Some Reflections on 2023

 

Some Reflections on 2023

The quality of football is dangerously low.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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