate dropped by 44%, and notable declines in Black male imprisonment were evident in all 50 states. Second, our life table analysis demonstrates marked declines in the lifetime risks of incarceration. For Black men, the lifetime risk of incarceration declined by nearly half from 1999 to 2019. We estimate that less than 1 in 5 Black men born in 2001 will be imprisoned, compared with 1 in 3 for the 1981 birth cohort. Third, decarceration has shifted the institutional experiences of young adulthood. In 2009, young Black men were much more likely to experience imprisonment than college graduation. Ten years later, this trend had reversed, with Black men more likely to graduate college than go to prison. Our results suggest that prison has played a smaller role in the institutional landscape for the most recent generation compared with the generation exposed to the peak of mass incarceration.--a study

The notion that prison is an institution that contributes to development is just staggering.

AI Containment

“The official number [of Covid-19 deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death,” a Times article read, explaining that both CDC data and a study in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases support the claim that “almost one third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category.”

***

The only times over which we have any degree of influence at all are the present and the future – both of which can be made worse by attempts at symbolic restitution among the living for what happened among the dead, who are far beyond our power to help or punish or avenge. Galling as these restrictive facts may be, that does not stop them from being beyond our control. Pretending to have powers that we do not, in fact, have risks creating needless evils in the present while claiming to deal with evils of the past.--Sowell

***

Central planning fails because its success would require the mind of God, yet planners are human. Even if they somehow weren’t corruptible, they can never be sufficiently informed to outperform the market, which is composed of the untold bits of detailed consumer and seller knowledge that are signaled through prices. Interference in the market process, whether it be through direct or indirect price controls, inevitably produces harmful unintended consequences.--deRugy

AI Containment

The Biden administration is stirring over developing controls for AI. They are talking about creating confines on developed commercial AI  products before they are released. Some questions come to mind.

--Does the government have in-house experts or will they rely on experts in the private sector, experts who are probably developing the products being analyzed?

--Does the government have a good history of quality regulations? After all, this sounds a lot more significant than regulating farmers to protect a field rodent.

--Is the regulatory process free of outside influence? Are those outside influences always domestic companies or are they sometimes foreign nations?

--What is the greater threat, those who accept the notion that AI should have oversight or those who repurpose existing, approved AI applications or develop their own outside of regulations? What are the plans for that second group?

Norberg on Improvement

... once the government is in the business of providing support to businesses, it becomes attractive for more and more companies to build political connections and lobby for their own government-granted privileges.--deRugy

***

From the Economist:

It is far from clear such [manufacturing] jobs can be brought back—no matter how much governments spend. For a start, the manufacturing wage premium has fallen sharply. Production workers’ wages in America now lag behind those of similar service-sector workers by 5%. Moreover, the sort of high-tech factories that America and Europe are attempting to attract are highly automated, meaning they are no longer a significant source of employment for people with few qualifications…
According to the IMF, the gap between manufacturing and services productivity growth has shrunk in many countries since the turn of the millennium. In China and India its direction has flipped, with services productivity rising faster. Moreover, services are a broad church, ranging from teaching to tech. The latter boasts extremely fast productivity growth, which may soon be propelled further by artificial intelligence.

***

There are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs of S&P 500 companies who are guaranteed that much.

Norberg on Improvement

In his book “The Invention of Improvement,” Paul Slack writes that a belief in a steady rate of improvement began to take hold in 17th-century England. No more did England think that prosperity and well-being would come from returning to some better past. Instead, it would come from applying human ingenuity to improve skills, work the land better and engage in trade and industry. Indeed, the very word “improvement” was of recent coinage, first applied to broader areas than agriculture in the mid-17th century. In his interpretation of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay explains: “Fear of change, up to that time nearly universal, was giving way to fear of stagnation; the word innovation, traditionally an effective term of abuse, became a word of praise.”

This perspective was expressed in many works—for example, in John Locke’s founding document of classical liberalism, 1689’s “Two Treatises of Government.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously expressed the zero-sum theory of economics in 1755, saying that the great robber of mankind was “the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say ‘this is mine.’” In fact, 65 years earlier, John Locke had already refuted such assumptions, with the much more modern idea that productivity and market exchange create prosperity for both sides: “he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind.” Since the individual who encloses land increases its production by some hundred to one, according to Locke, the agricultural entrepreneur does not take one acre from mankind, but gives it 99 acres.

Progress vs. Progressivism

A research group on aging led by Oskar Burger at the Max Planck Institute has pointed out that the bulk of humanity’s mortality reduction has been experienced by only the last four of roughly 8,000 generations of homo sapiens since we evolved around 200,000 years ago.

***

Fewer large markets are open to Chinese technology exports than ten years ago. For any Chinese product that might rise to the attention of a Congressperson, the US is fairly hostile. Europe remains open, but it too is grumbling about protection. A huge blow to Chinese tech firms in recent years was the loss of the Indian market. One of the many surprises 2020 was the deadly skirmish between Chinese and Indian troops that erupted after decades of relative calm. In the aftermath of the brawl, India’s government locked Chinese companies out of a market many staked growth plans on. India is not fully closed, and Chinese firms still have a lot of markets to export to. But that set has shrunk, and who can be sure that Beijing’s diplomatic and military posture won’t hurt markets for other entrepreneurs?--Wang

***
Hackers linked to Beijing accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that is believed to have compromised at least hundreds of thousands of individual U.S. government emails, according to people familiar with the matter.
Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, was also hacked in the cyber-espionage attack, the people said. The two diplomats are believed to be the two most senior officials at the State Department targeted in the alleged spying campaign disclosed last week, one of the people said.

***


Progress vs. Progressivism

From a recent Geo. Will article on Progress vs. Progressivism:

"Progressives’ obsessing about race is not only undiminished by decades of improvements in race relations (e.g., approval of interracial marriages was 4 percent in 1958 and 94 percent in 2021), it is inversely related to improvements. There are vocal interests with large political and lucrative financial stakes (e.g., the “diversity” consultants industry) in the myth of nonprogress. Similarly, portions of the government have an interest in insisting on its failure, despite trillions spent, to substantially improve economic equality: Hence the government’s practice of not counting transfer payments and tax rebates (the earned income tax credit) as income for those of modest means. Counting those augmentations of income would reveal that the 2021 poverty rate was not 11.6 percent, but 2 to 3 percent.

…..

In “Life After Capitalism,” George Gilder, citing Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley in the Cato Institute’s volume “Superabundance,” writes that “between 1980 and 2022, workers have been able to buy some 300 percent more goods and services with their hours and minutes.” The secret sauce is applied knowledge. Economist Thomas Sowell is right: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today.” They lacked only know-how. As did the nail-maker before the Industrial Revolution, making one nail a minute. Today’s nail maker can produce 3,500 per minute.

…..

Economic growth has not just coincided with, it has been caused by, population growth — more brains, more trade in knowledge. There are, however, those who consider people a plague, and who favor ever-larger regulatory government to prevent ruinous human ingenuity and planet-threatening dynamism. Such people resent the time-price metric of economic (and hence social) progress because it measures the results of millions of unplanned and uncoordinated decisions, cooperations, inventions and refinements.

The metric frustrates those who believe, and who benefit from, pessimistic predictions that the supposedly retrograde present is a harbinger of a stagnant future of scarcities — unless government plans a better future. The time-price metric blows to smithereens the idea that progressivism is conducive to progress."

Another China Lab

Almost 16 million trees have been chopped down on publicly owned land in Scotland to make way for wind farms, an SNP minister had admitted amid a major drive to erect more turbines.

***

RFK Jr.'s son, Conor, joined Ukraine's Foreign Legion to fight in Ukraine.

***

Is it my imagination, or are there a lot of personal attacks on the more conservative Supreme Court justices?

Another China Lab

China’s empty buildings, unused airports, and barren highways are what central planning looks like in practice.

One of the key problems with central planning is that government planners don’t know how much to produce. In the absence of price signals that communicate the need for goods and services, they just have to guess. The guesses aren’t guided purely by practical analysis, of course. Political considerations often play a large role, as do the desire to “uplift” less developed areas.

China’s province of Guizhou is one of its poorest. The government sought to spur development there and commissioned massive construction projects. Bloomberg reports some staggering facts of the government’s overbuilding.

Near the city of Zunyi, one of Guizhou’s largest, the government built three airports. The one furthest from the city only has four flights per week. Guizhou’s mountainous terrain has provided a playground for Chinese civil engineers, and the province is home to nearly half of the world’s 100 tallest bridges. It’s “questionable whether it was entirely necessary,” Bloomberg puts it mildly.--Pino

If you build it, they will come?

Immigration

The legacy of Bidenomics is much clearer: surging public debt, feeble productivity growth, a degradation of the nation’s energy capacity, and a return to industrial policy based on the fantasy proposition that government can pick winners.
Bidenomics should be judged, not on the inflation and unemployment rate in a year’s time, but on the economy’s potential in a decade.--Baker

*** 

From a paper: Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

***

The Cato Institute’s recent 2023 national survey on central bank digital currency (CBDC) yielded troubling findings about younger Americans’ affinity for government surveillance within their own homes. Nearly a third (29 percent) of those age 18–29 support “‘the government installing surveillance cameras in every household’ in order to ‘reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,’” the Cato Institute reports. This figure is more than twice as large as that for the general population: 14 percent




Immigration

Conservatives lacking confidence in the nation’s capacity for assimilation should know that among the 11 million (down from 12.3 million in 2007) illegal immigrants, 62 percent have been here at least 10 years, 21 percent at least 20 years, only 15 percent for less than five years, and 35 percent own their homes. They have assimilated.

Immigration, “the sincerest form of flattery,” is an entrepreneurial act: Families who risk everything by walking from Guatemala to Texas will probably enhance American industriousness.

Immigrants are prolific at starting companies — [Tim] Kane says start-ups create 3 million jobs a year, and “there is no net job creation” without them. Ignore the “lump of labor” fallacy that there is a fixed amount of work, hence a fixed demand for workers. (Do you remember how the nation suffered when tractors displaced agricultural workers? No, you don’t.)--Will

As an aside, there is a high school in LA whose students are fifth-generation Hispanics and English is not spoken. Yet the point remains: to identify these deserving people and separate them from those that are a risk to the country. The country needs immigrants and should be able to determine which ones.

When Enemies Trade

There seems to be a belief among the Pittsburgh fans that an infusion of stalwarts from an average AAA team is going to arrive and be competitive in the majors.

***

The only safeguard of liberty is the restraint of power itself.--Nutter


***

Racial preferences starkly divide academia from the public; 74 percent of the public (including majorities of Democrats and Black Americans) opposes racial preference in hiring and admission.

***

The number of Americans living in Spain grew by 13% from 2019 to 2021, and home sales to Americans jumped 88% from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2022, according to a report by the General Council of Notaries in Spain.

When Enemies Trade

It is impossible for a country to have, at the same time, the largest possible population and the qualitatively best, the largest possible industry and the greatest possible independence in food and raw materials, if this must be brought about by all kinds of governmental intervention. Too much doctoring of the economic structure of a country is the surest way to make it less fit even for military purposes…. To sum up, even if unrestricted armaments have to be accepted as something inevitable, Liberalism has no need to surrender. -- Wilhelm Röpke’s February 1935 Economica paper, “Fascist Economics":

So, adds Bordeaux, "Only in the short run might there be a trade-off between the freedom of markets, including the freedom of international trade, and a country’s military might. In the long-run, the freer are markets – and the freer is international trade – the greater is the country’s material prosperity, as well as the spirit of enterprise, innovation, and commercial and industrial discipline that are necessary (if such is the goal) to produce the most effective weapons in the greatest possible abundance."

I understand the general principle, but it seems to be limited by the assumption that the traders are partners motivated by self-interested advancement, not competitive malice who are planning, in addition to personal success, the destruction of the partner. That seems a big distortion for free trade to smooth out.

The Motives of the State

A recent article stated the notion of “average global temperature” is meaningless. Average global temperature is a concept invented by and for the global-warming hypothesis. It is more a political concept than a scientific one. The Earth and its atmosphere is large and diverse, and no place is meaningfully average.

***

those who want to blame the legacy of slavery for outcomes today are overlooking the legacy of the welfare state, which grew dramatically beginning in the late 1960s. The Great Society programs implemented under President Lyndon B. Johnson subsidized counterproductive behavior that took a huge toll on the black family. Subsequently, many of the positive trends among blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century—from declining crime rates to educational and economic gains that were narrowing the gap with whites—either stalled or reversed course.--Riley

***

South Korea are refining their customer base.

A restaurant in Seoul is “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis that men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.
Other zones are even more niche.
Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.

 


The Motives of the State

No policy can be constructed on the all-embracing principle that everything depends on everything else. Those cause-and-effect relations that are immediate and direct must be distinguished from those that are remote, indirect, and generally unpredictable. In that sense, a [national] security-oriented policy should be conceived as one designed to cope with clear and present external forces directly threatening preservation of our form of government and way of life.

To go beyond this specific purpose is to take upon ourselves a moral duty beyond our borders, whether to right wrongs as we perceive them, to spread freedom and democracy as we conceive them, or to liberate others from oppressions forces as we see them. It is to presume that we have a right or obligation to intervene directly in the internal affairs of other nations, provided only that our cause is just. If that presumption were warranted, other nations would have a similar right or obligation, and the only point of contention would be justness of cause, an issue not easily settled by consensus.--Nutter

On the surface, this seems to be a reasonable position but it does imply, unlike the evangelical fascist and communist countries, that the state is an immoral beast. So, which is worse?

The Unity of Socialism

Equal opportunity policies are against racism. Affirmative action is racism under new management.--Sowell

****

There is a study valuing chess squares and determining the placement of pieces on the board.

****

JFK Jr on COVID-19. "There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He then scrambled around a bit.
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

A nation of outliers.

The Unity of Socialism

Every once in a while you come across something that is simply terrific. This is from Bastiat:

If I had to point out the characteristic that differentiates socialism from economic science, I would find it in this. Socialism encompasses a countless host of sects. Each of these has its own utopia and it can be said that they are so far from agreeing with one another that they are in bitter conflict with each other. Between the organized social workshop of Mr. Blanc and the anarchy of Mr. Proudhon, between the association of Fourier and the communism of Mr. Cabet, the difference is night and day. This being so, how do these leaders of (different) schools (of thought) band together under the common denomination of “socialists,” and what is the link that unites them against natural or Providential society? It cannot be other than this: They do not want a natural form of society. What they want is an artificial form of society that emerges fully formed from the brain of the inventor. It is true that each of them wants to be the Jupiter of this Minerva, that each nurtures his own form of artifice and dreams of his own form of social order. But there is one thing that they have in common: they do not acknowledge that the human race possesses either a driving force that impels it toward good or a curative force that delivers it from evil. They quarrel over who will knead the human clay, but agree that it is a clay that requires kneading. In their eyes, the human race is not a living and harmonious being; it is an inert material waiting for them to give it feeling and life. It is not a subject for study but a material on which to experiment.

More Government Investments

India has launched its third Moon mission, aiming to be the first to land near its little-explored south pole.
The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft with an orbiter, lander and a rover lifted off at 14:35 on Friday (09:05 GMT) from Sriharikota space center.
The lander is due to reach the Moon on 23-24 August.
If successful, India will be only the fourth country to achieve a soft landing on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China.

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In the Post, George Will predicts that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.

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"The impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations," Sam Singer, a spokesman for the Anchor Steam beer said in a statement.

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More Government Investments

The Los Angeles Times estimated that the government payout to build SolarCity in Buffalo could have been as much as $1.5 billion. In exchange, officials expected the Buffalo factory to create as many as 5,000 jobs and attract further development to the area. Musk promised that by 2020, the factory would make enough products to cover 1,000 roofs per week. But barely a decade since the deal was struck, the factory averages 21 installations per week, and the only new business that has moved into the area is a single coffee shop. And while Tesla reported in February that it had created 1,700 jobs—as the Journal notes, "enough to meet its obligations to the state and avoid a $41 million annual penalty"—the majority of those are Tesla employees who don't work on solar projects.

Those Who Can't Do, Govern

French, writing in the NYT on the rise of critical and aggressive politically activist Christianity, which he opposes, "the need for existential humility in any Christian political theology. This is not moral relativism. We still possess core convictions. But existential humility acknowledges the limits of our own wisdom and virtue. Existential humility renders liberty a necessity, not merely to safeguard our own beliefs but also to safeguard our access to other ideas and arguments that might help expose our own mistakes and shortcomings."

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Senate Intelligence Committee.
Last week, the committee unanimously adopted a provision to cut off all federal funding to any secret UFO reverse-engineering program, whether conducted by the US government or hidden away in the private sector via a defense contractor.
The Intel committee chose their words carefully, broadly targeting any reverse-engineering programs involving unidentified craft of 'non-earth' or 'exotic' origin.

Now that's just nuts.

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John Kerry negotiated with the Iranians when he was out of office.

Those Who Can't Do, Govern

Joe Biden wants to take a page from China’s economic playbook. In a recent speech, the president officially embraced the term “Bidenomics” to describe his economic policies, which he characterized as the federal government “investing in key industries of the future, making targeted investments to promote domestic production of semiconductors, batteries, electric cars, clean energy.” In other words, the administration is pursuing a government-directed industrial policy using taxpayer subsidies and mandates to pick economic winners and losers.

The administration is partly motivated by fears that the U.S. is falling behind China, where firms are openly subsidized by the government and have been gaining market share in industries once dominated by American companies. But three recent studies jointly authored by American economist Lee G. Branstetterand Chinese economist Guangwei Li suggest China’s industrial policy “successes” are overblown. China’s various industrial policies, such as “Made in China 2025”—which, like Bidenomics, targets direct subsidies, tax incentives and government loans to key sectors such as aerospace, robotics, energy-efficient automobiles and biopharmaceuticals—don’t just fall flat. They do more harm than good.--Hodge

For some reason, this thought process never dies. Their eight tyrants are better at business than our incredible innovators who are always moving the world. So, our eight tyrants have to take charge and save the day. And they show up with huge scissors and cut the ribbon at the Solandra and Solar City plant openings. 

Maybe things would be better if they also showed up and cut the ribbon for the bankruptcy filing, too.

Some Stuff

Some Stuff

Two women were shot, and one of them was killed, in Pittsburgh's Brighton Heights neighborhood after a “youth fight” at the Jack Stack pool spilled out into the street Wednesday night, the city's police chief said.

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Sotomayor's net worth when she was nominated for the Supreme Court was about $80,000.
Since then, Sotomayor's net worth has skyrocketed, putting her among the ranks of the nation's millionaires. In 2021, her investments totaled somewhere between $1.5 million and $6.4 million, according to financial disclosure forms. Last year, investments were roughly the same, in between $1.6 million and $6.6 million.

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The global-warming industry has declared that July 3 and 4 were the two hottest days on Earth on record. The reported average global temperature on those days was 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit, supposedly the hottest in 125,000 years. The claimed temperature was derived from the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, which relies on a mix of satellite temperature data and computer-model guesstimation to calculate estimates of temperature.

One obvious problem with the updated narrative is that there are no satellite data from 125,000 years ago. Calculated estimates of current temperatures can’t be fairly compared with guesses of global temperature from thousands of years ago.

A more likely alternative to the 62.6-degree estimate is something around 57.5 degrees. The latter is an average of actual surface temperature measurements taken around the world and processed on a minute-by-minute basis by a website called temperature.global. The numbers have been steady this year, with no spike in July.--Milloy

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This is the opening of a piece by Jacobs. It reflects a growing theme on the Left, the rise of fascism in the U.S., a vision that seems hallucinatory, generalizing a tiny minority as normal--a trend becoming characteristic of the country:

"Why do the journalists covering the biggest story of their career—the attempted overthrow of democracy—want to treat it like routine politics?
The ongoing rise of fascism in America is quite a story to tell. There’s been an attempted coup. The U.S. Capitol was overrun by a mob. Members of Congress pushed slates of fake electors to try to steal an election. Politicians plotted to call out the military to seize voting machines.
The stakes could not be higher. This is a story that affects the future of every American.
So why do so many journalists want to normalize the fascist threat? Why do they treat it as if it’s just the same old politics? It’s as if they're covering the flood of the century and want to save it for the regularly scheduled weather report."

Ex Post Facto

“The surest way to reduce the trade deficit is to wreck the economy.”--Riley

From a paper on a China medical program: The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) rolled out in China from 2003-2008 provided insurance to 800 million rural Chinese. We combine aggregate mortality data with individual survey data, and identify the impact of the NCMS from program rollout and heterogeneity across areas in their rural share. We find that there was a significant decline in aggregate mortality, with the program saving more than one million lives per year at its peak, and explaining 78% of the entire increase in life expectancy in China over this period. We confirm these mortality effects using micro-data on mortality, other health outcomes, and utilization.

Leslie Van Houten is loose.

Ex Post Facto

Ex post facto law and Bill of Attainder are two legal outrages specifically forbidden in the American Constitution simply because they are so abusive. Ex post facto applies laws in retrospect, making something legal previously, illegal at the time it was legal. A Bill of Attainder is a law aimed at a specific individual. These concepts are so obviously unjust--and are so often generated by personal malice or political enthusiasm--that any thoughtful person--and the Founding Fathers had them in abundance--would easily reject the concept. As would anybody.

But not now. Now people are being held legally responsible for legal acts done by total strangers years ago when those acts were legal but currently despised. Vicarious--or imputed--liability is a real legal concept, usually with respect to parent-child or employer-employee. A child or employee can be seen as an agent of the parent or employer. That concept is a reasonable debate. But how is holding total strangers, generations later, responsible for presumed consequences of legal acts hundreds of years ago at all reasonable?

How could ex post facto laws be taken seriously, then made inherited?

The answer is hidden in Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the Harvard discrimination case: The Black community needs assistance--legal, reasonable, abusive or not. That is the sign of a culture twisting itself to accommodate a protected class.

Walk a Mile in Charlie Manson's Shoes

 

The Church of England technically owns a stake in some of the world's biggest songs, including Rihanna's "Umbrella," Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack," and Beyoncé's "Single Ladies." The church is one of several investors in Hipgnosis, a company that has spent over $1 billion to acquire the rights to songs.

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I wouldn’t trust these folks to run a lemonade stand. They would organize middle schoolers via collective bargaining, freeze prices, institute $25-an-hour “fair” wages, cap sugar levels, place tariffs on “flavored drinks” from other neighborhoods and then tax parents to subsidize the inevitable losses.--Kessler on government investments

 

Walk a Mile in Charlie Manson's Shoes

There may be a human right to free speech but there is no right to be listened to. 

A while ago, some news agency felt it reasonable to interview Charles Manson, learn his political opinions, and publish them. This abuse of the public space cannot be dismissed by simply saying "If you don't want to hear what he has to say then don't listen." Interviewing a bedwetting, fire-starting, animal-torturing homicidal maniac for his opinion on anything is simply insane. 

But underlying this abuse is a philosophy: The philosophy of non-judgment. It is everywhere. It allows a school principal to avoid the decision of whether or not to suspend a nine-year-old with a water pistol, it allows a judge not to judge, instead using mandatory sentencing, it confounds a people trying to assess a threat or a deviation by demanding respect for all cultures regardless of its seriousness or pathology, it prevents a sensible people from dismissing anything. 

So, Manson speaks, genital mutilation has a historical and cultural value, a pyramid of Aztec hearts is an architectural marvel. One has more and more respect for the plight of the modern artist who has been robbed of art's historical right to teach; when nothing is true, everything must be taken as it is, isolated, and without context or judgment.

 

Trouble with Math at the Supreme Court

The archbishop of York has suggested that opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, recited by Christians all over the world for 2,000 years, may be “problematic” because of their patriarchal association. Now, just try to imagine what the good father was thinking.

Oneil Cruz is rapidly becoming "the other Cruz."

The latest data show that between 2010 and 2023, identification as LGBTQ+ has almost tripled among the student body at Brown (from 14% in 2010 saying they were not heterosexual to 38% now). Global warming cultists would probably conclude that this is evidence of homosexuality's infective nature.


Trouble with Math at the Supreme Court

Seeking to show that considering race in admissions was fair and realizes equality, Jackson argued in her dissent that diversity "saves lives" and is essential for "marginalized communities." She asserted that diversity is for the "betterment" of students and society at large beyond college campuses.

"For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die," Jackson wrote as one example.
That claim came from an amicus brief filed by lawyers representing an association of medical colleges. The brief stated that for "high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug; it more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live," citing as support a 2020 study that examined mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015.

In a letter Friday filed to the Supreme Court docket, Norton Rose Fulbright wrote that the argument cited by Jackson in her opinion "warrants clarification" and sought to clear up any "confusion."

"The principal cited finding of the [study] was that the mortality rate for Black newborns, as compared to White newborns, decreased by more than half when under the supervision of Black physician," the law firm's letter said. "In absolute terms, this study found that patient-physician racial concordance led to a reduction in health inequity."

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week, Ted Frank, a senior attorney at Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, responded directly to Jackson's claim, lambasting the justice for making a mathematical error.

"A moment's thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible," wrote Frank, who filed an amicus brief in support of Students for Fair Admissions. "Imagine if 40% of black newborns died — thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that's a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%. How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake?"

Frank went on to argue that the 2020 study was "flawed" and didn't match Jackson's claim about Black newborns having a significantly higher chance of surviving with a Black physician.

"The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for Black newborns with Black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians)," Frank wrote.

"So, we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party's mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges 'all of us' to 'do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.' Instead, we should watch where we're going."--Kliegman

The point here should not be that mortality rates and survival rates are different, but that politically motivated decisions are being generated by the courts using any and all information that supports them. Justices are simply regurgitating them. And that is not the behavior one expects from objective examiners of life-changing decisions delivered by the highest court in the land. We should not expect the justices to be polymaths, but we should be able to expect reflection and caution. Regrettably, reflection and caution corelate well with intelligence.

Shroud

Clarence Thomas graduated from Holy Cross ninth in his class (of more than 500 students). According to the New York Times, eight Holy Cross graduates were admitted to Yale Law between 1968 and 1978, the decade that included Justice Thomas’s law school career. Why assume that he got in only because of his race? Why question the justice’s credentials but not Bill Clinton’s or Hillary Rodham’s, two of his fellow Yale Law students? The reason is affirmative action, which has made people suspicious of black academic and professional success. And, with Thomas, the Left magicians have made affirmative action a slur!

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This past week the IMF released the 1Q2023 COFER data. US dollar share of world reserves actually INCREASED to from 58.6% to 59.0%. Arguably further evidence against short-run “de-dollarization” which is apparently overhyped.

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Anyone who believes that rich lobbyists, in pursuit of their own particular special interests, exert too much influence over politics must surely advocate less and not more government. After all, the more the state intervenes in the economy (through subsidies and overregulation), the greater the influence lobbyists can exert.--Zitelmann



Shroud

Some adventurous bureaucrats have decided to attack the dreaded global warming at its source: they want to blunt the sun.

Imagine. The very source of life on earth has become a small cadre's greatest enemy. Years ago, seeding the atmosphere with tiny reflective flakes to bounce the sun's rays back into space was a thought experiment--as an act of war. Evil nations could do this in some crazed anti-production act to drive the world retrograde to more primitive time. Now people we call our leaders are plotting to solve the climate hysteria with a bold, completely uncontrolled--and uncontrollable--stroke. They want to blanket our trembling, fragile earth in a darkening pall. A poorly substantiated threat will be solved by an impossible, unmanageable--and possibly planet-killing--experiment.

The governments are becoming like some Marvel super-villain.

Dissent

If the average annual GDP growth rate is 1.5% for the next 80 years, the economy would grow 232%. A 2% climate-change effect would reduce that growth to 225%. As physicists say, that’s a difference “in the noise.”

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In total, the top quintile [of American households in 2017] paid some 61 percent of all federal, state, and local taxes as compared to 20 percent paid by the fourth quintile, 11 percent paid by the middle quintile, 5 percent paid by the second quintile, and 2 percent paid by the bottom quintile.

Dissent

The popular debate over the recent SCOTUS decisions on racial prejudice and personal belief has revealed that many people do actually not understand the debate. I saw a lawyer objecting to the Harvard racial preference decision who was so muddled she needed the moderator's help to formulate her very poorly constructed ideas. Her basic idea was that the demonstration of inequalities in life was prima facie proof of the need to influence the scale that everyone in this country agrees to. A thief must restore what he stole; here, someone has come home and found something missing and everyone in the culture has to stop what they are doing and contribute to its restoration.

The Constitution is a structure that limits the power the government can assume--even if it has good intentions--based upon limited personal responsibilities the people are willing to surrender. The conflict is not simply with a government that innately wants to increase its influence, it also is with those who are not willing, or able, to shoulder the burdens of living--and consequences of freedom--accepted by their fellow citizens. But the baseline idea that something is innate in the political makeup that guarantees balancing life among us all because it sounds like a good or kind idea is a very weak position that will only decrease sympathy for the real and legitimate problem.

Disease in China

Do what you will, gentlemen; you cannot give money to some without taking it away from others. If you absolutely insist on draining the taxpayer dry, well and good; but at least do not treat him like a fool. Do not tell him: “I am taking this money from you to repay you for what I have already taken from you.”--Bastiat


Disease in China

In an exclusive interview with Jennifer Zeng, a member of the International Press Association, who provides first-hand information and unique insights about China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chao Shao revealed that his colleagues were given four variants of the virus to determine which one would spread most effectively, the ANI report said. He referred to the coronavirus as a "bioweapon."

Chao Shao shared an anecdote about his colleague, Shan Chao, who confessed that their superior provided them with four coronavirus strains for testing. Their task was to identify the strain with the greatest ability to infect various species, including humans. These revelations highlight the alleged intention to create a highly contagious virus.

So biologists tinker with bioweapons, pilots fly near misses, ships challenge others at sea, nations invade each other to re-establish their homeland, now AI threatens the perception of truth all over the world--all risking accidental death or war or gradually increasing conflict to no one's benefit other than a few madmen giggling in bunkers.

Imagine in this world thinking global warming a prime threat to humanity.

Pivot

Samuel Hammond: “European AI safety is focused on privacy while American AI safety is focused on paternalism. Neither make us more safe in any substantive sense.”

A recently passed bill in Michigan could make it a felony to intimidate someone by intentionally using the wrong gender pronouns, according to some legal experts.
Michigan's state House of Representatives has passed bill HB 4474, a piece of legislation that criminalizes causing someone to feel threatened by words.
Under the new bill, offenders are "guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000."

Jack Wilson's son, Jake, is a shortstop and expected to be a first rounder this year.

The difference between investigation and management. White House cocaine: Greg Gutfeld pointed out the differing declarations of the location of the discovery, as District of Columbia fire officials reportedly said over their radio that it was found in the library – which is notably part of the East Wing – while the U.S. Secret Service reportedly said it was discovered in the more heavily-traversed West Wing.

Pivot

The people who have fought with such outrage in favor of the university's right--even obligation--to select students on the basis of an arbitrary vision of their student body makeup and the history of past admissions are now organizing against university legacy admissions. The are using the arguments of those that defeated them in the Harvard preference case. Taking up the weapons of the victors is weird enough, but weirder when you claim you're the moral side. So, their attack on Justice Thomas for being an affirmative action product makes more sense.

As the Supreme Court dissents show, there is little philosophy here and, thus, continuity. The recurring point is not the reverence for concept and consistency, it is results. There is a model in the minds of the Left that must be achieved in some way, regardless how circuitous or insincere. This is an important point since the Constitution was created to provide confines to government activity, not a blueprint. Certain individual rights are ceded to the government in very defined ways. The rest are reserved to the citizen, based upon the belief in every individual's inherent value and dignity. (And, regrettably, competence.)

Ours is a system of refined process, not outcome. And opposition is easy as it is not confined by ordinary, human thinking. It is a matter of passion.

The Enemy

The claim that women are paid 75 percent of what men earn for doing the same jobs requires that millions of employers ignore their own self-interest. Why would they leave so much money on the table? Why not hire an entirely female workforce, pay them (say) 80 cents on the dollar, and wipe out the competition?
Does the alleged fact require that countless people are colluding? Consider, for example, the claim that inflation is caused by corporate greed. Really? Hundreds of thousands of firms simultaneously raise their prices and not one of them sees an opportunity to grab market share by underselling the competition?--Fullmer

Cocaine in the White House.

The Enemy

The Truth may be out. The tensions in the U.S. may not be in its direction, may not be evidence of an evolution.

'We are slaves to an ancient document written by old white male slave owners.' (sort of an approximation)

This is a neat summary given by a law person from D.C. This actually makes sense: the enemy of these people is the Constitution, the basic founding document these people feel is an obscenity. And she was a big guest on The View, celebrating the Fourth, apparently. But it is clarifying when the Left admits its problem with America is its basic formation. It's what they mean when they talk about "fundamental change." It's sort of like going to France and being furious that people speak French. Or Iran and objecting to Islam.

One does wonder why such discontent allows for people to stay in a place where they hate its very marrow? Become evangelical and confront a majority who are content with the culture's very nature? And it is always difficult to explain why an activist would gin up so much animosity and dissent against an America where the intentions are so high-minded and the failures--certainly when compared to other nations--so mild.

On the other hand, most confident cultures would strike back.

Fourth of July

There are few uglier traits than this tendency -- witnessed in men no worse than their neighbors -- to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. -Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (4 Jul 1804-1864)

The annual Nathan's Hotdog Eating Contest is today. The competitors eat hotdogs for ten minutes. The current record holder--and favorite today--is Joey Chestnut. The over/under is 72.5.

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a suspicious substance that prompted a brief evacuation when it was found Sunday evening inside the White House, according to law enforcement authorities.
In a preliminary test, the substance, a white powder, indicated positive for cocaine, according to an official familiar with the investigation and the recording of a dispatch from a D.C. fire crew that responded to the incident.


Fourth of July


America had an exceptional revolution, one that did not attempt to define and deliver happiness, but one that set people free to define and pursue it as they please.--Will

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Isonomy guaranteed … equality, but not because all men were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men were by nature ... not equal, and needed an artificial institution, the polis, which by virtue of its νόμος would make them equal. --Arendt

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The American Constitution is, as far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at any given time by the brain and purpose of man---Gladstone

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Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.--Thacher

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Jay Leno had a recurring skit where he asked questions to passers-by on the street--questions most people think are rather simple and obvious. He asked several people what the Fourth of July celebrated, when independence was declared, and who the country separated from. Of course, the results were embarrassing to most of those interviewed. One was particularly interesting. A college instructor knew nothing about the Revolution at all, thought it occurred in the 1920s, and thought China might have been involved.

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A survey published recently said that 27% of people questioned did not know the American Revolution was waged against the British.

*****

When I was a child in the '50s, the Fourth of July was a great event. The kids decorated their bikes, small local parades were held--every community had some commemoration and the larger communities had fireworks. It was unlike other secular events like Thanksgiving which were delightfully family-oriented; this was a commonly held social event. It was a birthday party. And it was heartfelt. Everyone felt that years ago something of value had been accomplished, something special in the world created. There was a glow.

When Obama was first campaigning, he was asked about American Exceptionalism. (The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.")

American exceptionalism is a description of how America developed, not what it was.

The phrase has been used since by those who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) Obama saw a trap--it would not do to talk of "exceptionalism" when we want all people to be the same, all nations indistinguishable. So, he hedged and said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." He, unlike those Americans of just a generation or two ago, does not think that America is unique.

Unique. If that element is lost in this country, a lot has been lost. So, buy a small flag. Decorate your bike.

Some Questions

Some Questions

“In the first seven months of fiscal year 2023, over 9,711 PRC nationals were encountered by U.S. border patrol along our Southwest border exponentially more than the previous three years,” Pfluger, Committee on Homeland Security

According to information cited by the lawmakers, in 2021 CBP reported just 4,103 encounters of Russian citizens along our Southwest border. However, that number jumped to 21,763 in fiscal year 2022 and it’s over 33,000 for the first seven months of fiscal year 2023.

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Morally speaking, it is reactionary rather than progressive whenever the state expands its authority at the expense of society. Government handouts, subsidies, and interventions of every kind, no matter how dressed up with a specious humanitarianism, are essentially coercive measures by the state, encroaching more on more on the voluntary action of society.--Morley

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Funds marketed with a sustainable label were hit with $12.4bn in net outflows in the US in the past 12 months even as green funds in Europe added $126.3bn, according to the data provider Morningstar.

The rift between the jurisdictions is a sign that the political backlash against asset managers who take a position on environmental, social, and governance issues in the US has started to dampen the appetite for ESG strategies, analysts say.

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The strong nuclear force is estimated to be about 1038 times stronger than electromagnetism. This means that the forces that hold atomic nuclei together are billions of times stronger than the forces that hold atoms together through their electrons and electric charges.

The reason for this vast difference in strength is due to the properties of the particles that are involved. Electromagnetism is carried by photons, which have no mass and only interact with charged particles. In contrast, the strong nuclear force is carried by gluons, which are themselves charged and interact with other charged particles, as well as with quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons.

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Metro areas with a higher share of immigrants have more dynamic economies and experience faster growth in the number of jobs created and new business establishments.
Are they attracted to the dynamic communities? Is youth a factor?

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In Bogotá reducing traffic by restricting who could drive each day based on license plates led people to circumvent the policy by buying more cars.

The Somme Should be a Battle Cry in the Streets

The Mariana Trench is a chasm in the western Pacific Ocean that spans more than 1,580 miles (2,540 kilometers) and is home to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point on Earth’s surface that plunges more than 36,000 feet (about 11,000 meters) underwater.

That’s nearly three times deeper than the site where the wreckage of the RMS Titanic lies in the Atlantic Ocean, and it’s deeper than Mount Everest is tall.



The Somme Should be a Battle Cry in the Streets


Today is the anniversary of Day 2 of the Battle of Gettysburg and Day 2 of The Battle of the Somme.

Gettysburg was a three-day fight.

Nearly one-third of the total forces engaged at Gettysburg became casualties. George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac lost 28 percent of the men involved; Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia suffered over 37 percent.

Of these casualties, 7,058 were fatalities (3,155 Union, 3,903 Confederate). Another 33,264 had been wounded (14,529 Union, 18,735 Confederate) and 10,790 were missing (5,365 Union, 5,425 Confederate).

The Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in all of human history, was fought between July and November 1916 during World War I.

The battle involved more than three million men, of whom one million were either wounded or killed. 20,000 British died the first day. The total casualties, estimated to be more than 1,000,000, included 650,000 German casualties, 420,000 British, and 195,000 French. Enough to give war a bad name.

The Civil War in the U.S. was fought to preserve the Union and, eventually succeeded in ending slavery in the country. WWI would be difficult to categorize; it was a result of complex allegiances and accidents.
Its main effect was to create the foundations for World War Two.

The Civil War in the U.S. had some significant long-term value despite the horror, but WWI?

My point here, two days before Independence Day, is to highlight our astonishing good fortune to be removed from Europe's homicidal history and to ask the question: Why do the Europeans have such confidence in the wisdom and leadership of their rulers? Looking at WWI as an example, why would anybody trust these people, who marshal their benighted citizens to fight in inexplicable wars named in decades and centuries? Why would the world not be dominated by laws limiting the damage governments and their minions could do?

Harvard and Hierarchies

 

It is said that the popular distain for American history has undermined popular support for the military and discouraged typical likely military volunteers. Will that necessitate a general draft?


Harvard and Hierarchies

The Harvard Discrimination decision raises a lot of interesting questions. This observation here is one of the answers (written not in reference to the decision.)

"The mistake often made here – as in so many social controversies – lies in the idea that, if we abolish the particular type of inequality with which we happen to be familiar, we thereby abolish all inequality. But as [John] Hicks and [Albert] Hart point out, what do we accomplish by diminishing inequality of income if at the same time we increase inequality of power. And it must be remembered that power advantages no less than money advantages may be transmitted (however unofficially) from one generation to another….

In short we do not have a choice between a world of equality and one of inequality. We have only a choice between different kinds of inequality."--Wright

Behind this idea is an important concept that is routinely overlooked in the popular debate: Hierarchies are never overthrown, they are only replaced.