Dueling Consensus

Where did "line of gain" come from? From the same place as "top of mind?"

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300 miles of tunnels in Gaza? But no GDP?

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Sen. Menendez, living at home with wads of cash and gold bars, is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Dueling Consensus

This could be fun.

International scientists have jointly signed a declaration dismissing the existence of a climate crisis and insisting that carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth.

“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration, made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.

The pendulum of truth?

Democracy reflected in science. The confidence of consensus. The joy of community. In an uncertain world, isn't that enough?

The Frizzon of the Luddite

Pittsburgh police are investigating after a man was robbed at gunpoint overnight in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood.
Pittsburgh Public Safety officials say officers responded to the 300 block of Morewood Ave. around 12:45 a.m. for reports of an armed robbery.
The victim was pistol-whipped.

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"My colleague’s mother threw their pet cat off their balcony in Beijing when the red guards were at their door. Pets were bourgeoisie. My colleague said she never forgave her mom."--from a comment on an article on China's "revolution."

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The Global Warming child is pro-Hamas. Will that change peoples' minds? Should it?

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The Frizzon of the Luddite

Bidenomics is fast becoming a study in the contortions of industrial policy. Consider the Commerce Department’s decision late last week to slap tariffs on solar imports from Southeast Asia, raising the costs of U.S. solar-energy projects that the White House says are the vital future of U.S. energy.

…..

The solar follies reveal the contradictions of the Biden Administration’s industrial policy. Its labor, climate and anti-China agendas conflict in their combination of subsidies, mandates, bans and taxes. Subsidies lead to tariffs, which lead to more subsidies as government becomes the allocator of capital and decides which companies win or lose. The biggest losers, as usual, will be American taxpayers.--wsj
                                                *
There are a lot of problems here, the most obvious is the conflict of titanic competing philosophies. Some in the government have decided that modernity is a danger to the world. This is not a new idea; it has been with us forever. Luddites. Rosseau. Marx. There have always been some who believed that our humanity was inversely related to the development of material success. This is heartfelt--and often championed by profound thinkers. So, frequently morons are warmed by greatness. Think Maxine Watters on the same dais as William Blake.

The real problem arises after this very subjective assumption: the solution is modernization.

Energy Warriors

"To the BELOVED REPUBLIC under whose equal laws I am made the peer of any man, although denied political equality by my native land, I dedicate this book with an intensity of gratitude and admiration which the native-born citizen can neither feel nor understand."--Dedication to Andrew Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy (Scribner's, 1886)

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The NHL suspended Ottawa Senators forward Shane Pinto for 41 games on Thursday, making the 22-year-old American the first modern-day hockey player banned for sports gambling.
The league said the half-season ban was for “activities relating to sports wagering” and that its investigation found no evidence Pinto bet on NHL games.

Pinto's team helmet has a gambling ad on it.

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Energy Warriors

US oil production surged to a record high of 13.2 million barrels a day last week.

The new record high also comes as oil prices have also jumped in recent months, with Brent crude up 24% since June. That's as top OPEC+ producers Saudi Arabia and Russia have curbed supplies.

The US oil rig count remains well below the 2014 peak of more than 1,600 rigs. There were just 502 active oil rigs in the US last week, representing a 69% decline from the 2014 peak.

The White House explains this rise proves their energy policy is not hostile to American oil production.

Market Insider reports, "That shows just how efficient America's energy industry has become after a period of depressed oil prices from 2014 through 2021."

But there are other explanations. Higher prices make inefficient oil production profitable and gives value to oil of lesser quality.

More CO2. Higher prices. Lower quality. That's what we all want, right?

 

Solving the Education Problem

The off-duty pilot facing 83 attempted murder charges after he allegedly tried to shut off the engines of a plane mid-flight on Sunday night admitted to taking psychedelic mushrooms, new arrest documents claim.

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The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

That is from a new paper by Christopher and Caitlin Kearns in the QJE.

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There are still some 247 million malaria cases globally every year causing 619,000 deaths including 476 thousand deaths of children under the age of 5. That’s more than 1000 deaths of children every day.

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Solving the Education Problem

The state of Oregon has solved the testing disparities in the state by outlawing the tests.

Oregon changed letter grades to a pass-incomplete system. There were little to no attendance requirements, and the essential skills requirements were suspended, according to OPB.

Although the suspension was supposed to end in 2021, the Oregon board has extended the pause on the essentials skills test until at least 2029 because of --- racism.

Leaders in the Oregon Department of Education and the state school board say that requiring all students to pass standardized tests or create teacher-judged in-depth assignments as graduation requirements are "harmful hurdles" for "historically marginalized students."

Social Justice

According to survey data, up to 80 percent of trans individuals suffer from serious psychopathologies and one-quarter of black trans youth attempt suicide each year.

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The Indian authorities have charged the renowned novelist Arundhati Roy over public comments she made 13 years ago about the restive Kashmir region, the latest step in an intensifying crackdown on free speech by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Suman Nalwa, a spokeswoman for the New Delhi police, said the government had approved charges against Ms. Roy and the Kashmiri law professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a move required for certain crimes in India. The two have been charged under several sections of Indian law, including offenses related to provocative speech and the promotion of enmity between different groups.

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Popeyes has claimed the position of the second-largest chicken chain in the U.S. Chick-fil-A came in at No. 1.
Popeyes also saw a decrease in its market share during the same period, dropping from 15% to 11.9%. Chick-fil-A, meanwhile, expanded its market share from 38.3% to 45.5%.

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Social Justice

Riley on Sowell and "social justice."

In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”

The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”

…..

For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”

To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.

…..

He says that whether social justice proponents are pushing for slavery reparations or higher taxes on the rich, their real agenda is the confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Enthralled by what he calls the “chess-pieces fallacy,” progressives treat individuals like inert objects. “I got that from Adam Smith, who had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who feel they can move around people much as one moves around chess pieces,” he says.

“That fallacy takes many forms, and taxation is a classic example.” The fallacy is assuming that “tax hikes and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction, when often they move in the opposite direction.” Liberals say, “ ‘We need more money, so we’ll make the wealthy pay their fair share,’ which is never defined, of course. But the wealthy are not just going to sit there and do nothing.”

Destructive Material Progress

“The Biden administration acts like we don’t have any leverage over our ‘friends’ the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and other governments that can speak to Hamas.” (Wright) I suspect that the Biden administration is finding that it doesn’t have much leverage over the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and other governments that can speak to Hamas. Remember, candidate Biden talked about how he was going to make the Saudis “pariahs,” and then ended up fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh. I suspect many foreign leaders of non-allied nations see Biden as a chump, a man they can cross, ignore, or blow off with little consequence.--NR

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WSJ writes that lawlessness is 'a growing social dysfunction born of the abandonment of broken-windows policing. Broken windows originated in a 1982 article for the Atlantic magazine by James Q. Wilson of Harvard and George L. Kelling of Rutgers. They argued that if you sweat the small stuff that really makes city residents feel unsafe (aggressive panhandling, public urination, petty crime), you’ll catch problems before they metastasize. Their metaphor was the broken window.'


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In Portland, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) union has been bankrupted, the port closed, hundreds of millions of dollars lost and shipments slowed all because of a dispute over 2 jobs.


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Destructive Material Progress

Vampires and zombies may be replacing the eagle as America's totem; we seem to be fascinated by the undead. Marx. And, of course, Rousseau.

By the early 1970s, Atomic Age dreams of ubiquitous nuclear power were evaporating as fast as those Space Age fantasies of humanity soon spreading out into the solar system. The data show a clear break in nuclear reactor construction in 1971 and 1972, which suggests the decline in reactor construction is likely attributable to a confluence of regulatory events, perhaps creating uncertainty about the future cost of safety regulations. Two of the most important events happened in 1971: the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Calvert Cliffs decision, in which the DC Circuit Court ordered federal regulators to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, widely considered the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental laws. Basically, NEPA and related executive orders require federal agencies to investigate and assess the potential environmental costs, if any, of its projects and solicit public input. (At least twenty states and localities have their own such statutes, known as “little NEPAs.”) The following passage from the Calvert decision gives a good feel for the era’s Down Wing attitude: “These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation…seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment. Several recently enacted statutes attest to the commitment of the Government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’”--Pethokoukis

"Destructive engine of material progress." And you thought these guys were wearing hair shirts and living in the desert, not running your government. 

John Galt, please call your office.

It Lives!

Biden-bombics. After adjusting for inflation, the typical white family’s income rose 1.3%, the report says. But it shows declines for black and Hispanic families of 1.6% and 1.1%, respectively. Wages for minorities didn’t keep up with inflation, and those for whites barely did.

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In Chicago, officials envision a city-owned grocery store as a way to address food deserts in neighborhoods where privately owned stores have closed and moved away. But rather than trying—and inevitably failing—to duplicate those services at the public’s expense, Johnson should instead listen to why the likes of Walmart and Safeway have bailed. “Grocery operators have pointed to crime and homelessness as reasons they’ve needed to invest more in security, driving up costs,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

So the government, which cannot keep the streets safe and hold a criminal in jail is going to open grocery stores?

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Is anything more symbolic of the inept, dangerous American political system than the laughable attempt to create the appearance of Republican House leadership?

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It Lives!

The endless Israeli wars, the abrasive American 'identity politics,' the ubiquitous mood of 'unforgiving,' all recall earlier times.

The oldest known evidence of any law code are tablets from the ancient city Ebla (Tell Mardikh in modern-day Syria). They date to about 2400 B.C. — approximately 600 years before Hammurabi put together his famous code.

"An eye for an eye ..." is a paraphrase of Hammurabi's Code, a collection of 282 laws inscribed on an upright stone pillar. The code was found by French archaeologists in 1901 while excavating the ancient city of Susa, which is in modern-day Iran.

He ruled the Babylonian Empire from 1792-50 B.C.E. And his laws seem to grow out of necessity: he was trying to organize an expanding empire of diverse groups with diverse rules and norms.

His was actually an effort to eliminate tribal justice that holds groups responsible for individual acts and individuals for group acts, for example, Hatfield and McCoy thinking. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is the thinking of the modern, ironically named, Progressive.

Group identity is the most primitive of all legal forms. Hammurabi's genius was to overcome it, to apply individual crimes to individuals. There is a thesis that it influenced the Old Testament (through the Babylonian Captivity.) 

But group identity never has left the Middle East. And it will always have the lurching monster staggering around, fed and encouraged by the Left in the American University Lab.

The Rewards of Subsidy

According to data from the Census Bureau, 343,000 Californians fled the state between July 2021 and July 2022. That marks the third consecutive year that California has seen a net decline in population.

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For the past two years, at least two of the people advising Biden’s Iran envoy were actually secretly working for the Iranian government.--NR

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Danny Serafini, a first-round draft pick who once pitched for the Pirates, has been arrested for the murder of his father-in-law.

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The Rewards of Subsidy

In her 2004 paper “The Incentive Effects of Higher Education Subsidies on Student Effort,” New York Federal Reserve economist Aysegul Sahin made the case that the less they have to pay, the less students work. She wrote: “I find that although subsidizing tuition increases enrollment rates, it reduces student effort. This follows from the fact that a high-subsidy, low-tuition policy causes an increase in the percentage of less able and less highly motivated college graduates. Additionally—and potentially more important—all students, even the more highly motivated ones, respond to lower tuition levels by decreasing their effort levels. This study adds to the literature on the enrollment effects of low-tuition policies by demonstrating how high-subsidy, low-tuition policies have both disincentive effects on students’ study time, and adverse effects on human capital accumulation.”

So the results are that people work less, produce less and schools attract and reward less capable people. But wouldn't it be kinder?

Nostalgia for Old Battlefields

According to Irving Levin Associates, a research firm, between 2013 and August 2023 the nine healthcare giants spent around $325bn on over 130 mergers and acquisitions.

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In 2016, China reported 17.86 million births. This week, it reported 9.56 million births for 2022.

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Now 261 confirmed cases of Dengue in Italy of which 49 are locally acquired.

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Nostalgia for Old Battlefields

Remember when American courts tried to use European court decisions as precedents?

Here is a revealing segment from Gramm:

"...economic freedom and source of our prosperity, is being threatened by the Biden administration, which seeks to circumvent Congress, the courts and the Constitution to Europeanize the American economy. The administration, which can’t get Congress to legislate its agenda or the courts to allow it through executive orders, is now using international agreements and coordination in tax, antitrust, environmental and financial policy to empower Europe to impose the administration’s agenda on the U.S.

Europe is more than willing to share its constraints with its more efficient competitor, but the Biden administration is the driving force behind this regulatory race to the bottom. This mounting regulatory burden is dragging down the unique productivity, wages and profits that Americans view as our birthright.

A perfect example is the Biden administration’s agreement to allow foreign governments to tax U.S. companies on their U.S. earnings if Congress refuses to adopt the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s global minimum tax. The administration not only supports the international tax increase but was its principal author. While 137 nations endorsed the OECD tax agreement, a Democratic Congress rejected it last year. Now, with a Republican House, the administration’s only chance to raise corporate taxes is to use the OECD agreement to pressure Congress to impose the tax or let foreign nations collect the equivalent tax on U.S. subsidiaries operating in their countries. The Trump administration blocked France’s proposed digital services tax on U.S. tech companies by threatening tariffs on its wine and cheese exports to the U.S. But the Biden administration has pledged not to retaliate when foreign nations tax American companies on their U.S. earnings.

Another example of this collusion is the Federal Trade Commission’s coordination with the U.K. antitrust watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority. After the FTC wasn’t able to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard in federal court, the agency appears to have conspired with the CMA to block the acquisition.
…..

Over the past 30 years, real per capita gross domestic product in France and Germany, the EU’s two largest economies, have grown, respectively, from $28,670 to $38,913 (a 35.7% increase) and from $30,615 to $43,032 (40.5%). Real per capita GDP in the U.S. has grown 56.7%, from $40,108 to $62,866. Making America more like Europe gives the Biden administration the government it wants, but European economic results won’t give American families what they want."

                                                 ***

These people can not remember why the American Revolution occurred and what it allowed us to escape. And they go outside our foundational documents in their attempts to drag us back to those grand old days of aristocracy, ethnic conflict, and abuse of the common man.

Free Markets Versus Force

China's 44th naval escort task force - from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theatre - has been involved in routine operations in the region and spent several days in Oman last week.

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The deficit was $1.7 trillion for the most recent fiscal year, which ended September 30, according to Treasury Department data released Friday. However, the deficit essentially doubled to about $2 trillion if the impact of President Joe Biden’s federal student debt cancellation plan – which the Supreme Court struck down before it took effect – is not included.

Interest costs rose almost 40% last year, and soon we’ll spend more on interest than we do on national defense.

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With all the fuss about the new Scorsese movie, it is said that the Oklahoma Osage tribe was, in the 1920s, the richest subset in the entire world.

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A St. Louis youth football team had the rest of its season canceled after a player’s parent allegedly shot the coach multiple times for not putting his son as a starter for the team, according to city and police statements.

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Free Markets Versus Force

"One of the important achievements of free markets is that they peacefully prompt individuals not only to respect the preferences of others, but also to help others achieve their goals even when those preferences and goals are not widely shared. Furthermore, no one is compelled to offer such assistance; such assistance is given voluntarily; it is elicited through commercial offers.

Industrial policy, in contrast, conscripts everyone into serving the vision of the architects of the industrial policy. Many NatCons today, for example, long for an economy featuring more factory jobs. Never mind that most Americans don’t want such jobs (as we can tell because most Americans would not agree to take the pay cuts that would be required to ‘purchase’ the privilege of having many more such jobs). But if these NatCons ever manage to grab enough political power, they’ll try to impose their vision – an imposition that will be impossible to achieve without the NatCons threatening coercion on anyone who is prone to act in ways that would undermine the NatCons’ scheme."--Bordeaux

A Constitution of Convenience

Among the college-aged, sports betting and gambling has become largely normalized. The Rutgers study found that a third of those aged 18 to 24 were now gambling in some form online—four times as many as when the center last surveyed the state’s population in 2017—and 19 percent were at “high risk for problem gambling.” The NCAA study found more than a quarter of college-aged students had placed a sports bet using a mobile app or website.

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There are 2 million Arabs (21%) in Israel and 0 Jews in Iraq.

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Do we need to send humanitarian aid to the House Republican caucus?

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A Constitution of Convenience

--"A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." This is from former president Trump.


--New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham issued a "public health emergency order" that purportedly suspends the right to bear arms in Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County. When a reporter asked Grisham whether her order was consistent with her oath to uphold the Constitution, she reiterated that "no constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute."

So both parties publicly state that the Constitution is an impediment to some government direction and actions that some unnamed group knows and can translate. Neither party believes in foundational national concepts.

This is why the shutdown was so easy. The Constitution has little representation in public debate. And no party affiliation. Constitutionalists will become a cult, recognizing each other with a knowing look or a secret handshake. And government will, initially, look like bumper cars until some willing strong man mercifully grabs the reins.

Strange Beliefs in Government

Jon Stewart's Apple broadcast has been dropped. He and Apple executives had disagreements over some of the topics and guests on “The Problem." Mr. Stewart told members of his staff on Thursday that potential show topics related to China and artificial intelligence were causing concern among Apple executives, a person with knowledge of the meeting said. As the 2024 presidential campaign begins to heat up, there was potential for further creative disagreements, one of the people said.
The commercial mix with entertainment is difficult.

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Rep. Tlaib was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrant parents. She will bring, as many do, the problems of the old world's efforts to insinuate itself into America's new world.

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Strange Beliefs in Government

There is a lot of global trouble, national and international threats. These must be fought or surrendered to. How we lurch depends to some degree on what we, as citizens, know and will allow. (This, of course, accepts the notion that we citizens have input as to what the government does.) Yet never in this country's history has mendacity been a pillar of society. With that poison in the culture, it is difficult to see how it can be mobilized against perceived dangers. And last night Biden tried to do just that.

But in a culture of lies, will a speech like that be meaningful? Can anything?

An example. 

In a recent speech, I heard Biden claim, “Billionaires pay an average of — guess what? — less than 8 percent in federal taxes — less than 8 percent on a yearly basis.” To drive home the point, the President declared that this is a “lower federal tax rate than a firefighter, a teacher, a cop” pays.

According to Congressional Budget Office statistics for 2019 (the most recent year with data), the heaviest tax burdens still fall squarely on the highest income earners. The Top 1 percent of filers pay an average federal tax rate of 30 percent. This number holds among the ultra-wealthy as well. Suppose we restrict the subset to only the top 0.01 percent of earners, a category that generally applies to people with multi-million dollar annual salaries. In that case, the CBO estimates an average federal tax rate of 30.2 percent.

By contrast, the average tax rate on the lowest quintile of filers was just 0.5 percent in 2019 – a result of generous tax credits that are designed to relieve the poor of almost their entire federal tax burden. The second lowest quintile paid an average rate of just 8.9 percent in federal taxes.

How could the President of the United States not know this? And is this president making policy on this misconception? What other strange concepts does the President of the United States suffer from? And is it a surprise that these people cannot enlist support or be believed?

Fertility and its Discontents

So if you hear that 60% of papers in your field don’t replicate, shouldn’t you care a lot about which ones? Why didn’t my colleagues and I immediately open up that paper’s supplement, click on the 100 links, and check whether any of our most beloved findings died? The answer has to be, “We just didn’t think it was an important thing to do.” We heard about the plane crash and we didn’t even bother to check the list of casualties. What a damning indictment of our field!--Mastroionanni

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Based on translated investigations from 700-year-old coroners’ inquests – estimate the per capita homicide rate in Oxford to have been 4-5 times higher than late medieval London or York.

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It is crucial to make a distinction between achievements and privileges. This is not simply a matter of semantics. Privileges come at the expense of others, but achievements add to the benefits of others.


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Fertility and its Discontents

I was reading this article on declining fertility by Hanson with notions I found surprising.

"For 250 years we’ve seen a consistent worldwide pattern of falling fertility, on track to soon fall below and then long stay below replacement level. (Innovation will then halt.) Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world. These include valuing birth control, city life, schooling, intensive parenting, “finding ourselves” before marriage, preferring careers and friends to family, and also disliking religion, arranged marriages and traditional gender roles.

Though these values seem authentic and honestly fulfilling, we must face the hard fact that they seem to be in substantial conflict with their persistence over centuries. It’s not so much that humanity might go extinct, though that is a real concern, but that the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews. Similar to how Christians came to dominate the Roman Empire. These groups reject many of the dominant world culture’s cherished values, including innovation and open debate.

                                              ***

The key issue in such a reckoning is this: which of our usual cherished values that hinder fertility shall we consider compromising or at least substantially moderating in order to ensure the continuation of something like our dominant world culture? It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive. But alas we seem to need pretty big value changes, and thus a pretty big reckoning, for voters to even be willing to consider such large payments."

Belonging

At least 244,625 videos have been uploaded to the top 35 websites set up either exclusively or partially to host deepfake porn videos in the past seven years, according to the researcher, who requested anonymity to avoid being targeted online.
Over the first nine months of this year, 113,000 videos were uploaded to the websites—a 54 percent increase on the 73,000 videos uploaded in all of 2022. By the end of this year, the analysis forecasts, more videos will have been produced in 2023 than the total number of every other year combined.

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California legislators last month quietly repealed a 2022 law that authorized disciplinary action against doctors, including loss of their medical licenses, when they share COVID-19 “misinformation” with their patients. The law, A.B. 2098, defined that ambiguous and highly contested category of speech as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”

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The redistributive view of society makes the nations’s income, to a significant extent, a common-access resource, as air, land, and water used to be. As tends to be true with all common-access resources, the competitive struggle for portions of this new common property should lead to abuse and misuse of the property.--Lee

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Belonging

These politicians aren't aware they are doing standup.

Lemieux had some comments on remarks by one Katherine Tai.

"Katherine Tai, the US Trade Representative in the Biden administration, is one of the many lawyers tasked with understanding and running the economy. Last May, she gave a speech to celebrate the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. She told her audience:

'You are not invisible. I see you and I hear you. The President sees you and hears you. And we’re fighting like hell for you.

Because you belong.'

What does that mean? What does “you belong” mean?

In a liberal-individualist society, that is, in a free society, there is no way for an individual to belong but by choosing which group not to belong to, for he (or she) is a member or potential member of a practically unlimited number of groups with different degrees of abstractness and compatibility. “Belonging” to everything, belonging in general, is impossible in a free society.

In an unfree society, it is different. I can think of three sorts of “belonging.” In a tribe, one does indeed belong in general, because there is little choice but to adopt the belonging uniformity imposed by customs and the fear of being banned. In a more structured society, we meet the second kind of belonging: to belong to “society,” which means to its government, which may or may not be a majoritarian democracy. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Lenina expresses this in her simple way: “Everyone belongs to everyone else.” The “Dear Leader watches you and will take good care of you” that one can see in Ms. Tai’s lyrism is very consistent with that way of belonging. The third way to belong is slavery, the ultimate form of belonging; if you really want to belong, that’s the way to go."


He goes on. And it is perhaps unfair to isolate and focus on the remarks of a bureaucrat in a small speech at a manufactured event. But this does betray a mindset hitherto foreign to this country.

Quality Education

Reviews of Michael Lewis’s book on Sam Bankman-Fried have not been kind. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times each contended that Lewis had gotten too close to his subject, with the LA Times’s columnist Michael Hiltzik suggesting that journalism schools should use the book as a lesson on the “imperative need to approach a subject with a healthy helping of skepticism…in this book Lewis doesn’t exercise any.”

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In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today.--Larry Summers

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In Japan. employee earnings have dropped 2% in real terms in the past year and by 8% in the past decade.

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Quality Education

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam that is considered the gold standard for comparing states and large districts, the Defense Department’s schools outscored every jurisdiction in math and reading last year and managed to avoid widespread pandemic losses.

Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.

Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.

The schools reopened relatively quickly during the pandemic, but last year’s results were no fluke.

While the achievement of U.S. students overall has stagnated over the last decade, the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.

“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard who serves on the national exam’s governing board.
--Sarah Mervosh at the NYT,

Proportionality

The University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.

***

Whether playing tricks, mimicking speech, or holding “funerals,” crows and ravens (collectively known as corvids) have captured the public’s attention due to their unexpected intelligence. Thanks to results from a new Current Biology study, our understanding of their capabilities only continues to grow, as researchers from the University of Tübingen found for the first time that crows can perform statistical reasoning.

***

The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).

***

Proportionality

There has been a lot of interesting material about Israel. The original outrage has begun to fade. One of these has been the discussion of "proportionality" in warfare. "Proportionality" is being used a lot, especially by the press--and college students. But "proportionality has a definition; it relates to risk and reward, not balance. McCarthy has a good article in the Post on it.

This is it.

                                       ****

"In recent days, my brilliant colleague Douglas Murray schooled a British interviewer who challenged his defense of Israel’s military response to the October 7 atrocities carried out by Hamas.

She banged on about the need for “proportionality.”

Douglas illustrated the absurdity of touting this law-of-war principle as if it meant that Israel should limit itself to raping the precise number of women as Hamas did, while similarly killing precisely the same number of babies, elderly non-combatants, and young peace-concert revelers.

The proportionality twaddle is a hobby horse of anti-Western leftists – ever ready to rationalize the barbarity of jihadists who recognize no constraints on their tactics.

It came into vogue in the years after 9/11.

Following the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, American and allied armed forces were dispatched to take the fight to the jihadists’ strongholds overseas.

In response, the Muslim Brotherhood’s pom-pom squad at CAIR, and its familiar echo chamber – the media, American university campuses, and the political left generally – lectured incessantly that our combat operations must be “proportionate.”

Their distortion of this commonsense military principle is being echoed today.

As should be obvious, proportionality is nothing so ridiculous as eye-for-an-eye limits on responsive combat.

For one thing, we don’t fight that way: American, Israeli, and other Western military forces do not wage war by targeting and terrorizing civilians, including raping women, murdering the defenseless, or taking hostages and using them as human shields.

Those are war crimes – a term at which jihadists scoff, for it describes atrocities they execute precisely because we are horrified by them.

Western military forces regard such savagery as unacceptable, regardless of the enemy’s resort to it.

So what, then, is proportionality?

It is a principle that requires military commanders, when they determine battlefield targets, to weigh the importance of the military objective against the likelihood of “collateral damage” – i.e., civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.

Significantly, proportionality does not mean an army is prohibited from attacking if it knows there will be collateral damage.

To the contrary, if the military objective is important enough, collateral damage is a baleful but unavoidable consequence of warfare.

The military commander is obliged to try to minimize collateral damage, but not to the point of refraining from attacking important military targets.

If important targets are not hit, wars last far longer, and there’s nothing humanitarian about insisting on more carnage.

The object of war is not to achieve a stalemate. It is to defeat the enemy. It is to achieve the legitimate objectives that drive a people to go to war.

In some conflicts, objectives are limited. In others, such as Israel’s battle against Hamas, they are more comprehensive.

Israel has to demolish Hamas as a capable fighting force, for two reasons.

First, there can never be an armistice with an enemy that denies a nation’s right to exist and is committed to its extirpation.

Second, there can be no peaceful settlement between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors unless and until the latter abandon the commitment to Israel’s destruction that is tirelessly promoted and fomented by Hamas and its jihadist allies – not least, its patrons in Tehran.

These are legitimate military objectives. Israel is in a just defensive war, and it is permitted by the laws of war to pursue its objectives, until they are achieved, even if civilians and civilian infrastructure will be gravely harmed.

Clearly, Israel is doing the best it can – far more, I daresay than any other country would – to minimize collateral damage.

Indeed, it is going many extra miles to create corridors for civilian safe-passage from Gaza battlefields, which will undoubtedly enable many Hamas jihadists to escape.

Nevertheless, this concern for non-combatant elements of the enemy does not supersede the imperative of defeating the enemy.

Proportionality is not, as Israel’s detractors would have it, a doctrine that limits offensive combat operations to the harm a nation has sustained from the enemy’s operations.

It is not a principle that says, “use only as much force as the enemy, and no more.” Such a perverse rule would prevent the use of force necessary to defeat jihadists while allowing them, the terrorist aggressors, to dictate the terms of battle.

Nor is proportionality a prohibition against military targeting that would inevitably harm or kill civilians.

Proportionality simply dictates that military forces fighting a just war must concentrate on legitimate military targets and do the best they can, within reason, to minimize collateral damage.

It is not a straitjacket that makes legitimate military objectives unattainable.

It does not insulate from attack monsters who meld into civilian population centers, and who launch their attacks from – and stash their arsenals in – schools, mosques, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure.

Proportionality is a rule of reason, not of surrender."

Stuff

Stuff

I started to walk a bit to exercise and took yesterday off. Instead, I went to the local Publix. According to my phone, I walked just as far.

I listened to the radio on the way to Publix. It was some replay of a political program declaring 'breaking news' several days ago. The interview was with a Republican congressman who confided he was just out of the secret conference and Scalise had enough votes to be Speaker.

Sabin looked a little deranged on the sideline against Arkansas this weekend.

Do third base coaches need Spanish translators when they're giving signals.

Was McCarthy ousted by a coalition of far-right and the left? Expalin that.

Probably the best news of the week is that Biden thinks that warming is a greater risk to the world than nuclear war.

Saw an interview with an Arab literature professor, a measured guy who teaches at Columbia and has family in Gaza. He reports UNESCO says over 700 children have been killed in Gaza in the last week by Israeli bombardment. He asks if there is no equivalence in the moral responsibility, both Hamas and Israeli? He believes that Arab outrage will grow.
Under this is an unspoken element, that the governments of vast numbers of people have policies of their own, without regard for their people. The West is seeing this too. Will this dichotomy have some dialectic resolution?

Trump Tariffs

Six in 10 U.S. adults believe in one or more of the following: reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study.

***

Trump Tariffs

WSJ on Trump's economic policies:

If Mr. Trump’s goal was to nudge businesses to friendlier locales, a better U.S. policy was to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that excluded China. But Mr. Trump rejected that deal. The Pacific pact would have boosted trade among a dozen countries, including Vietnam, while offering companies an incentive to set up shop in those places. This approach would have avoided the collateral damage from Mr. Trump’s blunderbuss tariffs, . . .

Mr. Trump’s answer, as usual, is to quintuple down in a second term. A universal 10% tariff would “raise taxes on American consumers by more than $300 billion a year—a tax increase rivaling the ones proposed by President Biden,” the Tax Foundation says. Including expected retaliation, it would “shrink the U.S. economy by 1.1 percent and threaten more than 825,000 U.S. jobs.”

Slapping 10% tariffs on everything made by Vietnam, South Korea and other U.S. partners would have the effect of abandoning them to China’s economic sphere, which is the opposite of America’s geostrategic interests.

Middle East Futures

All men who can save are industrious, because all men are greedy for wealth…. It is only the guarantee of ownership and enjoyment of their gains which can put heart into them and make them diligent.--Quesnay

***

We are the party of fiscal discipline, but the national debt rose nearly 40% during Mr. Trump’s presidency. We are the party of limited government, yet in the name of helping working people, populists support massive intervention in the marketplace through federal controls on prices and interest rates and, as in Disney’s case, using government to punish a corporation for expressing “woke” opinions. In their big-government activism, populists more resemble progressive Democrats than traditional Republicans.--danforth

***

In America and Canada, a recent Lancet study found that 20,000 people die each year from heat, but 170,000 die from cold.
Globally, the study finds 4.5 million cold deaths, which is nine times more than global heat deaths.
The study also shows temperatures increasing 0.5 degrees Celsius in the first two decades of this century have caused an additional 116,000 heat deaths annually.
But warmer temperatures now also avoid 283,000 cold deaths every year.

***

Middle East Futures

The Middle East is a laboratory of modern distortion of both the past and future.

From the past, nothing can be forgotten. Hatreds must linger and flare. The Civil War in America was not enough. The revolution in the West against slavery was not enough. Independence in the Land of Ire is not enough. The Ottoman invasion of Serbia must be paid for. 

The world is a patchwork of Hatfields and McCoys fueled by ignorance, ill will, and conflict entrepreneurs. And this is seen as the moral high ground. The way we should all be. College students in the U.S. are in the streets demanding Israeli blood. Iran and Hamas are promising the righteous destruction of Israel and the death of its people.

Endless hatred is the child of identity and factionalism. At one time it was uselessly painful and destructive. But times have changed, as the Middle East shows. What are the possible outcomes in Israel? Status quo is one. The rubbing of the wounds continuing forever. Ugly and painful but tolerable for the rest of the world. Two, Israel kills their enemies, solidifies their borders, and lives in a stable area forever. That would be fine for Israel and for the world. Three, Israel loses. This is the scenario that seems to be misunderstood. Israel will never lose. It will never ask for a standing eight count, never lay down their arms, never sue for a compromised peace. If they are falling, they will take all their enemies with them, destroying the Middle East as they fall, a nuclear Sampson. This is what makes the animosity of Israel's neighbors, the strange bloodlust on the campuses, so unreasonable, like a nuclear suicide bomber. The end of Israel will be the end of the Middle East, the end of radioactive oil, and maybe--if there are enough accidental interlocking treaties--the end of us all.

Some Middle East History

Why did Mayorkas, after doing nothing for three years, suddenly decide to waive 26 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Farmland Protection Policy Act, the Eagle Protection Act, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, to throw up this section of the wall quickly?

***

In a since-deleted post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Blinken seemed to back a ceasefire. “Turkish Foreign Minister @HakanFidan and I spoke further on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel. I encouraged Turkey’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages by Hamas immediately,” the secretary of state wrote. 

Doesn't this remind you of Biden's sanctuary offer to Ukraine's president, who replied "I need weapons, not a ride?"

They've got their finger on the pulse of the world.

***

Some Middle East History

Israelis think their homeland has been taken from them and they want to live there. People from Palestine feel their homeland has been expropriated for someone else's cause and they want it back. One might argue that all conflicts arise from the ebb an flow of borders.

The current Middle East savagery has a couple of significant notions that have slid by under the radar as accepted fact, at least in the faculty lounge. One is the remarkably vicious "decolonization" concept, a blithe "weeding out" idea where colonizers are deracinated by any means possible.

This is an article that questions the very idea that Israel is constructed by colonizers. (From the WSJ):

'The colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.

It doesn’t take long to read or listen to anti-Israel advocacy before the word “colonial” or “colonialism” is hurled at the Jewish state.

After the spasm of Hamas murder, rape, and kidnapping over the weekend, the U.S. Palestinian Community Network exclaimed, “Our people are waging an anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-Zionist liberation struggle.”

According to an anti-Israel statement signed by dozens of student groups at Harvard, Israel is undertaking “colonial retaliation.”

An academic cottage industry is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise in “settler colonialism,” and Hamas itself is partial to the term.

The use of the word “colonial” in all its forms isn’t meant to accurately describe reality or clarify anything; rather, it is a term of abuse wielded to delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.

The “colonial” smear can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.

First of all, the original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t sent by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit of the homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many cases, didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought, say, to establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities routinely carried out against them on Russian soil.

They thought of their venture as a return to a place that Jews had inhabited for thousands of years.

Indeed, the colonialism charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.

The Jewish people have had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became fundamentally identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land was a locus of the Jewish faith — the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the place where many religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed; the object of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in Jerusalem”).

There is a reason that Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed in the early 20th century.

On top of this, Israel has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to accept a two-state solution.

The Palestinians must be counted among the worst nationalists the world has ever known: They have repeatedly rejected opportunities to obtain a nation-state because they hate Israel’s legitimate national aspirations more than they love their own.

In one sense, Israel’s ultimate offense is to have won defensive wars fought against antagonists seeking to wipe it from the map.

As for Gaza, Israel ended its occupation nearly 20 years ago. It wanted to wash its hands of the place as much as possible, an understandable impulse but one that has proved unsustainable. Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and then expelled the rival Palestinian group Fatah in a factional war. In total control, Hamas proceeded to make Gaza a base for conducting armed operations against Israel.

Israel’s failing here wasn’t so much heavy-handedness — although it took measures to protect itself from the threat in Gaza, as did Egypt — but the naïve belief that it could reach a de facto accommodation with a Hamas that would misrule Gaza for its own ends while not becoming too dire a threat to Israel.

Its mass terror attack on Israel ends that delusion.

If nothing else, the accusation of colonialism is very telling. There is one country in the roll call of nations that doesn’t deserve to exist. One people that doesn’t deserve a homeland. One people who, despite being subjected to hideous persecutions over the centuries and being constantly attacked today, is supposedly guilty of every possible crime.

And it happens to be Israel and its Jewish inhabitants.

The Hamas attack was just a taste of what it would do to Israel if it had the power — extricate an indigenous people from their homeland in the most brutal fashion possible, in the name, of course, of anti-colonialism.'

                                               **

The 'colonizing argument' looks like a straw man. This article may be a little too easy and the points moot. The nation of Israel was legislated into existence by the well-meaning West after the Holocaust, essentially partitioning a large property absorbed in a war, into two states. Displaced people will always have a legitimate complaint.

But there are more extenuating circumstances. That 'property' was originally taken over by the Ottomans in the 1500s--that is, it was invaded, occupied, governed, and taxed by the Ottoman Empire, originally founded by Osman Gazi, a Turk, and expanded over the centuries to include the Middle East and North Africa. Gradually, the empire began to erode but the final blow was its misadventure in joining Germany in the First World War where the empire was destroyed, its territories absorbed and occupied by various Western allies.

That is to say, it lost its integrity, as it had in the 1500s.

There are a lot of lessons here. Don't fight wars. If you fight a war, don't lose it. If you lose it, expect a lot of changes. And, if you complain about the results 500 years later, don't expect intelligent sympathy.

Riley Gaines

"Make America Great Again" was a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where, you know, people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want, insult whoever came in their way. And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base. So it is like a cult and somebody has to break that momentum."
Hilary said this. If you read it closely you will see it's very strange and revealing.

***

1 percent is roughly the percentage of the American workforce that is unionized and employed in manufacturing.

***

A new study published Monday in the medical journal BMJ found that long COVID is virtually indistinguishable from long-haul symptoms after other infections. In other words, the authors suggest long COVID may not be unique from any other respiratory-illness recovery.
What’s clear is public-health officials have massively exaggerated long COVID to scare low-risk Americans, including healthy children.--makary (hopkins)

***

Riley Gaines

Riley Gaines is the woman who lost her national swimming championship to Lia nee Will Thomas and is still furious. She has been traveling through the States giving furious speeches on the unfairness of males competing in women's tournaments. She was attacked and held for ransom by campus trans activists at San Francisco State University. She has been giving furious interviews on conservative radio. She has created several furious foundations.

She is a serious, successful, attractive athlete who is intelligent, funny, and makes a good impression and argument. She recently declared September 10th Real Woman's Day because, in Roman numerals, it's XX.

She has now become my favorite gender entrepreneur.

The Fed

Two genetic men will be in the Miss Universe contest this week in San Salvadore.

***

"Gaza militants who attacked an all-night music festival in southern Israel shot and killed revelers at point-blank range, then looted their belongings, new car dashcam video verified by CNN reveals."
How did 'murderers' morph into 'militants?'

***

China says that its relationship with the U.S. "will determine the future of humanity."

Let's all think about that.

***

The Fed

What are the practical elements of the Federal Reserve? What do interest rates really do? That is, what do interest rates "target?" They target the price of money, the ease of borrowing and expansion. That is, work. Hiring.

So rates go down, money loosens up, and mortgages and borrowing become more affordable. People borrow to buy and furnish homes--or build new ones. People borrow to start and expand businesses. And, thus, work increases.

And raising rates does the opposite.

So, the Fed is manipulating rates to manipulate the job market. And raising rates intentionally targets workers, by policy. Lowering rates artificially creates the environment for unstable jobs, raising rates reclaims those jobs and damages collateral, stable ones.

School Stats

Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.--wsj

***

At least one person is dead and eight others wounded after a shooting early Sunday morning in White Township, not far from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A spokesperson for IUP said at least two of the nine people shot were students.

***

What is the most settled science, global warming or the danger of secondhand smoke?

***

In an interview this morning, McCarthy hedged on his willingness to return.

**


School Stats

Here are some 'academic' stats on the American school system. Every culture in history recognized that education created the next generation of citizens, their hopes, their ambitions and achievements. The problem is not that the schools do not do a good job, it is that the obvious failures do not create corrective response.

Minority pupils compose 89 percent of Chicago’s public-school student body. In third through eighth grades, the percentage of Black students proficient in reading and math are 11 percent and 6 percent. Hispanics: 17 percent, 11 percent. The percentage of 11th-graders proficient on the SAT in reading and math: Black students 10 and 8; Hispanics: 16 and 17. In 22 schools, not a single student can read at grade level; in 33, not a single student can do math at grade level. Even the supposedly good news is disgusting: Last year, the graduation rate was a record high 82.9 percent — even though chronic absenteeism is 49 percent among low-income students.
These are the results of public-school operational spending increasing 58 percent in a decade, to $26,356 per pupil. Mostly this funds teachers’ salaries and benefits. Teachers praising “socialism” and prating about “social justice” thrive while their students’ futures are stunted.--Will

The Chicago Teachers Union got its former lobbyist, Brandon Johnson, elected mayor, in part by funding his campaign with an $8 monthly deduction from teachers’ paychecks.

Thirteen of Baltimore’s public high schools have zero students who are proficient in math. Only 11.4 percent of the students in the five best-performing Baltimore public high schools were proficient.

The Wonders of Academia

The human mind grows only through resistance.--Arnold Schwarzenegger

***

Amazon’s first pair of prototypes for its Project Kuiper satellite internet system launched on Friday. Project Kuiper is Amazon’s plan to build a network of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit, to provide high-speed internet access anywhere in the world.

***

What is the difference between those illegals who are smuggled into the U.S. at checkpoints in vans and cars and trucks and those who just walk over?

***

The Wonders of Academia

This is part of a talk Rufo gave to Hillsdale on the origin and financing of the transgender movement. It has some interesting stuff.

'In the late 1980s, a group of academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone, and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of “queer theory” and “transgender studies.” These academics believed gender to be a “social construct” used to oppress racial and sexual minorities, and they denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of “heteronormativity”—i.e., the white, male, heterosexual power structure. This system, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed. And the best way to achieve this, they argued further, was to promote transgenderism. If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.

Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, revealed the general thrust and tone of transgender ideology in his Kessler Award Lecture at the City University of New York in 2008, describing his work as “a secular sermon that unabashedly advocates embracing a disruptive and refigurative genderqueer or transgender power as a spiritual resource for social and environmental transformation.” In Stryker’s best-known essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” he contends that the “transsexual body” is a “technological construction” that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker writes. And this monster, he continues, is destined to channel its “rage and revenge” against the “naturalized heterosexual order”; against “‘traditional family values’”; and against the “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.

One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950. After serving several years in the U.S. Army, Pritzker went into business, having inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the “first trans billionaire.” Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals, and activist organizations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.

This money was allied with political power, as Pritzker’s cousin, Illinois Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, signed legislation in 2019, his first year in office, to inject gender theory into the state education curriculum and to direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries.'

NATO Symbolism

 

Biden is building a border wall.

***

The Republicans are looking for a House leader. Who could organize thee guys? Who would want to try?

***

Michael Lewis is drawing fire from the Left.

***

NATO Symbolism

The U.S. shot down a Turkish drone over Syria. They shot down a NATO asset. Very Republican of them.

What Is Wrong With Us?

All zoos actually offer the public, in return for the taxes spent upon them, is a form of idle witless amusement, compared to which a visit to the state penitentiary, or even a state legislature in session, is informing, stimulating, and ennobling. -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (12 Sep 1880-1956)

***

Research paper: Populism at the country level is at an all-time high, with more than 25% of nations currently governed by populists. How do economies perform under populist leaders? We build a new long run cross- country database to study the macroeconomic history of populism. We identify 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020 and show that the economic cost of populism is high. After 15 years, GDP per capita is 10% lower compared to a plausible non-populist counterfactual. Economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule.

***

What Is Wrong With Us?

In August 2023, there were 232,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the Mexican border. There is no 'get-away' estimate. One month.

There have been 3.8 million encounters with immigrants at the Mexican border during Biden's administration. 1.8 million are adults. There are estimated to be at least 1.6 million non-encountered 'got-aways.' That's 5.4 MILLION illegal immigrants, none we really know and only a few we can locate.   

The question is not one of policy. There is no policy. The question is, what are we doing? Is there actually a motive for no policy? Or is no policy the best they can do?

And another question: how can thinking people look at this without alarm?

Marx and Value

The genius of price controls. While U.S. college prices keep rising, British tuition is capped by the government—and schools are being forced to cut back on teaching and research--wsj
If you want to destroy something--like cigarettes--freeze their price.

***

Social Security will be insolvent in a decade, at which time the legal requirement is for across-the-board benefit cuts limiting benefits to incoming revenues, which will amount to about a 23% cut for everyone, regardless of need.

***

Marx and Value

Marx defined value as the labor embodied in a commodity under a given structure of production. In his terms, value is the 'socially necessary abstract labor' embodied in a commodity. So work input, not product or consumer input, determines the value of a product.
I suppose a good example might be the equal prize money for tennis players, men, and women, despite the fact that men's competition is valued more by the audience and, hence, by sponsors. Ditto WNBA.
It's interesting that these abstract 'Angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin' thinkers are always ridiculed when faith is involved but always taken as profound when the philosophy leads to the homicide of disbelievers.
So we see the AWU's almost self-immolation over incredible wage demands that will, in the face of government-subsidized EV development, virtually guarantee their extinction.