Erdoğan

US space agency Nasa is launching its first on-demand streaming service called Nasa+.
Nasa said the streaming service would be free, family-friendly and wouldn't have any adverts. (which is to say the taxpayer pays for it.)

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“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” --Robert Frost

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Roughly half of TicTok’s U.S. user base is under 25 years old 
 

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Erdoğan

Erdoğan has an unusual position in the West. He is a very non-Western member of NATO. And he suffers from having a name that sounds as if he is from Lord of the Rings.

In Erdoğan's speech at the UN General Assembly, he called on the international community to collectively fight what he thinks is the greatest malady of mankind: Islamophobia. He wants, he said, to revolutionize the post-World War II international political order by giving Muslim nations a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Erdoğan also wants the world to recognize the breakaway Turkish statelet of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey. That statelet emerged after Turkey's illegal invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Erdoğan admitted he was holding NATO hostage. On September 26, he said that the Turkish parliament would abide by his pledge to ratify Sweden's accession to NATO if the US sticks to its commitments to deliver F-16 fighter jets to Ankara.

Meanwhile, at home, a Turkish journalist broadcast a video showing Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists being detained in Turkey, then released and sent to government-run camps for military training.--from gateway via don

International Law

The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.-nyt!!!!!

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Studies of rats show that, once they learn a fear, chemical pathways form in the brain that allow them to learn additional fears more quickly in the future.

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I find that even with identical goods, child vendors are 97% more likely to make a sale and earn more than twice that of adult vendors. Despite no differences in valuation for the goods, couples, and female customers are 90% and 27% more likely to buy than male customers. Females and couples are 50% more likely to be targeted by vendors than males and are charged higher prices on average (1.15-2 times) than males. --paper

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International Law

Fareed Zakaria has developed a reputation as a reasonable voice on the left simply by not being hysterical. This is from a recent op-ed he wrote that offers a 'solution' to the funding of the war in Ukraine. As with so much of the Left, it ignores basic aspects of our lives.

                                              *

"Set up an international and legal process by which Russia’s $300 billion-plus of frozen reserves could be used to aid Ukraine’s reconstruction, which the World Bank estimates would cost more than $400 billion over the next ten years.

In one swoop, that would signal to Putin that Ukraine will not face a funding crisis and that even were Trump to be elected, these funds, administered through some international body, say in Switzerland or Belgium, would continue to flow to Kyiv.

There are challenges to this policy. Russia’s reserves lie in various countries, but European allies hold most of them, and their governments worry that they don’t have the legal authority to divert them. Laurence Tribe, the distinguished legal scholar, and some of his colleagues have written up a definitive case as to why it would be legal and appropriate to go down the path of using Russian reserves for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, and former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow have argued persuasively that it is good policy.

Tribe’s basic argument is that Russia has engaged in a massive and systemic violation of international law and norms and that it is appropriate, indeed necessary, for there to be some price to pay for this. To reject this logic in favor of one that protects Russia’s “property rights” is perverse since Russia has engaged in brutal, sustained violations of Ukraine’s property rights and has taken the lives of thousands of its civilians as well.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a core violation of any conception of a rules-based international order. It strikes me as right and wise to force it to pay a heavy price. But how that policy is pursued matters. In the past, the United States has tried to enforce its own conception of international rules unilaterally, often generating huge opposition to it. The approach we should take this time is the opposite.

This policy should be rooted in international consensus, law and norms. Legal opinions like Tribe’s should be presented. An international legal organization and process of adjudicating claims should be established and the funds handled through it. Russia’s assets and Ukraine’s reconstruction should serve as a building block for international law and norms that help shore up the rules-based order. As Summers, Zoellick, and Zelikow note, if this case sets the precedent that a country that engages in naked aggression might find that its dollar reserves are in jeopardy, that is not a bad precedent for a world in disarray."

                                                  *  

So a bunch of guys sit around with a problem and offer a solution that is 'right and wise.' As with so much of the Left, it has no context, no basics. Controlling international money and banks with an unelected bunch who will inevitably come in conflict with individual Americans who expect input to policies that influence them and do not expect to be governed by foreigners.

And the Left will never understand why people will resist such an obviously 'right and wise' decision.

Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy

Six teenagers have gone on trial behind closed doors in connection with the beheading of French history teacher Samuel Paty.
The murder, which shocked the country, took place in 2020 after the teacher had shown his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on freedom of expression.

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15% of Nvidia's revenue comes from Singapore.

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In an interview, an American general said he thought an Iranian attack on the U.S. across the U.S. southern border was 'unlikely,' that they would more likely attack Americans abroad.

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SCOTUSblog reports on the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy case. It strikes at the heart of the bureaucratic world and the assignment of legislative and judicial functions to unelected and unreachable appointees.

A summary of a summary:

The case stems from an administrative proceeding that the SEC brought against hedge fund founder and investment adviser George Jarkesy in 2013. The SEC’s in-house enforcement proceedings eventually found that Jarkesy and his firm had committed securities fraud, and it ordered them to pay $300,000 in fines and to repay nearly $700,000.

The government’s view in this case is that the Constitution affords Congress a broad authority to create new obligations by statute, and that because those statutory obligations were unknown to the common law, they are public rights that Congress can assign to an administrative tribunal without a jury. It should be enough to validate the congressional scheme that the features of the securities cause of action here do not match the elements of the 18th-century cause of action for fraud.

In contrast, Jarkesy broadly calls for the eradication of the public rights doctrine, arguing that one of the main “catalysts” and “flashpoints” for the American Revolution was the British crown’s practice of trying claims for statutory penalties in admiralty courts without a jury.

The second question is whether Congress can delegate to the SEC the power to decide whether a case should be pursued as an administrative proceeding or as a civil enforcement action – that is, within the agency or in a federal district court.

The third question in the case is whether the Constitution allows Congress to give the SEC’s administrative law judges protection from removal.

This is culled from the article. Then this summary:

"The summary above should make it clear that a complete affirmance of the 5th Circuit’s decision probably would be the most important administrative law decision of the last half-century. That suggests of course a pretty strong likelihood that several of the justices will be reluctant to go nearly so far. The argument should give a lot of insight as to which of the three challenges is likely to survive."

And this opening line in an article in the Atlantic on the case: 

"This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government."

This looks like a big deal. And it should be contentious. Jarkesy is a conservative talk show host and superficially looks guilty. But the very point of this country is that it was built on free principles and processes, regardless of how unattractive its victims might be.

Penrose and Hawking

Finland has closed four of eight border crossings with Russia because of Russian efforts to infiltrate Finland under the guise of amnesty-seeking.

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Americans don’t travel a lot (43% have passports) but that's a lot compared to Japan, where only 21.7 million people now have passports, not even a fifth of the country.

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Cowen writes: 

...intellectual non-Leftists, increasingly ... are Nietzschean, compared to days of yore. But if they are classical liberal instead, typically they are religious as well. That could be Catholic or Jewish or LDS or Eastern Orthodox, with some Protestant thrown into the mix, but Protestants coming in last.
The person being religious is now a predictor of that same person having non-crazy political views. Classical liberalism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essentially religious movement.
Many strands of libertarianism are being left behind, and again this is a positive rather than a normative claim. It is simply how things are.
Aayan Hirsi Ali announces she is now a Christian.

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Penrose and Hawking

Penrose and Hawking did calculations using information from their research on black holes. Two of their conclusions:

“The odds against an ordered universe happening by random chance are 10^10^30th to 1, against."

And,

"The odds against life are 10^10^123rd to 1, against.”

Thanksgiving's Downside

 

The Israelis in their struggles in the Middle East have cleverly raised the feminist question.

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My favorite question from the press so far was that raised by the BBC woman who asked if the willingness shown by the Israelis to surrender many Palestinians for few Israelis in prisoner swaps was evidence of Israeli bigotry.

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Double-amputee Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius was granted parole Friday, 10 years after shooting his girlfriend. The world is now just a little less safe.

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Thanksgiving's Downside

Events like Thanksgiving are upsetting to the Left because they imply community, a violation of the Left's template of division and isolation. The basic element of society, according to the Left, is conflict, most recently the effort of the oppressed to right themselves after some oppressor's damage and continued ill wishes. The essence of community is conflict. This insane oxymoron is a repackaging of the disastrous Marxian homicidal mania of the recent past. 

However, the invention of America solved the ancient problem of inequality by formalizing the equality of all men regardless of their individual histories and characteristics. This was done by fiat, not by destroying the cultural/political/social outliers.

Somehow this astonishing, optimistic, true egalitarianism cannot be accepted by fractious, angry, rebels-without-a-cause who insist on fighting over problems that America has already solved.

A Miracle, Thanksgiving-type

According to the US Census Bureau, the number of people aged over 55 grew by 27 percent between 2010 and 2020, 20 times higher than the growth rate of the collective population under 55 (1.3 percent).

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There is talk of a new, mysterious respiratory infection in northern China, which has changed the WHO concerns from expensive wine choices at expensive dinners to their less comfortable area of health care.

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The Dublin riots were weird, especially since the press was so quiet about the perpetrator. But there is a rumor that it was most likely an Algerian migrant who stabbed several kids and adults, making the riot fit with the European mood.

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A Miracle, Thanksgiving-type

In a 2003 Boston Globe article titled “Giving Thanks for the Invisible Hand,” syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby offered a wonderful tribute to the miracle of the invisible hand that makes affordable turkeys available so efficiently every year at Thanksgiving through the power of “spontaneous order” and without the need for any central planning or “turkey czars.”
“The invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many.”


The Thanksgiving Miracle

Isn’t there something wondrous — something almost inexplicable — in the way your Thanksgiving weekend is made possible by the skill and labor of vast numbers of total strangers?

To bring that turkey to the dining room table required the efforts of thousands of people — the poultry farmers who raised the birds, of course, but also the feed distributors who supplied their nourishment and the truckers who brought it to the farm, not to mention the architect who designed the hatchery, the workmen who built it, and the technicians who keep it running. The bird had to be slaughtered and defeathered and inspected and transported and unloaded and wrapped and priced and displayed. The people who accomplished those tasks were supported in turn by armies of other people accomplishing other tasks — from refining the gasoline that fueled the trucks to manufacturing the plastic in which the meat was packaged.

The activities of countless far-flung men and women over the course of many months had to be intricately choreographed and precisely timed, so that when you showed up to buy a fresh Thanksgiving turkey, there would be one — or more likely, a few dozen — waiting. The level of coordination that was required to pull it off is mind-boggling. But what is even more mind-boggling is this: No one coordinated it.
No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan and issuing orders. No one forced people to cooperate for your benefit. And yet they did cooperate. When you arrived at the supermarket, your turkey was there. You didn’t have to do anything but show up to buy it. If that isn’t a miracle, what should we call it?
Adam Smith called it “the invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many. Out of the seeming chaos of millions of uncoordinated private transactions emerges the spontaneous order of the market. Free human beings freely interact, and the result is an array of goods and services more immense than the human mind can comprehend. No dictator, no bureaucracy, no supercomputer plans it in advance. Indeed, the more an economy is planned, the more it is plagued by shortages, dislocation, and failure.

It is commonplace to speak of seeing God’s signature in the intricacy of a spider’s web or the animation of a beehive. But they pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic energy and productivity of the free market. If it is a blessing from Heaven when seeds are transformed into grain, how much more of a blessing is it when our private, voluntary exchanges are transformed – without our ever intending it – into prosperity, innovation, and growth?

Nast and Thanksgiving

 

In 1992, a KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin defected to the United Kingdom, bringing with him a trove of official documents he’d absconded with across his 30-year career. Those documents revealed that the KGB had actually worked to spread misinformation that the CIA was behind the JFK assassination, going so far as to forge a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to CIA officer E. Howard Hunt (best known today for his involvement in the Watergate burglary) to implicate him and the CIA in the assassination.

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An interesting interview with former Israeli prime minister Olmert on BBC by a newsreader who was pointed, biased (against Israel), and hostile.

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A report is afoot that will be dedicated specifically to a form of geoengineering known as solar radiation management. This is a technique that essentially involves spraying fine aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth. The idea is that, once it’s reflected, there’ll be less heat and temperatures will go down.

They plan to block the sun.

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                            Nast and Thanksgiving

Thomas Nast was a Bavarian immigrant credited with developing the American cartoon. He arrived in the 1840s as a child and became the illustrator for Harper's Weekly. He developed the modern version of Santa Claus and the elephant as the Republican Party symbol. As such, this is a provocative drawing, from the Nineteenth Century.

Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday and the Heart of the American Experience (link added):

 

{Thomas] Nast was an immigrant, having arrived in America from Germany when he was six years old, and “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” reflected what Nast saw as the immigrant’s passionate affection for his new country and commitment to its democratic values….
At the head of the table stands Uncle Sam, who is carving a turkey. Around the table are seated Americans representing an array of races and religions, identified in many cases by their national dress. Among the guests are an African American family, a Native American, a Chinese man with a long queue, an Irish American couple, a Spanish woman wearing a mantilla and holding a fan, a bearded Muslim with a fez on his head. Nast presents the people in this portrait respectfully, not as caricatures. His message is that every American has an equal right to sit at the Thanksgiving table.

Happy Thanksgiving

Geert Wilders’ far-right, anti-Islam Party for Freedom (PVV) is on course to be the largest party in the Dutch parliament, according to exit polls, in a major electoral upset whose reverberations will be felt around Europe.
It is unclear whether Wilders – who has always been shut out of government – will be able to win enough support to form a coalition. He said this evening that “no party can ignore us any longer”.

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New York Giants quarterback Daniel Jones underwent surgery to repair his ACL, the team announced Wednesday.

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According to a survey, that has polled voters since 1999 about U.S. household gun ownership, 52 percent of respondents this year said they or someone in their home owns a gun. The number is up from 46 percent in 2019, according to an NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll. More than a decade ago in February 2013, the share of U.S. households that owned a gun was 42 percent.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a tricky word. It means gratitude but it implies more than something to be grateful for, it implies something to be grateful to.

In the fall of 1621, the Plymouth settlers had a celebratory meal with a local Indian tribe as part of a traditional English harvest festival. There are two accounts; no mention is made of a Day of Thanksgiving but they were probably happy; since their arrival, they had a 50% mortality. 

It lasted three days. A Day of Thanksgiving, a day the English would have considered religious, was first held in the new land in 1623 following a needed rainfall. Various days of thanksgiving were celebrated by the country over the years, the first in commemoration of the end of the Revolution by Washington. In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln formally made Thanksgiving an annual event.

It is interesting to see these two men, Washington suspicious of organized religion and Lincoln harder to read, celebrating an official Thanksgiving, but both seem heartfelt, Lincoln's surprisingly so. Washington is almost a mirror of the mindset of the time. The two proclamations are below.

The Thanksgiving

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor--and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me `to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.'

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be -- That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks -- for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation--for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed--for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted -- for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions--to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually -- to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed--to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn [sic] kindness onto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord -- To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease [sic] of science among them and us -- and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence [sic], have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.
Abraham Lincoln

November 22, 1963

In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. Fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure.
According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks,

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Black women of African descent were more likely to die of the medieval plague in London, academics at the Museum of London have found.

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Pittsburgh officials are warning about increased coyote sightings in some city parks.

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November 22, 1963

The past and present merge:

The Thanksgiving holiday, one of the best holidays and certainly the best secular one, has been spoiled for everyone who was awake and thinking in the mid-60s by the assassination of Jack Kennedy. That promising shift from the generation of Eisenhower to its sons, to youth and its potential, to the charismatic and the virile, was just stopped cold by Oswald in Dallas. We defaulted back to the older, ponderous Lyndon Johnson, a true guardian of the Old Guard. That loss--of youth, of hope, of promise, of beauty--has never been overcome and we are reminded of it every Thanksgiving. One only wonders how much of the unrest in the '60s and '70s was a result.

An aspect of the assassination that has dogged its shadow has been the shameless exploitation of the atrocity by writers, politicians and artists. This exploitation, which has become almost a cult, believes--or says it believes--that the assassination was a conspiracy of a number of men, groups, or organizations. Every aspect of the event has been picked over, every inconsistency of life magnified, every possibility made a probability. The result is that the event, right before many of our eyes, has been completely recreated and, like an alternative universe, continues without interference with its own laws, experts, and history. It is very like those academic musings run wild. "If, instead, you assume that history and archeology was 300 years wrong--or falsified--and Moses was actually alive in the court of Akhenaton...." "If, instead, you assume there is an unexplained and unexplainable driving force in history..." "If, instead, you assume that everyone is possessed at birth by sexual urges towards their immediate family...." It is another victory of the Art of the Plausible.

This is nowhere more revolting than is seen in the movie "JFK" where a seemingly respectable director rewrites the assassination story according to a man whose grasp on the event is dangerously close to psychosis. Oliver Stone writes a story of the assassination through the eyes and the belief set of James Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, who had arrested, charged, indicted, and tried a local community figure, Clay Shaw, for involvement in the Kennedy murder. Shaw's arrest was virtually random. There was no evidence against him other than the word of a psychiatric patient who failed a lie-detector test and refused to testify. How an American citizen could come under such unreasonable, whimsical charges has never been explained. But Garrison persisted and then Stone followed up after the laughable trial (where the jury took longer to find their seats than to find "not guilty") with a movie inexplicably presenting the Garrison thesis as within the same time zone as reason. Of course, all the facts of the assassination were changed to implicate the innocent, the shooting presented was almost a complete fiction and this all was delivered by Kevin Costner, a credible actor, with certainty and outrage. Anyone who knew anything about the assassination walked from the theater with their collective heads spinning. But many with less of a good grasp left alarmed and resentful. This constant barrage of misinformation has done a lot to undermine this country's credibility and value in the minds of its people who, after all, own and run it.

There are two bad lessons here. The first is there are people and industries in the world who, even in those cultures with the highest of ideals, will do anything, say anything, publish anything to make a buck. If possible they will take the Plausible-made-Art and create an industry of it with historians, academics, and franchises. The second is that they often hide their entrepreneurship in the gowns of Art. How many of our greatest artists have questioned the reliability of memory, the interaction of history and art--even to the point of their blending? So Stone calls Julian Barnes and Cormac McCarthy as witnesses for his defense.

Stone is more Goebbels than John Huston here. He is everything that is wrong with businessmen gone rogue. His product is harmful to the society, toxic to the young, and delivered without an ounce of social conscience. The real story about Garrison is how is it possible that Clay Shaw could be treated like a Kafka character in the United States. Another would be a clarifying and cleansing explanation of all the facts and evidence that has been gathered over the years about the murder. This might set the country at ease. But there's probably not much money, or return on arrogance, in this. Instead, why not take advantage of the distressed and confused citizens, contribute to their malaise, and cash in.

In 1976 the U.S. House of Representatives created a commission, The House Select Commission on Assassinations, to investigate all the evidence of the murder again. This time they applied all the newer technologies available as well. Aside from the single and erroneous "fourth bullet thesis" not a single new conclusion was reached. Instead, this august deliberative body concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy--but they believed one existed anyway.

Kennedy #2

Biden has invoked one of the Cold War "war powers" acts to pass an Executive Order to coerce homes to use electric power for heat and appliances.

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The Chinese-supported biolab in California has the look of a bioweapons research facility with TB, Ebola, HIV, and other charming lifeforms.

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And everyone seems surprised with the rise of international populist tendencies--see Argentina and even Sweden.

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Kennedy #2

An industry has arisen to continue the mythology.

Oswald was not capable of such violence; he could not have made the shots in the time allotted; the rifle was inferior and the scope was misaligned; he had an alibi; there is no record of his interrogation by the Dallas police; he was an imposter from Russia; the "Oswald" in Mexico City was an imposter; his pictures holding the rifle with the pistol and the two Communist newspapers are fakes; he travelled with Cuban revolutionaries; the rifle found on the depository sixth floor was a Mauser, not Oswald's Italian infantry rifle Model 1891/1938; the third shot--the head shot--came from the front; a second shooter was seen on the "grassy knoll;" the Dallas doctors disagreed with the Bethesda pathologists; three tramps in a box car in Dallas were likely CIA and were probably involve--one even looked like Woody Harrelson's father; Tippit's murderer was unidentified; the bullets that killed Tippit did not match Oswald's pistol; many involved have died suspiciously; the Mafia did it because of their annimosity to Bobby Kennedy; the CIA did it because of their fear of a Kennedy retaliation over the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Garrison argument implicating Clay Shaw (on the evidence of a psychotic who failed a lie detector test); Castro did it in self-defense; the JFK movie by Stone (see Garrison); the Navy pathologist burnt his notes; the Dallas FBI burnt a note Oswald left for them before the murder; Marina Oswald burnt photographs of Lee holding the rifle, Ruby killed Tippit, Tippit was meeting Oswald and was involved, .....on and on. The democracy is hard at work here. Many of these notions come from average and concerned people, volunteers working far afield. Some are lawyers. Few are experts in the area they are focused on in the murder. One writer on the Zapruder film and what it reveals about the number of bullets and their timing is a Kierkegaard lecturer from Haverford. Some of these objections are just nuts, some are true but, of those that are true, none would change anything.

What is certain is this:
1. Oswald bought the murder weapon from a mail-order house using an alias he always used and had the false ID in his wallet at his arrest. Oswald posed with the rifle holding communist newspapers; his wife, Marina, took the picture. Marina saw the rifle many times and knew where it was kept.
2. Before going to shoot Gen. Walker, a right-wing John Birch Society member, Oswald wrote a detailed letter to Marina explaining what he was going to do and what she should do if he were killed or did not come back.
3. He shot at Walker and the window slat diverted the bullet. He then fled the state for New Orleans.
4. The day of the murder he left his wedding ring in a glass by his wife's bed, then carried the gun to the depository wrapped in paper (later found at the shooting site) in a car driven by a fellow worker.
5. He was seen and described by a witness as he pushed the gun out of the window and the muzzle fire of 3 shots was seen.
6. Men at the window one floor down and directly below the sniper's nest on the sixth floor of the depository, heard the gunfire above, heard the bolt action, and heard the casings hit the floor.
7. Oswald was seen in the depository after the shooting; he left the building and took a bus, then a cab, to his rooming house where he got his pistol.
8. Officer Tippit was a well-regarded, simple guy and a solid citizen. At least ten people saw him murdered by Oswald and all identified him. Three bullets hit him in the chest. Oswald stepped away, then returned several steps to put a bullet in Officer Tippitt's temple as he lay on the ground. (!)
9. Ruby killed Oswald but his motives are obscure. It may not even have been planned. All acquaintances said he was distraught over Kennedy's death and the possibility that Jackie, whom he adored, would have to return to Dallas to go through a trial with Oswald. (The only press interview he ever gave was to Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen!)

Any theory about the killing has to include and accept these facts.

A Reverse Coverup

CNN did a segment encouraging the canceling of Thanksgiving. They interviewed an almost incoherent Indian lawyer complaining about the decline of the American Indian.

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Realtors across the country are rethinking their jobs, and some are backpedaling from the profession, fearing that the heyday of their business is over.
A court verdict last month stands to radically alter the way real estate agents are paid for their work, and could result in far lower pay for the 1.6 million men and women who sell homes as their main job or as a side hustle.---wsj

***

Historically, 60% of children born in the large Pakistani community in northern England had parents who were first cousins. That has dropped to 47%.

Is the criticism of such marriages culturally intolerant?

***

A Reverse Coverup

Recent events have raised questions whether agencies and unelected bureaucrats have altered the reporting of events "for our own good."

Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.
According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots. (Politico)

No doubt this will become our CIA cover-up story for the next decade. But.....

This might remind one of Oswald in Mexico City.
Now a real conspiracy. Jack Childs was a spy/raconteur who knew Castro. He says Castro told him that when Oswald realized the Cubans would not grant him a visa when he was in Mexico City he screamed with defiant bravado, "I'm going to kill Kennedy!" This was confirmed by the spy Rodriques Lahera in a debriefing with Harold Swenson. In November 1963, the Cuban intelligence officer in charge of monitoring possible CIA/exile activity against Cuba, Florintino Aspillaga, was told by Castro to abandon his usual sweeps and focus all his listening devices on the Dallas area.
So.....? 

The specifics of the assassination are beyond debate. Oswald, a defector to Russia, a communist disillusioned with the Russian system but enamored with the Cuban one, murdered President Kennedy. The only question is whether someone or some group influenced Oswald's decision. Castro may not have been involved. But it sounds as if he was not surprised.

Zito

Transgender Day of Remembrance is officially on Nov. 20 though many universities are holding events on different days, and the day is one of 30 holidays and four months intended to celebrate LGBTQ individuals, according to Seattle Pride.

***

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said the U.S. would offer “millions” to a de facto international climate reparations fund, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

***

The increase in the world’s population between 1900 and 1990 was four times as great as the increase during the whole previous history of humankind.

***

Zito

Selena Zito is the Erma Bombeck of political writers. She coined "The Press takes Trump literally but not seriously, his voters take him seriously but not literally."

Some recent notes from Selena Zito:


The Democratic Kentucky governor won reelection easily, while the GOP governor in Mississippi just squeaked by. Democrats now control both houses in Virginia. In Ohio, an abortion amendment passed easily.

But there were other races that were worth watching, according to Zito, that may have flown under the radar. She recently reported on a district attorney race in Allegheny County, Pa., where the Democrat is on the far left and was given millions by George Soros–backed groups. There, the Republican pulled out a victory. “These local elections impact the larger elections next year, and they tell us where the Democratic Party is,” (the Hill)

“the Democratic strategy is to marry ‘MAGA extremists’ with abortion, and run on that.” But she cautions the term “extremists” has a new definition since the October 7 terror attack in Israel. “‘Extremist’ has all of a sudden changed based on what we’ve seen in the streets,” she said. “People aren’t dumb. They’re going to say, ‘so what really is an extremist? Is it someone that supports Republicans, or someone out in the streets wanting Jews to die?’”Republicans have their own whole set of crazy problems, but this one could stick with Democrats for a generation.

With Trump, it’s comportment. With Biden, it’s his age. RFK can take voters from both sides.

“I would not be shocked if neither man is the nominee.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire listening to voters. I can see a scenario, based on anecdotal reporting, where DeSantis wins Iowa, Haley wins New Hampshire, and then all bets are off going into South Carolina,” she said.

“There is a nuance to Trump supporters,” she continued. “They like what he did, thought his policies were great, but they’re also really exhausted. His behavior is reflected on them because they supported him. So they’re shopping in their head, looking for someone who is willing to go to the mattresses. DeSantis and Haley have proven they have that ability, but also have governing experience, and the ability to be pragmatic. That’s where voters are.”

Mobility and Success

The average Ukrainian soldier is 43 years old, according to Time Magazine.
When the war began in February 2022, the average Ukrainian soldier was between 30 and 35 years old.

***

This week, the director of the U.S. government’s UFO analysis office stated that there is “evidence” of concerning unidentified flying object activity “in our backyard.” According to physicist Seán Kirkpatrick, who heads the congressionally-mandated All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, this alarming UFO activity can be attributed to one of two extraordinary sources: either a foreign power or “aliens.”

***

The fearsome Ann Coulter titled her recent think piece 'Pro-life is the 'Defund the Police' of the GOP ' and made the point that refusing to acknowledge election results is 'not a good way to go through life.'

***

The Pirate team is still weighing its options as to how to approach Oviedo's injury. Tommy John surgery is potentially on the table for the 25-year-old right-hander, which would keep him off the mound for a full season.

***

Mobility and Success

To say, as [John] Rawls does, that unjust rewards may be tolerated only to the extent necessary to benefit people in “the poorer sectors of society,” raises both factual and moral issues. As we have seen, the poorer sectors of American society, as defined by income, are a transient group, disproportionately of the younger and less experienced workers, and no one remains younger for life. Among the small proportion – 5 percent – of those in the bottom income quintile who remain there over the years, while the other 95 percent of those initially in that quintile move on up, it cannot arbitrarily be assumed that this unusual fate can have nothing to do with the way they have chosen to live their lives.--Sowell

The notion that the citizen is mobile in a free economic system is upsetting to those with determinist views. It muddles easy generalizations and diminishes their proponents. And, of course, it undermines the very glue the Left relies upon: despair.

When freedom has promise, it is the Left that is hopeless.

Ain't funny, McGee

 

Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said the U.S. would offer “millions” to a de facto international climate reparations fund, Bloomberg News reported Monday.

***

Russia has lost 302,000 soldiers killed and wounded in Ukraine and tens of thousands more have deserted, according to new UK figures.

***

The life expectancy of men in the U.S. is nearly six years shorter than that of women, according to new research published on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. 

? De facto discrimination. Evidence of systemic racism?

***

Ain't funny, McGee

The Washington Post ran a cartoon by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Ramirez satirizing Hamas’s claims that Israel targets Gazan children, showing the terrorist group’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamadi, using kids as human shields. By Wednesday, after what executive editor Sally Buzbee called “deep concern” from staffers and letters written by subscribers, the Post pulled the cartoon, which many readers and employees reportedly saw as racist.

Ramirez told NR he believes the accusations of racism on his part stem from an inability to reckon with the tactics Hamas uses, like employing children as human shields, as he depicted in his drawing.

“When the intellectually indolent cannot defend the indefensible, they pull the race card,” he said.

The backlash to the cartoon stemmed partly from allegations that Hamadi’s facial features had been exaggerated in a racially stereotypical manner. Ramirez explained to NR — and provided examples of other cartoons of his demonstrating as much — that he does so for all his subjects regardless of ethnicity.

The ability of what he called a “faction of juveniles” to dictate editorial decisions is a problem not just for the Post but for journalism as an industry and the country as a whole.

“The free exchange of ideas is the foundation of our democracy, and the purpose of an editorial cartoon is to be the catalyst for thought,” he said. “By promoting the thoughtful exchange of ideas, we forge a consensus through the fiery heat of debate. I think political correctness and the woke movement are bad for democracy.”

Ramirez said it is the responsibility of people in positions of power to protect those values.

“It is sad that people who oppose a political viewpoint have to invent diversions to quell the debate; we should be better than that,” he told NR. “America should be better than that. We need some adults in the room. If it scares you — a cartoon — maybe you need to grow up.”--from NR

Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -Bill Watterson, comic strip artist of Calvin & Hobbes

***

Hundreds of anti-oil, pro-Palestine protesters clashed with riot police outside the APEC summit in San Francisco ahead of President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping's widely anticipated meeting on Wednesday.

***

In Japan, the market for adult diapers is larger than the market for infant diapers

***

Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements

Xi met with President Joe Biden in California this week. It's a meeting of different cultures, different philosophies, different historical arcs. While free nations believe free men is the apogee of political evolution, and it sometimes lapses into political evangelism, it is generally a defensive philosophy with isolationist potential. That is not true of its socialist/communist opponents and their degenerate totalitarian endpoints.

This is from a collection of comments made by Xi, illustrative of his thinking and his lessons from recent American events.

                                            

***Xi has been trying to stabilize relations with Washington, apparently pressed by China’s economic troubles and a desire to reduce Beijing’s diplomatic isolation. “We have a thousand reasons to grow the relationship between China and the United States, and none at all to ruin it,” Xi told American lawmakers in Beijing recently.

But Xi underscored that his judgment of the challenge posed by the United States remains unchanged, saying with rare public bluntness in March: “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.”

When President Xi Jinping of China made his first state visit to the United States in 2015, he wrapped his demands for respect in reassurances.

He courted tech executives, while defending China’s internet controls. He denied that China was militarizing the disputed South China Sea, while asserting its maritime claims there. He spoke hopefully of a “new model” for great power relations, in which Beijing and Washington would coexist peacefully as equals.

But back in China, in meetings with the military, Xi was warning in strikingly stark terms that intensifying competition between a rising China and a long-dominant United States was all but unavoidable, and that the People’s Liberation Army should be prepared for a potential conflict.

“Beyond doubt, our country’s growing strength is the most important factor driving a profound readjustment of the international order,” he told top commanders in November 2015, two months after his visit to the United States. “Some Western countries absolutely never want to see a socialist China grow strong under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Despite his assurances to President Barack Obama not to militarize the South China Sea, Xi told his senior commanders in February 2016 that China must bolster its presence there, saying: “We’ve seized the opportunity, eliminated intervention and sped up construction on South China Sea islands and shoals, achieving a historic breakthrough in maritime strategy and defending maritime rights.” (In the years that followed, China quickly expanded its military infrastructure in the area.)

Xi’s remarks are among collections of speeches that Xi made to the People’s Liberation Army and Communist Party officials, published by the military for internal study by senior officers, and seen and corroborated by The New York Times. The volumes, “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” cover his initial years in power, from 2012 to February 2016.

The global financial crisis of 2007-08 had shattered official Chinese assumptions that Washington’s economic policymakers were competent, even if Beijing disagreed with them. Chinese officials quizzed American officials like Hank Paulson, then the Treasury secretary, about their mishandling of the situation. For many in Beijing, the lessons extended beyond the financial system.

“It was a defining moment,” said Desmond Shum, a business owner whose memoir, “Red Roulette,” describes those years, when he mingled with China’s political elite. “After that point, the entire Western model was questioned much more. There was also this growing belief that the world would need China to lead the way out of the mess.”

Xi saw lessons in the “Arab Spring” uprisings that had toppled corrupt authoritarian leaders across the Middle East. The overthrow of Egypt’s leader, Hosni Mubarak, in 2011, left a deep impression on Chinese leaders, who saw parallels with the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, said John K. Culver, a former CIA officer who followed Xi’s rise.

“What really scared them was Egypt, because Hosni Mubarak rose as an officer in the Egyptian military, and yet the military turned on him,” Culver said. Chinese leaders, he added, “saw that and asked themselves: ‘If Tiananmen Square happened today, would the army again save the party?’

Within weeks of taking power in late 2012, Xi met with officials and sounded a warning: The collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, was a cautionary tale for China. It had fallen, he lamented, because its military had lost its nerve. He warned officials that China could suffer the same fate unless the party recovered its ideological backbone.

Months later, he issued an internal edict to roll back the influence of what he called Western ideas, such as the concept of universal human rights and the rule of law, in universities and the news media.

Xi, who leads the military as chair of the Central Military Commission, reserved some of his bluntest warnings about the West for his commanders.

“The ‘laws of the jungle’ of international competition have not changed,” he told military delegates to China’s national legislature in 2014. He pointed to the growing presence of U.S. jets, ships and aircraft carriers in the Asia-Pacific region as evidence that the United States was seeking to contain China.

He also said that the pro-Western protests that were then sweeping across Ukraine were a warning for Beijing. “Some Western countries are fanning the flames there and secretly scheming to achieve their geopolitical goals there,” he said. “We must take heed of this lesson.”

To prepare for the threats Xi saw ahead, he said, China needed to urgently overhaul its military. From late 2015, he initiated a sweeping reorganization of the People’s Liberation Army, seeking to make it an integrated force capable of extending Chinese power abroad, especially through air, sea and space forces. His warnings about the West helped underscore the urgency of those changes.

“Speeches to people within the system are attempts to mobilize,” said Blanchette, the researcher in Washington. “You don’t do that by just saying that the world is getting a little bit complicated; you need a narrative that is going to allow you to smash vested interests to achieve change.”

Xi warned that the People’s Liberation Army was still dangerously backward, and could fall behind if it did not seek to innovate, particularly in upgrading its weaponry and command organization. In these speeches, Xi did not say that war was unavoidable. But he made clear that without a formidable military, China would not be able to assert its will.

“In international contestation, political operations are very important, but ultimately it comes down to whether you have strength and whether you can use that strength,” he told the commanders on the Central Military Commission in November 2015. “Relying on a silver tongue won’t work.”--from “Xi Jinping’s Selected Major Statements on National Defense and Military Development,” reported in NYT

                                                  *

So, not only is the socialist philosophy necessarily cannibalistic because of its own inefficiencies, America's own recent behavior has raised the question of the American giant's competence and, hence, its vulnerability.

Some Books

From a paper.

Advances in evolutionary theories (the Extended Synthesis) demonstrate that organisms systematically modify environments in ways that influence their own and other species’ evolution. This paper utilizes these theories to examine the economic consequences of human dispersal from Africa. Evidence shows that early humans’ dispersal affected the adaptability of animal species to human environments and, through this, the extinction of large mammals during Homo sapiens’ out-of-Africa migration. Empirical analyses explore the variation in extinction rates as a source of exogenous pressure for cooperation and innovation among hunter–gatherers and examine the impact of extinction on long-run development. The results indicate that extinction affects economic performance by driving continental differences in biogeography, disease environments, and institutions. Eurasia’s location along the out-of-Africa migratory path provided human and animal populations with coevolutionary foundations for domestication and agriculture, which gave Eurasians technological and institutional advantages in comparative development.

Interesting--and perhaps forbidden--thought.

***

According to a report by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, more than 80% of China’s 1 billion private enterprises are family-owned, with about 29% of these businesses in traditional manufacturing. From 2017 to 2022, around three-quarters of China’s family businesses are in the midst of a leadership transition, marking the largest succession wave in Chinese history.

***

Is a ceasefire in the Middle East proof of concept for Hamas?

***


Some Books

From the insightful Amity Shlaes in her book New Deal Rebels:

Out of a very American sense of decency, most of the public was unwilling to delve into the New Deal’s arguments. To impugn the government’s motives would be more indecent yet. The longer the license of crisis was invoked, the more citizens accepted the suspension of their freedoms. And, over time, Americans became so accustomed to economic misery and their own lack of freedom that, benumbed, they came to see no other remedy to their woes than a yet-larger government. In any case, it appeared easier to go along.

(Familiar, no?)

                                                  *
From Magness' review of a book advocating changes in education by Gannon:

University professors, Gannon contends, must abandon “the façade of objectivity” in the classroom—a concept that he derides as “an abdication of our responsibility” and an exercise in “intellectually dishonest” instruction (p. 21). In its place, he espouses a “pedagogy of radical hope” that embraces its duty to train political activists, albeit only in a set of far-left values that perfectly align with Gannon’s own beliefs.

(A revolutionary opinion on education as less an environment and more an indoctrination camp.)

                                                   *

Kline on his paper on liberalism as an adjective:

The digitization of text has enabled us to prove that liberalism started with Adam Smith and friends. Liberalism 1.0 was Smithian liberalism.
I show the origins, nature, and character of liberalism 1.0 in a new study, “‘Liberal’ as a Political Adjective (in English), 1769–1824,” embedded below.

The paper discusses the stepping from non-political meanings of the adjective liberal to the first political meaning. Smith and his friends christened their political outlook “liberal.” The data show that ‘liberal’ acquired a sustained political signification for the first time around 1769: the liberal policy principles of Adam Smith and his associates.

The study will appear in Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, in an issue containing proceedings of the Adam Smith 300 conference in Edinburgh in 2023, organized by the NOUS Network. The posting is done with permission of the editors of the special issue.

The bodies of evidence include: (1) the non-occurrence in English prior to 1769 (with a few exceptions); (2) the blossoming from 1769 of ‘liberal plan,’ ‘liberal system,’ ‘liberal principles,’ ‘liberal policy,’ etc.; (3) the occurrence beginning in the 1770s of political uses of ‘liberal’ in Parliament; (4) the occurrence of the same in the Edinburgh Review, 1802–1824.

The political adjective liberal came alive around 1769 and was sustained straight up to when the political nouns liberalism and liberal start up in the 1820s.

The data from French, German, Italian, and Spanish confirm that Britain was the first to get to a political sense of “liberal.”

I look at text of David Hume and Adam Ferguson, and then the liberal christeners William Robertson and, most importantly, Adam Smith.

I briefly treat figures in the sustainment of the christening, Edmund Burke, Dugald Stewart, and John Ramsay McCulloch.

I also discuss “liberal” in early American political discourse. I theorize on why “liberal” was never much used in America, until the twentieth century, when “liberal” acquired a new meaning contrary to the Smithian meaning.

Those who favor reform that reduces the governmentalization of social affairs need a name for that Smithian outlook. Whatever name we adopt, it will be abused or stolen by those whose characters and deeds spell the governmentalization of social affairs. We should remember who we are. We should return to the great liberal arc of the last 500 years, rising out of Christendom. There is only one liberalism 1.0. Let’s recover it and stick with it.

(Liberal concepts start with Adam Smith.)

Criteria for Parenthood

A study published in 2020, which drew together multiple pieces of research to track the health of almost 50,000 over-65s, showed the incidence rate of new cases of dementia in Europe and North America had dropped 13 per cent per decade over the past 25 years — a decline that was consistent across all the studies.

***

A study adds nuance to ongoing debates about whether antisemitism is more prevalent on the political right or left, by suggesting that (at least in the UK) it is instead associated with a conspiracist view of the world, a desire to overturn the social order, and a preference for authoritarian forms of government—all of which may exist on the right, the left, and elsewhere.

***

An estimated 500,000 women in the United States between 18-24 are content creators on Onlyfans. There are 15,500,000 female Americans between 18-24. Roughly 3 out of every hundred women you meet between 18 and 24 are signed up to create content on Onlyfans.

***


Criteria for Parenthood

Michael and Catherine “Kitty” Burke were told they weren’t qualified to be foster parents unless they vowed to support a child should he or she someday identify as “LGBTQIA.” Reminiscent of California's attempt to disqualify parents because they did not support their child's transitioning at school.

So, the state has requirements for parenthood.

This is actually fascinating because there has been an often-spoken-of problem with a rarely-spoken solution. Crime and poverty have established connections to childbearing and childraising. Single-parent families, families with incarcerated parents, and children of teenage parents all, demographically, raise children who do not work, commit more crimes, require state financial support, go to jail, and have children who do the same.

Will the state, having already announced they have the right to define parenthood criteria, turn their hungry eye to that area? And what would their good-intentioned actions be?

Yellin' at Yellen

Our statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4% of the American public, they [Jews] account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes,” FBI Director Wray said.

***

"The Irishman," a film with great actors at every turn, and said to be a Scorsese triumph, was released in theaters at over 3.5 hours long. It did not do well and went to Netflix, its original producer, in a month. It cost over $200 million to make and grossed about $8 million.

***

One in three Americans has at least one tattoo. More than half of women in their 20s do.

***


Yellin' at Yellen

Every once in a while, rarely, government experts come under scrutiny.

Yellen, who was appointed Treasury secretary in January 2021, should have issued more long-dated government bonds before the Federal Reserve began hiking interest rates early last year, Druckenmiller says. The billionaire investor and head of Duquesne Family Office made the comments to elite trader Paul Tudor Jones during a fireside chat at a recent Robin Hood Foundation event.

"When rates were practically zero, every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary in the United States refinanced their mortgage," Druckenmiller said. "Unfortunately we had one entity that did not, and that was the US Treasury."

"I literally think if you go back to Alexander Hamilton, it was the biggest blunder in the history of the Treasury. I have no idea why she's not been called out on this, she has no right to still be in that job after that," Druckenmiller said.

                                                    *

This kind of example runs the risk of exposing That-Which-May-Not-Be-Mentioned: these failures, like the border problem or the deficit, are not evidence of competing philosophies and disagreements, they are evidence that these people are over their heads. We have deferred our problems to people who simply cannot manage them. 

Our only salvation is that the country's predatory enemies are led by people at least as stupid.

Tattoos

60% of hate crimes last year targeted Jews. 9% targeted Muslims.

***

The UN General Assembly elected Albania, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, China, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Dominican Republic, France, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Malawi and the Netherlands to the Human Rights Council (HRC) for the 2024-2026 term. The Chair of the council currently is...Iran.

***

In a late 2022 survey, some 40% of corporate respondents said they were concerned about the “reputational risk” raised by public criticisms of carbon offset projects.
In recent months, corporations including Shell, Nestlé, EasyJet, and Fortescue Metals Group all announced they were backing away from offsets or the claims of carbon neutrality that relied upon them.

***

Tattoos

The oldest preserved tattoos found belonged to a person today known as Ötzi, a resident of the Italian Alps some 5,300 years ago. The guy had 61 tattoos, including bracelets on his wrists and black dashes all over his body. Lars Krutak, an anthropologist who studies tattoos, says that the cultural practice of tattooing almost certainly goes back further, developing independently in many places around the globe. For generations, the Māori people used miniature chisels to create stunning facial tattoos, a practice that has come back in popularity in recent decades. One third-century Roman described the barbarians of Britain as “marked by local artists with various figures and images of animals,” the dye in their skin growing and changing along with their bodies.--from the Atlantic

It seems these old and ancient practices did not, as they do today, reflect personal preference or expression. They were usually connected to cultural or mythic milestones, like a gang tattoo; one got 'the battle tattoo,' 'the fatherhood tattoo' or 'the hunter tattoo.' So ancient tattooing was a joining, a merging into the community, rather than an individual statement or personal expression.

Apparently.

Unbearable

A remarkable study: 'We study the AI control problem in the context of decentralized economic production. Profit-maximizing firms employ artificial intelligence to automate aspects of production. This creates a feedback loop whereby AI is instrumental in the production and promotion of AI itself. Just as with natural selection of organic species this introduces a new threat whereby machines programmed to distort production in favor of machines can displace those machines aligned with efficient production. We examine the extent to which competitive market forces can serve their traditional efficiency-aligning role in the face of this new threat. Our analysis highlights the crucial role of AI transparency. When AI systems lack perfect transparency self-promoting machines destabilize any efficient allocation. The only stable competitive equilibrium distorts consumption down to catastrophic levels.'

***

One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic was the early insistence by the WHO and the CDC that COVID was not airborne. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.” the WHO tweeted on March 28, 2020, accompanied by a large graphic. Even at that time, there was plenty of evidence that COVID was airborne.

***

Under New York law, prostitution is considered a Class B misdemeanor and is punishable by up to three months in jail and/or up to a $500 fine.

Patronizing a prostitute, meanwhile, is a Class A misdemeanor and is punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a $1,000 fine.


***

Unbearable

Several people with autism and intellectual disabilities have been legally euthanized in the Netherlands in recent years because they said they could not lead normal lives, researchers have found.

The cases included five people younger than 30 who cited autism as either the only reason or a major contributing factor for euthanasia, setting an uneasy precedent that some experts say stretches the limits of what the law originally intended.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to allow doctors to kill patients at their request if they met strict requirements, including having an incurable illness causing “unbearable” physical or mental suffering.

Between 2012 and 2021, nearly 60,000 people were killed at their own request, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee.

Questions

Questions

Some observations.

How is it that the outrage over Israel with people in the streets was invisible until Israel was attacked?

Our energy status, our financial status, the global warfare, the nuclear threat, our border and illegal immigrant status, the age of our 'leaders'--all of these elements are threatening to the country, our livelihood, our very safety. Yet in the recent election, the vote was heavily in favor of the status quo. How is that possible?

The Ohio abortion vote reiterated the not-needed-to-be-proven notion that single-issue voters will override everything, regardless of consequence.

The abortion issue may make the Republican Party permanently irrelevant.

The shrinking population in Western Pennsylvania has yet to stimulate real conceptual change in the area's politics. The winner in the County Executive vote was a socialist and former barista. This may reward conservatives cynical about the effectiveness of government but there is another side to government: the ability to do harm. See national energy policy.

The 'systemic racism' slur that appears commonly in U.S. discussions and in Critical Theory has always seemed unserious and unsubstantiated. Sociologic and psychological theories are famously soft and difficult to prove and defend. But is this outbreak of antisemitism meaningful?

Why is Chris Christy not more popular?

What is it in us that allows us to look at serious problems that demand intervention and blindly turn away? When will the national debt become important to 'leaders' and citizens?

When did the idea of more gentle warfare emerge?

Hierarchies

 

600,000 known 'getaways' at the southern 'border' this year. This year. One might assume they are highly selected subjects.


***

John Kirby from the National Security Council said the administration is 'monitoring' the traffic on the southern 'border.' Monitoring. It sounds like they are like neighborhood police who have moved from being law-enforcing interventionists to armed secretaries.

***

The Metropolitan Police in London were videotaped removing posters with pictures of hostages taken by Hamas. The posters were being removed from Cullimore Chemist in Edgware. The chemist’s CEO, Hassan Khan, recently retweeted posts branding Israel and the IDF “filthy animals” and encouraging Iran and Hezbollah to attack Israel.
What was the police’s excuse for removing the posters? They explained, “We do not wish to limit the rights of anyone to protest or to raise awareness of the plight of those kidnapped and the terrible impact on their families. But we do have a responsibility to take reasonable steps to stop issues escalating and to avoid any further increase in community tension.”--from Shapiro via Don

***


Hierarchies

An interesting note:

"One of the reasons it is seemingly impossible to get any Palestinian leader to sign on the dotted line is the harsh fact that the Middle East is full of assassinated peacemakers. In 1979, Egypt's Anwar Sadat signed a peace deal with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in the culmination of a process that had begun the previous year. In 1981, while reviewing the troops during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal, Sadat, and eleven others were killed by an Islamist militant in an attack that also wounded 28.

Assassinating leaders who reach out to the opposition isn’t just an Arab or Palestinian habit. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 and famously shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn. He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres. And then, in 1995, a right-wing Israeli extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords killed Rabin.

In this Middle East conflict, if you try to reach out to the other side and find some form of coexistence, somebody on your side will accuse you of being a traitor and sellout and agent for the opposition and put a bullet in you."--Geraghty
                                                *
This is a mutually-agreed-to death match. And they don't want interference or referees. But the right-wrong debate is now moot. One side has nuclear weapons and the other has a psychotic friend with them. The conflict itself is a threat to the world.

The essence of the problem is that the incompatible desires of both combatants supersede, in their minds, the very needs and existence of mankind.