Chess

Does it not matter if the hungry are fed, if slums are replaced by decent and air-conditioned housing, if infant mortality rates are reduced to less than a tenth of what they were before? Are invidious “gaps” and “disparities” all that matter? In a world where we are all beneficiaries of enormous windfall gains that our forebears never had, are we to tear apart the society that created all this, because some people’s windfall gains are greater or less than some other people’s windfall gains?--Sowell

***

In northern Peru, a team of archaeologists has unearthed a striking discovery. They have located a 3,000-year-old tomb that is believed to be of an esteemed religious figure from the ancient Andean society.

***

China's fertility rate is falling.

The 20% drop in two years. Following a 40% drop in five years. There's nothing even remotely similar in the historical record.

***

Chess 

From an internet posting:

The chart speaks for itself. (Actually, it doesn't.)

11:30 AM · Aug 28, 2023

·

12.3K

Views

And this comment: It started in the 50s with the first Indian international Master, Manuel Aaron. He started the Tal chess club in Chennai , brought in Soviet chess books and even a Soviet Grandmaster for a month with more visiting and Anand, the Indian prodigy was his pupil. Basically all the local players worthy of note went through that chess club.

It blossomed from there , Anand was born and lives in Chennai and has been a great role model for chess in India and got many youngsters interested in the game.

So a bit of a network effect. Great players very active in coaching and mentoring got the ball rolling and it snowballed from there..

The Inequality of Experts

A few cobras in your home will soon clear it of rats and mice. Of course, you will still have the cobras. -Will Cuppy, journalist (23 Aug 1884-1949)

***

Hands down, Nikki Haley won the first GOP debate. And I don’t say this just because she’s a South Carolinian or because she was the only woman among the fiery pack of primary candidates. She was simply smarter (even smarter than you, Vivek), more sensible and more experienced – and it showed.--Kathlene Parker

***

The problem of unsustainable Social Security and Medicare trajectories? Simple, says Ramaswamy: Just achieve sustained 5 percent economic growth, and the problem will disappear. (Average annual economic growth from 1947 to 2022 was 3.1 percent, according to Cato Institute fiscal analyst Norbert Michel; only once was it more than 5 percent for three consecutive years.)--Will

***

The Inequality of Experts

Dr Stephen Schneider, of Stanford University, is a well-respected climatologist who is also quite active in the media and politics. He has a famous quote that is often published by non-apocalyptics. The entire quote is here:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."

Sometimes the last sentence is omitted. Apocalyptics see the last sentence as clarifying and saving.

They are too kind.

This debate is emblematic of the growing problem in the democracy of 'the expert,' whose input is seen as much more important and reliable than the rest of us slugs. Regrettably, it will not be solved easily because their high position in the culture, unlike the aristocracy of old, is earned. Their relationship with us is more like the old days of the dismissal of women, a disparity of circumstance.

This creates a tough problem for 'experts' because they want to pretend we are all equal.

Truth Inequity

There is talk that some state-elected cabinet members might try to keep Trump off the primary ballot using the 14th Amendment. State elected. National ballot.

***

Trump's first case is scheduled to start on March 4, the day before Super Tuesday.

***

The audacity of the Left is breathtaking.

***

The new Covid vaccine has had no clinical studies on it yet. Biden recommended it anyway,

***

Truth Inequity

An essay by Astra Taylor in the New York Times opens with this sentence;  “Since 2020, the richest 1 percent has captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth globally — almost twice as much money as the rest of the world’s population”

Nobel-laureate emeritus, Vernon Smith composed this in response:  

"The opening sentence implies that wealth is produced independently of human action which is devoted mainly to capturing it. If that is your understanding of the world you can only feel insecure, fear it, and write of your terror.

And what does it reveal about the NYTimes that it wallows and champions this perspective? A truly dedicated mission to spread gloom and unhappiness. It is one thing to report bad news, it’s another to glory in it."

Envy is making a good run at mendacity as the nation's defining quality. Here it masquerades as economic theory. (Just can't escape the mendacity.) There's a charming Old World quality about income disparity where, like the Third World, the spread is between people with everything versus those with nothing. And, somehow, this correlates with a guy driving an F-150 not having a Dreamliner.

An Economist on the Deficit

The kooky degrowth movement advocates for a radical reduction in economic growth to achieve its social and environmental goals. Degrowthers argue that the continued pursuit of infinite growth is ecologically unsustainable on Spaceship Earth, causing massive environmental destruction, social inequality, and political instability. Given that current global per capita GDP is currently around $12,000 a year, we’re either talking about a big reduction in rich country living standards or a world with far fewer people.--Pethokoukis 

***

It is said U.S. maternal deaths are up. But methods of classifying them have changed. Calculating maternal mortality rates in 2015 and 2016 in a consistent manner for the entire United States without using the standard checkbox item yielded rates similar to the maternal mortality rates calculated from vital statistics before the standard checkbox item was introduced.

At least some, and perhaps all, of the apparent increase in recent years of maternal mortality rates in the United States is an artifact of a change in death certificate recording.

***

E.V. graveyards are therefore an indictment of government policy, not capitalism. When private entrepreneurs enter into a nascent market, they put their own capital on the line; their ambition is tempered by the fear that failure will mean losing their shirt. But when the government agrees to cover part of the bill, or requires people to use that product, then it artificially lowers the risk.--Lancaster

***

An Economist on the Deficit

The Federal government is spending a lot more than it receives in taxes, so it is running a deficit that is financed by borrowing in the bond market. The size of the deficit relative to total domestic production (GDP), a rough measure of our ability to pay for our indebtedness, is about 6% in 2023. That percent has been higher in the past, during wars and recessions, but those episodes required deficit spending, and then the government returned to fiscal responsibility. Not so today. We are at full employment and not engaged in world conflict, so the 6% deficit is an unprecedented problem, especially since about 30% of our debt is held by foreigners. The chart below from a paper by George Hall and Tom Sargent shows holders of U.S government debt from 1900 through 2022. The fraction held by foreigners (shown in orange) remained small through the mid-1970s but has ballooned since 2000, and this is cause for concern on a number of levels. First, we can no longer claim the old refrain, “we owe the interest and principal to ourselves so the government debt does not burden our children.” China and Japan, the largest foreign holders of U.S. obligations, receive interest payments that will eventually require higher taxes, especially with the new era of high rates. The budget deficit will grow as current government bonds mature and are replaced with higher interest-rate obligations. Second, foreigners can stop investing in U.S. government debt whenever they please, and that would either drive down the value of the dollar in the foreign exchange market, raise U.S. interest rates, or both. Those unpleasant outcomes are unlikely to occur as long as the dollar remains international money, the world’s medium of exchange, but that needs a commitment to fiscal discipline. The pound sterling was once the world’s reserve currency but lost its “exorbitant privilege” to the American dollar during World War I as Britain turned from creditor nation to debtor. It is not easy to replace the established medium of exchange, but it has happened before. America should tighten its belt when it can, not when it has to.--Bill Silber,
Former Marcus Nadler Professor of Finance and Economics, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author;

August 13, 2023, 4:30pm.

• 

Sunday/New Laws and Hyperbole

 

Pete Alonso was hit in the back of the neck by a Jose Soriano curveball, leading to the benches clearing as the Mets lost 5-3 to the Angels.

The Pirate pitcher in the second inning yesterday gave up a single and four walks, once throwing a fastball over the head of a batter.

There is a difference between malice and incompetence. In either situation, however, the game owes safety to its players.

***

Does Prigozhin's death give insight into the way governments think about problems?

***

In the Miami-Jacksonville game, Miami Dolphins rookie wide receiver Daewood Davis appeared to be knocked unconscious. He was hospitalized and the game was suspended.

***

Chicago police say a 42-year-old woman sustained a gunshot wound to the leg during the game against the Oakland Athletics, and a 26-year-old woman had a graze wound to her abdomen. The 42-year-old woman was in fair condition at University of Chicago Medical Center. The 26-year-old woman refused medical attention, according to the police statement.


***

Sunday/New Laws and Hyperbole

Gandhi said, “Everyone in the world knows that Jesus and His teaching are non-violent, except Christians.” 75 percent of Christians believe in capital punishment because they think we can stop the killing by killing the killers.

The tribal law of retaliation, (Lex Talionis = Tit-for-Tat), was written by the ancient lawmaker Hammurabi during the period 2285-2242 BC. It has been ridiculed as crude and primitive but probably was a real philosophical advance for the time. It was actually an effort to eliminate tribal justice that would hold groups responsible for individual acts and individuals for group acts, for example, Hatfield and McCoy thinking. (This "primitive " thinking is now returning in Western politics, shamelessly.)

It is believed that the Mosaic law absorbed this thinking during the Jews ' captivity in Egypt and it became Old Testament law. instead of mutilating or murdering all the members of the offender’s family or tribe, one should discover the offender and only punish him or her with an equal mutilation or harm. Later, a milder version of this law was substituted that demanded monetary compensation, as decided by a judge, in place of physical punishment.

What Christ says in the gospel is revolutionary. He says, “You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil." This is the "Turn the other cheek" gospel where one is to forgive the attacker, give away your clothes until you are naked, and pray for those who persecute you.

This is simply different thinking, revolutionary in the West. And it is simply overwhelming as a way to live; one might say even "unhuman."

Yes, as Christ Himself says later in the sermon. "So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That is hyperbole. We can not be perfect. He is not asking us to change what we are, only to see an ideal to approach.

It's like how Flannery O'Connor explained her hyperbolic imagery: Sometimes the audience is so dense you need a two-by-four.

Reparations

“Too many teachers today see their role as propagandists for the fashionable notions of the times. Their own ‘role model’ is not Mr. Chips but Joseph Goebbels.”--Sowell

***

"A second country in Africa has recently reported cases of Marburg, an infectious disease that has high fatality rates and, according to the World Health Organization, epidemic potential. The news has lent urgency to ongoing efforts to develop a vaccine for Marburg — and concern among public health officials that earth's changing climate could be fueling the outbreaks."
Marburg is, dare we speak the name, Ebola.

***

Melania. It's so hard for a sex exploiter to take the high ground. But withdrawal may not be enough. Some school teacher was just arrested for threatening her son, Barron.

***

According to Our World in Data, energy use per person in the United States was 76,634 kilowatt-hours in 2021, which is close to 11 times India’s energy consumption of 6,992 kilowatt-hours per capita. Sooo...

***

Reparations

More debate over the earth being flat.

"Still, we’d have a significant portion of reparations payments being made by Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Eskimos, Polynesians, and high-income Blacks. In this case, Ms. Hannah-Jones apparently has no problem with extracting payment for reparations from descendants of people who not only held no black slaves in the U.S. but who also were not responsible for the offensive Jim Crow-era restrictions. In addition, higher-income Blacks would be paying reparations to lower-income Blacks.

The only potential ethical and economic salvation for this latter position is to insist that the costs of making and enforcing finer-grained distinctions are too high to justify shielding Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Eskimos, Polynesians, and high-income Blacks from having to pay taxes some of which would be used to fund reparations payments. If she’s taking this stance, then she – much like the slavers who she rightly abhors – is willing to forcefully extract from innocent people the fruits of their labor in order to enrich others."--Magness

Exploitation is in the background music of most social movements. 

Trump and the Constitution

A shark was discovered on a riverbank in Idaho last week.

***

Some information that stimulates a question.

Division: 

late 14c., divisioun, "act of separating into parts, portions, or shares; a part separated or distinguished from Division is from  dis- "apart" (see dis-) + -videre "to separate," which, according to de Vaan, is from PIE *(d)uid- "to separate, distinguish" (source also of Sanskrit avidhat "allotted," Old Avestan vida- "to devote oneself to"). 

I thought it would be connected to "vision." which is actually from visionem (nominative visio) "act of seeing, sight, thing seen," noun of action from past participle stem of videre "to see," from PIE root *weid- "to see." 

So, to the point:

Trump and the Constitution

It is interesting, but understandable, that the Debate is getting little coverage on CNN and MSNBC and a lot on FOX. This is emblematic of the division in thought and expression that is characteristic of today's politics. 

That division is aided by the sequestering of information. Here is an article by Kurtz, written on December 6, 2022, on what Trump said about the 2020 election which has become internalized by the Left and seemingly deflected by the Right. (I italicized the article, did cut it, but did not correct.)

Billions of words have been devoted to analyzing, criticizing, demonizing and denouncing Donald Trump. 

In newspapers, magazines and books, on television and social media, unnamed advisers provide a barometer of his moods and methods, sometimes venting their own frustration about what he’s doing or refusing to do.

And yet for all the digging about what’s happening behind the scenes, it is often Trump’s own words – on display, out in the open, in the light of day – that cause him the greatest problems.

On cable news yesterday, there were lots of banners about something that exploded over the weekend: "TRUMP CALLS FOR CONSTITUTION TO BE TERMINATED."

When I first saw similar headlines online, I assumed it must be liberal spin, something taken out of context to make that accusation.

Uh, no. That’s what he posted on Truth Social.

The impetus for Trump’s demand was the Twitter Files, which Elon Musk released, through journalist Matt Taibbi, on the outrage of the social media site suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story at the end of the 2020 campaign. The files show Twitter executives scrambling to come up with a reason for the blockade and debating whether "hacked materials" would hold up as an excuse. (The laptop was not hacked, what the New York Post obtained was a hard drive that the Democratic nominee’s son had left with a Delaware repair shop, but that wasn’t clear at the time.)

The files also show that Twitter acted on its own, not in response to a request from the Biden campaign, which did later ask that tweets with pornographic images of Hunter Biden be removed. And while one official at the liberal company did raise the prospect that Trump could be elected, Taibbi flatly said there was no evidence of government involvement.

Still, Trump used this to advance his two-year-old crusade to show, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him.

Here’s the entire post:

"So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" 

 

So, how does a true Conservative square his support for Trump with this obvious disregard for the Constitution?

The Moon

The only male member of an NHS health visitor team has won a sex discrimination case after his female boss told him to 'man up' in front of a room full of women.

***

The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies . . . Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”--Farrow

***

Prigozin's murder must make people think something. 

Putin is not a leader as much as an independent, self-advancing strongman whose loyalty is to himself. The other world leaders will wax moralistically but will do nothing; they want to protect themselves. This should raise the horrible question, Are these people doing anything for their citizens? Or, is everything the citizen gets deciduous, shed from above as part of the 'leader's' lifecycle?

***

The debates are never as revealing or as valuable as hoped for but last night's diverse gladiators made it entertaining.

***

The Moon

The moon is getting busy

India has landed a vehicle on the moon, close to the currently important south pole. There have been 28 landing missions--vs. 'impact' landings where the vehicle is destroyed--including six American missions that carried humans along with it. A total of twelve men have walked on the moon. All from the Apollo Program. And those men all returned.

The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russian space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.

On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.

Wearing Sunglasses at the Abyss

Starting pitcher Paul Skenes, the No. 1 pick by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 2023 MLB Draft, has been promoted to Double-A Altoona, the team announced Monday. He will pitch on Saturday; it's sold out.

***

“Population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization,” Musk tweeted this week, along with a list of countries where fertility rates are supposedly in decline.

***

The big story of the modern world is not inequality, which has declined even in purely financial terms since the days of dukes with 800-year-old names. The big story is Clark’s “equality of genuine comfort.”--McCloskey on how the poor gain more than the rich in a richer society

***

The Republican debates, the first dose of the democracy election placebo, starts tonight.

***

Wearing Sunglasses at the Abyss

Sometimes the harebrained escapes the dismissal of thoughtful, scornful, disbelief.

Fourteen major American cities are part of a globalist climate organization known as the “C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group,” which has an “ambitious target” by the year 2030 of “0 kg [of] meat consumption,” “0 kg [of] dairy consumption,” “3 new clothing items per person per year,” “0 private vehicles” owned, and “1 short-haul return flight (less than 1500 km) every 3 years per person.”

C40’s goals can be found in its “The Future of Urban Consumption in a 1.5°C World” report, which was published in 2019 and reportedly reemphasized in 2023. The organization is headed and largely funded by Democrat billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Nearly 100 cities across the world make up the organization, and its American members include Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.

Bloomberg is no fool so his association with this dilutes the insane impression of the idea. And so often these wildly destructive notions are presented as foggy, intellectual, good-hearted but unachievable wishes. But look at the implication here. No farming, no manufacturing or retail, no travel. This is Blade Runner stuff.

This type of devastating social change is compatible with war or plague. And this is desired. This is the Plan.

Somehow these horrific scenes never attract scrutiny or reflection.

Battery Costs

The idea that you can switch off the source of 80 per cent of humankind’s energy and everything will be fine is almost comically unworldly.--O'neill

***

One side of the culture war sees elite knowledge as superior to cultural knowledge. The other side insists that the reverse is true.

***

CO2 production from the U.S. has dropped from 2005 to 2020, despite the increased U.S. population and production. Why? Natural gas.

****

Battery Costs

This is from a letter forwarded to me from a Dr. Fields from the University of Alabama. I'm unsure of the specifics but the idea of the costs of EV is worth the effort and is rarely discussed.

Lithium Batteries

500 tons of earth/ ore will be refined into one lithium car battery. 900-1000 gallons of fuel is burned by one gigantic machine in a 12-hour shift.

Lithium is refined from ore using sulfuric acid. The proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass, Nevada is estimated to require up to 75 semi-loads of sulfuric acid a day! The acid and its byproducts go to several of the new EPA Superfund sites.

A battery in an electric car, let’s say an average Tesla, is made of:

25 pounds of lithium,

60 pounds of nickel,

44 pounds of manganese,

30 pounds of cobalt,

200 pounds of copper,

and

400 pounds of aluminum, steel, plastic, etc......

averaging 750-1,000 pounds of minerals, that had to be mined and processed

into a battery that merely stores electricity... Electricity which is generated by

oil, gas, coal, or water (and a tiny fraction of wind and solar).

 

Iron and Corn

Maryland has recorded its first case of locally acquired malaria in four decades, setting off concern among public health officials about the mosquito-borne disease known as a major global killer.

***

Who is this man?

***

Wait. The Chinese gave Janet Yellen hallucinogens without her knowledge?


***

Trochilic

MEANING:
adjective: Relating to the wheel or the rotary motion.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek trochos (wheel), from trechein (to run), which also gave us troche (lozenge) and the metrical trochee. Earliest documented use: 1570.

***


Iron and Corn


In an interview with Salon, [Warren] Hern, the author of Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth, doesn’t just argue that humanity is a cancer on the planet. He also advocates treating it with a similarly therapeutic regimen. After all, Hern told his interlocutor, “the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process.” As his book’s title suggests, humanity has evolved to the stage at which it has become the devourer of worlds.

Hern heaps praise on the ideas, if not the methods, adopted by the eco-terrorist outfit Earth First!, whose values were “very romantic.” Indeed. At least as a disposition, these laments are all a form of romanticism familiar to students of Rousseau. For that 18th-century philosopher, “it was iron and corn which first civilized men and ruined humanity.” The inescapable logic of economic specialization brings with it “the dissolution of morals,” Rousseau observed, because “the necessary consequence of luxury brings within its turn the corruption of taste.” Among the corrupting tastes to which we’ve succumbed is the affinity for modern conveniences like air-conditioning, which is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year.--Rothman

'Corrupters of men' is an ancient religious concept and is always amusing to hear from the mouths of anti-religious revolutionaries. Tearing the culture down to the studs implies some studs and what they are. Somehow those specifics get very fuzzy.

***

Answer: Fetterman

China Economy

While the movie The Blind Side was a box office smash, Michael Lewis said he and the Tuohy family received around $350,000 each from the movie’s profits. Oher says he wants $15 million from the Tuohys.

***

The United Kingdom’s Labour Party has abandoned the policy of self-identification — that is, allowing people to change their legal gender simply by filling out a form.

***

The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.

***


China Economy

China’s major tech companies have shed more than $1 trillion in market value and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers over the past two years. For years the government boosted favored industries like real estate and electric vehicles, but these are now deflating. Several hundred EV startups have gone bust in the past few years.

Many young, highly educated Chinese who can’t find jobs in their chosen fields have dropped out of the labor force, which they describe as “lying flat.” One Peking University economist estimated that youth unemployment would have hit 46.5% this spring if the millions of workers who have stopped looking for work had been counted.

The government is telling college graduates to settle for lower-paying, blue-collar jobs. “The more ambitious you are, the more down to earth you need to be,” the Communist Party’s People’s Daily said last month. The censorship of unemployment data is aimed at preserving social stability amid a growing class of educated, disillusioned and restless young people who could become a source of political unrest.--wsj

Pointless Asceticism

The nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings once observed that “the history of man’s necessities is the history of his inventions.”

***

Several reported cases of the dengue virus in humans have prompted Florida’s health department to issue a mosquito-borne illness alert in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

***

WOD
reprehensible

MEANING:
adjective: Deserving criticism or condemnation.

ETYMOLOGY: A number of peculiar connections.  
From Latin reprehendere (to hold back, to censure), from re- (intensive) + prehendere (to seize). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ghend-/ghed- (to seize or to take), which is also the source of pry, prey, spree, reprise, surprise, osprey, prison, impregnable, impresa, prise, and reprehend. Earliest documented use: 1384.

Think 'prehensile tail.'

***


Pointless Asceticism

A summary of some problems with the regulation of gas stoves, in National Review:

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, David Blackmon looks at the latest stage of the administration’s war on gas stoves:

"[The] Department of Energy’s (DOE) efforts to regulate at least half of all gas cooking stoves off the market through increased efficiency standards and force a costly redesign of up to 90 per cent of new gas cooktop models by 2027. In proposing the new standards, DOE officials released estimates of cost savings for consumers of “$650 million to $1.71 billion,” adding that “net societal benefits (including pollution reduction and health savings) would be even higher.”

Blackmon was unimpressed by these numbers, noting, for example, that

"[The] DOE’s own estimate is that the new efficiency standards would save consumers a rounding-error $22 over 14.5 years in operating costs. At $1.50 per year, consumers would be unable to recoup the higher retail price of the electric replacement over an entire lifetime."

But then the DOE does not appear to have been impressed by these numbers, either:

Just days before the President and his entourage departed Washington DC for Utah, DOE was forced to publicly admit that even its paltry original cost savings estimates for consumers were significantly overstated, by as much as 30 percent. DOE now admits that its proposed new standards would result in savings for each consumer of just 9 cents per month.

As is the case so often with such measures, any sense of proportionality seems to be absent:

The Heritage Foundation’s calculation based on DOE’s own data concluded the most optimistic possible outcome for the new standards would result in a net global temperature mitigation of 0.0009 degrees Celsius.

Then again, pointless asceticism has been a feature of many religious or quasi-religious traditions (a category into which climate fundamentalism fits fairly comfortably), as is the use of symbolism. The squeezing out of gas stoves is meant to reinforce two closely related messages. The first is that no climate “sin” is too small to escape notice in the relentless quest for purity, and the second is a sense of urgency. The climate crisis/emergency is so great that nothing must be spared in the effort to stave it off."

Lessons from the Wagner Group

When presented with the choice between two hypothetical Republican candidates, only 24 percent of national Republican voters opted for “a candidate who focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media, and culture” over “a candidate who focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border.”

***

"What I feel really sad about is I watched the whole thing up close. They showered him with resources and love. That he’s suspicious of them is breathtaking. The state of mind one has to be in to do that — I feel sad for him."--Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side

***

40% of the victims of the Maui fires had no insurance.

***

Preseason football is not very meaningful but Kendrick Green, 87 pick in Round 3 of the 2021 NFL Draft, was meaningfully and worrisomely bad in their first preseason, creating some anxiety about whether they have to find a backup center.

***

Lessons from the Wagner Group

The WSJ has an article on the rule of law, Trump's and Biden's legal problems, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner's surprising reach. This is a part of it.

"The Wagner mercenaries adhere to no standards of modern warfare. They are stone-cold killers. Yet it’s generally believed that no framework exists to prosecute stateless mercenaries for the atrocities they commit.

Though a significant event in the Ukraine war, the mutiny left the impression that Wagner is a collection of guns for hire. It is more than that.

This newspaper recently published a detailed examination of the empire that Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has assembled. The Wagner Group is in fact a military, financial and business organization that operates worldwide outside the established rule of law. It is off the grid.

According to the Journal’s reporting, Mr. Prigozhin operates some 70 linked companies that conduct nominally legitimate business in real estate, government contracting, oil, mining and natural-resource development. Mr. Prigozhin’s shell companies share financing for these commercial operations.

An umbrella group called M-Finance mines gold, diamonds and timber in the Central African Republic. Wagner runs a joint venture with a government-owned mining company in Madagascar, an operation, the Journal reported, “with a projected potential profit of billions of dollars in the next decade.” They have mining operations in Sudan and Mali. A company called Evro Polic protects and derives revenue from Bashar al-Assad’s oil and gas fields in Syria.

At the center of it all is Mr. Prigozhin, a thug and one of the most fascinating figures of our time. He has taken the Putin era’s pseudo-democracy based on oligarchic corruption to its logical endpoint, creating a multinational pseudo-corporation in business with willing sovereign governments.


Mr. Prigozhin, a limitless cynic, is sending a message: Grow up. The world is returning to survival of the fittest, and all your rules be damned. I am simply a rational entrepreneur, creating a parallel system without the burden of accountability."

The accountability question is certainly true but one wonders at the growing kingdoms of entities that follow rules that are not just in violation of the law, they are said to supersede them. All sorts of elements--criminal, religious, sociological--are flying banners that purport to be more basic, more real, more accurate a reflection of who we are, and, thus, more legitimate. The Wagner Group is an autocratic group that believes its outrageous power is just. And deserved. Warlords, like cartels, believe they fill a basic social need. So the social revolutionaries in the West--and especially in the U.S.--do not see themselves as violating the rules of American law, they see themselves as tapped into a basic law or groups of laws that the Constitutional framers either did not understand or overlooked. They believe they have a hold of the truth.

And truth trumps law.

Femaleness and its Discontents 2

 

An attack on Chinese engineers in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan was thwarted by Pakistan’s military, leaving two militants dead and the Chinese workers unharmed, police say.

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New York Mets slugger Daniel Vogelbach had a night to forget as he was booed off the field by his own fans during Friday's defeat to the Atlanta Braves. The Mets were shut out by the Braves bullpen, with Vogelbach putting in an especially disappointing performance.
The slugger struck out four times in the game and didn't manage to record a single hit in five at-bats on the night, causing fans to boo him and call for him to be DFA'd.

The Pirates got Holderman for him, which is probably more galling for the Mets.

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In the second quarter, people taking hardship withdrawals from their 401(k) was up 12% compared to the first three months of the year and leapt 36% year over year, according to a new survey from Bank of America, which tracks about 4 million clients’ employee benefit programs.

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Femaleness and its Discontents 2

The parade of horribles continued: “Hate crimes are on the rise.” Mills and her audience picture white Trumpists beating up blacks, Asians, and gays, notwithstanding the fact that hate crime suspects are disproportionately black. Invocation of climate change? Check. Invocation of the “constant threat of gun violence,” which, like climate change, can “feel overwhelming?” Check again. (Actually, the only people facing a “constant threat of gun violence” are residents of inner-city neighborhoods, who may be caught up in the dozens of fatal black-on-black shootings that occur daily across the country. The answer to that threat is proactive policing, a solution that most college presidents would dismiss as racist.)

Mills issued an invitation to a “university-wide conversation, starting today.” That conversation would address how NYU might “create and sustain a fully inclusive community where everyone can thrive.” The invitation was doubly tendentious. Such “conversations” (i.e., one-way harangues) have been going on nonstop for the last decade—see Beilock’s 2018 pledge to ensure that Barnard was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Second, the implication that NYU is not already a fully inclusive community is absurd. The groups whom Mills and her colleagues insist are being excluded are in fact preferred at every juncture, whether in admissions or hiring. If the beneficiaries of those preferences do not “thrive” at the same rate as members of non-preferred groups, it is because their academic skills are, on average, weaker. That weakness is the reason for preferential policies in the first place.

Other aspects of Mills’s CV are equally emblematic—her research on race and gender, her oversight of NYU’s Abu Dhabi satellite as senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life, her directorship of NYU’s film Production Lab, and her collaboration with Chelsea Clinton on a documentary. (Filmmaking is not the liberal arts’ comparative advantage—books are. But the filmification of the humanities continues apace.)

The contemporary university is always on the prowl for new sources of income to support its burgeoning bureaucracy. That means going abroad and overlooking violations of academic morality that would be disqualifying locally. Drag queen story hours are celebrated on American campuses, but they might not be welcomed in Abu Dhabi, where cross-dressing is illegal. The Sharia-inspired legal code in the United Arab Emirates allows for execution for homosexual sex acts. But students in Abu Dhabi pay full tuition at higher rates than American students, so NYU’s bureaucrats will focus their attention on what Mills calls “persistent” discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the U.S. To date, one supposed exemplar of such allegedly persistent discrimination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has not called for the criminalization of homosexual sex, or for its capital punishment.

The most far-reaching effects of the feminized university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.” It turns out that females and males assess the value of debate and the legitimacy of speech restrictions unequally. The 2022 FIRE College Free Speech Rankings reported “stark” differences in whether female and male undergraduates would allow speakers with “offensive” ideas (such as the belief that abortion should be illegal) to come on campus. In the 2021 FIRE rankings, over 40 percent of students at Barnard and Wellesley (women’s colleges, all) supported the use of violence against dissenters. In a 2018 Knight Foundation survey of over 4,400 college students, reported in Quillette, 71 percent of males agreed that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society; 59 percent of females agreed that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech. Two-thirds of male psychology professors from top universities polled in 2021 believed that pursuing truth was more important than pursuing social equity if the two conflict; around a third of male respondents said that the issue was “complicated.” Fifty-two percent of female psychologists answered that the issue was complicated, while only 43 percent prioritized truth. A 2017 YouGov survey of over 2000 U.S. adults found that 56 percent of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas, whereas 64 percent of females said that they should. Men support the development of knowledge that explains reality, even if such knowledge threatens egalitarian norms, whereas females are more willing to suppress such scholarship if it poses “potential moral threats,” as Quillette put it.

As long as the rhetoric of safety, threat, and trauma remains dominant, the push to shut down non-progressive speech will continue. And now the traumification of everyday life, like other modern academic trends, is fast spreading outside the campus. Emotional-healing coaches help the public “navigate” trauma in the “space of healing and self-development,” as a press release for one such coach, Rebeccah Silence, put it. The media operate in full trauma mode. The use of the word “trauma” in New York Times news stories rose by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021 and by nearly 300 percent from 2000 to 2021. In a June 22, 2022, email to the paper’s senior editors, a Times standards editor said that he was sympathetic to this impulse. After all, the standards editor wrote, “mass shootings, a pandemic, war, the murder of George Floyd and an attack on the U.S. Capitol” had left “wounds, shock and scarring in their wake.” A college president could not have put it better. But trauma, the editor suggested, didn’t need to be the Times’s “go-to term for any and all stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds.” Alternatives? How about: “stress, pain, suffering, scarring, shock, agony and wounds,” the editor proposed. The possibility that Times news coverage would simply dial back the hysteria was apparently inconceivable.

Colleges have been the conveyor belt into the outside world of safetyism, of the belief that minorities in the U.S. are endemically victimized, and of the ideas that words wound, that certain beliefs equal hate, and that such “hate” should be banned. Linda Mills may not fully subscribe to all those concepts. But she is part of a monumental shift in university life that has put such propositions into widespread circulation and that affects the principles by which we govern ourselves. The feminized university would be unlikely to choose the motto NYU adopted at its founding in 1831, reflecting its working-class, non-entitled self-image: Perstare et Praestare (Persevere and Excel). Excellence is now understood to underwrite white male privilege. Perseverance, absent a helping bureaucrat, is too much to ask of students who are, as irony-proof Princeton protesters put it several years ago, sick and tired of being sick and tired. A better motto for today (not in exclusionary Latin, of course) would be: Fight hate and recover from trauma!'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal

Femaleness and its Discontents 1

More than half of Iraqi oil comes from wells with Chinese involvement, and 30% of Iraq’s oil goes to China.

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Pigeons and doves are technically the same exact animal. In fact, the only real difference is in the name: the word "dove" is more Nordic, while "pigeon" has a French origin. Despite the fact that there's no big difference between the birds, some people tend to categorize them by size, dubbing bigger birds pigeons, while smaller ones are typically called doves.

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There is enough salt in the ocean to cover the Earth's entire surface. If all of the salt was spread out across the entire planet, it would reportedly be about 500 feet thick, or the height of a 40-story office building. Most of the salt in the ocean comes from rocks on land and is typically transported by rainwater runoff.

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Femaleness and its Discontents 1

Pitt has appointed a new president, a woman who will join part of a revolution in education bureaucracy and sensibility. Here's part of an article that believes the advancement of women in academia is not an 'advance,' it's a symptom.

'New York University’s selection of its new president is Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker, and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy.

Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate

Mirroring the feminization of the bureaucracy is the feminization of the student body. Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change. College institutions “really have a part to play in how we support students” suffering from that mental health crisis, Beilock tweeted recently. (A psychologist, Beilock specializes in improving female success in science by combatting performance anxiety, making her another overdetermined choice for university president.)

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity. On taking the helm of Barnard College in 2018 before ascending four years later to Dartmouth, Beilock pledged to ensure that the college was an “inclusive environment free from fear and hate.” Both terms are overwrought. There is nothing at Barnard or any other American campus that could rationally be cause for “fear” (apart from the possible incursion of violent street crime from surrounding areas); there has never been a more welcoming, supportive, and tolerant institution in human history than a college campus, at least toward humanity’s traditionally marginalized groups. Likewise, “hate” can be found here only under its new definition as a disfavored ideological position—the position, say, that seven-year-olds should not have premature knowledge of sexuality forced upon them via in-school “gender” instruction.

Given the ubiquity on campuses of the language of vulnerability, it is fitting that Linda Mills’s social work specialty is trauma. Her trauma research has centered on domestic violence, where the concept has legitimate applications. But the claim that NYU is a place of pervasive unsafety will likely get an additional boost from Mills’s ascendancy. In her letter of introduction as NYU’s president-designate, Mills adopted the fateful vocabulary of hurt and trauma. “We are a community that is hurting,” Mills asserted, especially after the “traumatic effects” of the pandemic. (The real hurt was inflicted by the unnecessary lockdowns, whose victims were not NYU’s bureaucrats, professors, or even most of its students, but rather small-business owners deprived of livelihoods and children whose parents did not have the capacity to homeschool them. The record does not reflect an effort by NYU’s leaders to combat those lockdowns.)

Mills portrayed the U.S. as endemically biased: “In the United States and elsewhere, we are struggling to address persistent inequalities and discrimination, whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, or other factors.” This by-now reflexive condemnation of alleged American bigotry is at best an awkward, and at worst an irrelevant, importation into a president’s first message to her university. In an alternative world, Mills might have celebrated the joy of learning and the grandeur of the Western tradition. But in any case, the real “struggle” should be to close the academic skills gaps whose effects the academy then attributes to racism.'--From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal (to be continued)

 

‘Synodality’ and ‘Clericalism.’

Who are these "unaccompanied minors" crossing the border and where are they going?

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Jarry got married.

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Tristan Jarry

A WOD recently was 'Vulcan,' the Roman fire and blacksmith god. Injured and deformed, he marries the spectacular Venus and is betrayed. The Greek equivalent is Hephaestus, similarly injured and betrayed. He marries Aphrodite.
I thought about the name Festus, a name I first learned on "Gunsmoke," a Western TV weekly starring James Arness, a big guy who played the monster in the original "The Thing." An important minor character was a deputy named "Festus," a kind of uneducated Everyman with his typical naivete and wisdom. The name is Latin, meaning "Festive" from "Festival," an irony on Gunsmoke, perhaps, but also of biblical origin; Festus was the Roman governor of Judea who succeeded Pilate. There is also a Greek god Festus who was some minor fertility god.

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‘Synodality’ and ‘Clericalism.’

Hélène de Lauzun has an article on a change in Vatican policy, seemingly aimed at Opus Dei. It is especially interesting in the context of the Church movement away from the structured hierarchy encouraging more "synodality."

"In a new motu proprio (“of one’s own initiative”) dated Tuesday, August 8th, Pope Francis amended the canons relating to personal prelatures, a status previously enjoyed by the organisation of Opus Dei, which had already been undermined a year ago by a previous papal reform.

The principle of the personal prelature dates back to the Second Vatican Council and was instituted by the decree Presbyterorum ordinis. Opus Dei, unaffiliated with a territory and therefore a diocese, needs the personal prelature to enable the organisation to carry out special pastoral tasks by virtue of a recognised ‘charism.’ The personal prelature has been used very little, since in the Catholic Church only Opus Dei, the organisation founded by Saint José Maria Escriva de Balaguer, has enjoyed this status since 1982.

At the end of July 2022, Opus Dei had already come under attack from Pope Francis. The motu proprio Ad charisma tuendum—conceived as a continuation of Praedicate Evangelium (“Preach the Gospel”), the apostolic constitution from 19 March 2022—intended to reform the structure of the Roman curia “in order to better promote its service in favour of evangelization.” It moved the supervision of personal prelatures, and therefore of Opus Dei, from the Conference of Bishops to the Conference of Clergy, which had the effect of weakening the authority of the Work and strengthening Vatican control over it. Ad charisma tuendum had also changed the status of the leader of the Work, who no longer had the rank of bishop: he could no longer bear the attributes of a bishop and or exercise the authority of a bishop.

Following from these earlier provisions, the “Apostolic Letter in the form of a Motu Proprio amending canons 295-296 on personal prelatures,” published on August 8th, now assimilates personal prelatures into “public clerical associations of pontifical right.” The edict, in simple terms, will further strengthen the Holy See’s control over the operation and development of universal or international associations, as is the case with Opus Dei, by virtue of canon 312 §1.

The pontiff “emphasises the associative character of the personal prelature,” according to the French canonist Msgr. Patrick Valdrini. The prelate of a personal prelature is now considered to be a “moderator”—a title reserved for leaders of associations of the faithful, like other existing communities, such as the Emmanuel Community—who retains the authority of an ordinary. In other words, prelates will remain leaders with executive power, which allows them in particular to open seminaries and incardinate deacons and priests.

The text also recalls that the faithful belonging to a personal prelature remains under the jurisdiction of their local diocese, which remains the region’s natural authority.

Finally, the new motu proprio insists that the statutes of a personal prelature must henceforth be “approved or issued by the Apostolic See.” Last April, Opus Dei voted on new statutes to incorporate the recent changes. These statutes must now be reconfirmed by Pope Francis, who may want to change them once more.

The reform is consistent with other measures already taken by Pope Francis, aimed at accelerating the centralisation of power despite the stated intentions of ‘synodality’ and the fight against ‘clericalism.’"

"Centralization" despite "stated intentions of of ‘synodality’ and the fight against ‘clericalism.’" A collision between the ideal and the practical, the spiritual and the mundane?