Some Reflections on 2024

An interagency trade policy committee is seeking to erode investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) protections under U.S. trade agreements with Colombia, Mexico, and Canada as it leaves town.
Robert Lighthizer, Donald Trump’s first-term trade representative, negotiated limitations on the international tribunals in the revised U.S. trade pact with Mexico and Canada. He and his allies on the left say businesses would build more factories in the U.S. if there were fewer legal protections for overseas investments. But this opens the door to leftwing governments that want to nationalize U.S. investments and harm U.S. shareholders. 

Purposefully making the outside world more unjust to exaggerate your domestic advantage.

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According to the Economist, it is China’s turn to worry about offshoring. Its manufacturers are leaving.

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“The more intelligent a person is, the more he discovers kindness in others, for nothing enriches the world more than kindness. It makes mysterious things clear, difficult things easy, and dull things cheerful.”--Tolstoy

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Some Reflections on 2024

The only thing more astonishing than Kamala Harris' nomination is that people voted for her.

Worldwide per capita income is up 500% since 1950. With such an astonishing growth of wealth, why is its disparity so important to some?

It is said that Russia's expansionist invasion of Ukraine is an aberration in history but it's the post-WWII peace period that is the aberration.

The new baseball contracts are quantum leaps in value, demand, and distortion. Strangely, it has not raised social justice warriors' cry for equity.

The costs of health care and education in the U.S. continue apace despite the fact there has been no success and the country continues to lag other comparably developed nations. Why has no one questioned our methods in the face of such bad results?

Mendacity in politics and journalism has reached an unimagined height. It is now brazen. It looks at the border and declares it closed. It changes the crime rate by redefining crime. The party that has been disguising the very leadership of the nation now accuses its opponents of undemocratic behavior.

Individuals who see themselves as visionaries, moral advocates, and the 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, and the commonest is hope. But, in motivation, the strongest is fear.

Paul Skenes had a remarkable year. He has remarkable stuff.

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 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 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.

More than 5,000 minors underwent sex-change surgeries between 2019 and 2023 and nearly 14,000 had sex-change treatments, according to research into insurance billing codes conducted by the advocacy organization Do No Harm.

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 again. Some people are taking the CO2 problem of the world less seriously than others.

I have reached a peculiar milestone in my life: I no longer care about Crosby's game. I want him to be happy.

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.'

 

Hogmanay

What would a cannibal on death row pick as his last meal?

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According to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the migration route between Tunisia, Libya, Italy and Malta is one of the most dangerous passages in the world with over 24,300 people disappearing or dying since 2014.

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Hogmanay

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year, a mixture of ancient traditions and, possibly, a more modern reaction to the strict Cromwellian restrictions of the Middle Ages. It has several characteristics. Bonfires are a part, perhaps from Viking or Clan days. "Redding" the house is another. It is a ritualistic cleaning, a 'readying' for the new year. The fireplace is swept and some read the ashes, like auguries. After midnight, neighbors visit, bringing small gifts, usually food, and receiving them, usually whiskey. 

Importance was placed on the first to enter in the new year, the "first foot." (Tall handsome men were good, redheaded women bad.) The house and the livestock are blessed with water from a local stream--which sounds really old--and then the woman of the house would go from room to room with a smoldering juniper branch, seemingly counteracting all the "redding" with smoke. Robert Burn's version of the traditional Scottish Auld Lang Syne, which translates to “times gone by,” is sung.

Joseph Has a Dream

 Kamala Harris, our Czar of Artificial Intelligence, speaking at the Essence Festival of Culture:

“Culture is — it is a reflection of our moment in our time, right? And in present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment.
And we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy, because as you know, it comes in the morning.
We have to find ways to also express the way we feel about the moment in terms of just having language and a connection to how people are experiencing life. And I think about it in that way too."

This is why we have a republic.

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Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah.

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Two Oregon men who entered the woods of Washington State on a Christmas Eve hunt for Sasquatch have been found dead, authorities confirmed on Saturday

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Joseph Has a Dream

In the gospel, Joseph has a dream where he is told the child Mary is carrying is not the product of an illicit relationship, the child is the Son of God. The entire New Testament hinges on this moment. On the meaning of a dream. The divine nature of Christ is brought to the outside world for the first time. The resurrection of Christ is the edifice of Christianity, the nature of Christ's conception is its foundation. 

Enter Arius.

Arias, an early Christian bishop, argued that Christ had a beginning and therefore could not be God. He was declared a heretic, then absolved, then made a heretic again. But his distress is crucial as it was--and is--the world's distress. The Prophet Mohammad formed his opinion of Christianity through contact with an Arian philosopher and, while he accepted the Jews as monotheists, he thought Christians polytheists.

Logic brought to bear on a being that rises from the dead seems misapplied. If either part of the story is acceptable, then it is hard to limit the rest of the story with petty human concerns. But, strangely, human reaction is the essence of the story. Like all the nativity scenes, humanity is at the center. Christ comes to the world as a vulnerable infant, dependent upon human care. Christ's later claims will mean nothing to the world without the disciples' translation, acceptance, and proselytizing. Humanity is the linchpin of the entire story. After all, human faith--humanity itself--was the basis of it all, for Mary--and Joseph--could have said "No."

Astonishing. And a hell of a dream.

Sat/Stats

Olivia Hussey has died.

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Quantum Computing:
Encryption will no longer guarantee privacy as quantum computers can crack ciphers in seconds. What will that do to the price of Bitcoin?
Quantum computing can enhance artificial intelligence by speeding up information retrieval.
Quantum computers may advance climate change research by improving weather modeling.

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In 2022, there were nearly 6 million police-reported crashes, more than 90% due to human error. Will self-driving technology help?

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December 2024 will see a rare "black moon," a term for the second new moon in a calendar month.
December's second new moon will occur at 5:27 p.m. ET (2227 GMT) on Dec. 30, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.
A second new moon is sometimes called a "black moon," just as two full moons in a month is sometimes called a "blue moon."  
New moons happen when the sun and the moon share the same celestial longitude, a position also called conjunction. You can't see the moon during this phase from Earth because the illuminated side is facing away from us; new moons are visible only during eclipses.

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Sat/Stats

In a TV interview, Jordan Peterson said a small percentage of criminals were responsible for 55% of crimes...

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William Kelly, director of the University of Texas Center for Criminology and Criminal Justice Research, noted that according to the U.S. Sentencing Project, as many as 100 million U.S. residents, which in 2014 would have been equal to 41 percent of the adult population, had a criminal conviction. That sounds hard to believe. Is it simply convictions divided by population?

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According to the 2014 National Crime Victimization Survey, only 37 percent of U.S. property victimizations and only 46 percent of violent victimizations were reported to police.

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In 2014, Swedish researchers drawing on records accounting for the experiences of 2.5 million people born in that country from 1958 to 1980 reported that from 1973 to 2004, some 1 percent of the population accounted for 63 percent of all violent crime convictions.

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A study found that a "small proportion of the study males (7%) were defined as ‘chronic offenders’ because they accounted for about half of all officially recorded offenses"

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Wolfgang found that 6 percent of juvenile boys accounted for about half of alleged juvenile crimes.

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A routine finding in the criminological literature is that about half of the crime is committed by a very small fraction of the population, around 5-8 percent depending on the sample and methodology used.

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The rearrest rate (for the first eight years after release) is about 49 percent. The re-conviction rate is 32 percent. The re-incarceration rate is 25 percent.

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Inmates who didn’t finish high school are 10 points more likely to be arrested again than those who got a high school diploma – and 40 points more likely than those who finished college.

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Prisoners released before turning 21 had a rearrest rate of about 68 percent; those released at age 60 or older had a rate of 16 percent.

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Offenders convicted of crimes involving guns are far more likely (68 percent) to end up being arrested again.

Strauss on Churchill

83% of U.S. energy and 60% of electricity came from fossil fuels in 2023.

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“Practically every terrible idea eating away at America’s soul originated with some academician whose philosophy gelled while writing his PhD dissertation.”--Graboyes

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Strauss on Churchill

Churchill died on January 24, 1965. When the philosopher Leo Strauss came into class and was informed of Churchill’s death, he said:

"The death of Churchill is a healthy reminder to students of political science of their limitations, the limitations of their craft.

The tyrant stood at the pinnacle of his power. The contrast between the indomitable and magnanimous statesman and the insane tyrant—this spectacle in its clear simplicity was one of the greatest lessons which men can learn, at any time.

No less enlightening is the lesson conveyed by Churchill’s failure, which is too great to be called tragedy. I mean the fact that Churchill’s heroic action on behalf of human freedom against Hitler only contributed, through no fault of Churchill’s, to increase the threat to freedom which is posed by Stalin or his successors. Churchill did the utmost that a man could do to counter that threat—publicly and most visibly in Greece and in Fulton, Missouri.

Not a whit less important than his deeds and speeches are his writings, above all his Marlborough—the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding, which should be required reading for every student of political science.

The death of Churchill reminds us of the limitations of our craft, and therewith of our duty. We have no higher duty, and no more pressing duty, than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence. For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness."

So greatness--even with the highest motives--is not enough. Our very nature in this complex world distorts our noblest aims. Life cannot be directed; the unpredictable is part of our very being. We live, in our marrow, in a struggle we cannot be directed out of. True greatness understands both its promise and its limits.

The Magi

On the morning of Boxing Day, 2004, a tsunami was unleashed across the Indian Ocean after a giant undersea earthquake struck off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killing over 230,000.

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Montana Supreme Court voted 6-1 this week and effectively declared a state constitutional right to protection from climate change.

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More than half of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act's estimated costs came from tax incentives to green corporations.

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And a more complex view of Christmas:

The Magi

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

--Yeats

Christmas

Though Ferguson sees profoundly the crisis of our times, and the contribution to that crisis brought about by the abandonment of Christianity, this is not primarily a political conversion. It's a deeply personal and deliberate turn to faith by a man who was formerly a lifelong atheist.--Niall Ferguson on X

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This is the time of year when we contemplate whether man's discontent can be overcome by force, will, and circumstance. And particularly, if that discontent can be alleviated by harming or otherwise taking advantage of his neighbor.

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Christmas

Today we celebrate God's stepping into Time. In this extraordinary integration, He enters a Middle Eastern family and places Himself in their care, the finite and the Infinite in a simple domestic human scene.

Always responsible to Him, humans became responsible for Him.

Imagine that. This is a moment of almost Nordic complexity.

The message of Christianity--that of forgiveness, love, family, and community of man--so distilled down in the symbols of this holiday, is so optimistic and hopeful one is always struck by the homicidal, nihilistic, despairing, and similarly faith-based philosophies that have risen as alternative explanations of man's condition.

It is hard to believe an active evil force is not present to influence it.

Merry Christmas.

Virginia

"The indisputable fact that nobody can argue is that when we do get there, our current securities, the cybersecurity systems — which includes everything from Bitcoin to email — will be in great danger."--senior lecturer at the University of Kent Perez-Delgado on quantum computing

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Justice is contractual while fairness is redistributive.

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No material progress, even though it takes shapes we cannot now conceive, or however it may expand the faculties of man, can bring comfort to his soul. It is this fact, more wonderful than any that Science can reveal, which gives the best hope that all will be well.--Churchill

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Virginia

One of the most famous Letters to the Editor ever to appear in a newspaper was this query from an 8-year-old girl. It was first printed in the New York Sun in 1897, along with a response by editor Francis P. Church. It proved so popular that it was reprinted yearly until the Sun went out of business in 1949.
 
The Question

Dear Editor:

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

The Answer

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

"Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

"You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

"No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."

A Christmas Story

A Guatemalan migrant has been arrested for allegedly lighting a sleeping subway rider on fire in Brooklyn on Sunday morning — then watching as his female victim burned to death.

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Labour government reports that more than 120,000 people died in 2022 while on the National Health Service’s waitlist for treatment.

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President Biden is granting clemency to 37 of the 40 federal inmates facing death sentences. Their sentences will be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The three inmates who didn't get clemency are the convicted murderer in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, the gunman at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, and the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. 

Well, some criteria must be present, I guess.

And the Democrats are worried about Musk influencing the government?
The country is being run like a college frat house.

Is there a bigger scandal in the country than this unreported substitution-presidency?

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A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:  

For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."

"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"

Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob-connected. He knocked out the extremely popular, (and black), Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sportswriter later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”

Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.

Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?

Quantum Computing

Crews conducting an excavation at an ancient cemetery, an archaeological site outside of Frankfurt, in what was once the Roman city of Nida, discovered an ancient silver amulet with a Christian inscription in a grave. This implies a Christian extension into northern Europe two centuries earlier than supposed. And wide travel and commerce.

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Discussions between Biden and the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Treasury over the last four years were not conversations or discussions, they were scripted. Literally written out before the meeting.

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Quantum Computing

An announcement from Hartmut Neven Founder and Lead, Google Quantum AI


"Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. 

Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.

Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years-- 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch. (Yikes!)

So quantum computation will be indispensable for collecting training data that are inaccessible to classical machines, training and optimizing certain learning architectures, and modeling systems where quantum effects are important. This includes helping us discover new medicines, designing more efficient batteries for electric cars, and accelerating progress in fusion and new energy alternatives. Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing."

This is the beginning of a new age, a technology that is parallel to--and enhances--Artificial Intelligence. And will prove to be an economic driver for cultures and economies with the foresight and infrastructure to support and develop it.

Hide the women. 

Stats

Today is the winter solstice.

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Terry Flenory is known in the hip-hop community for founding the organized crime organization Black Mafia Family alongside his brother Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory in 1985 Detroit. He and his brother were sentenced to 30 years in 2008 for running a nationwide crime ring. Biden just pardoned them.


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Stats

Last year, a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey found a quarter of Americans agreed that "patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country" — the most in the nearly three years the question was asked since Donald Trump's first White House term.

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Most voters (68%) think the actions of the killer against United CEIO Thompson were unacceptable, while 17% found them acceptable, an Emerson College poll out this week found.

Young voters: 41% found the killer's actions acceptable, while 40% found them unacceptable, per the poll. About 24% found them "somewhat acceptable" and 17% "completely acceptable."

22% of Democrats found the killer's actions acceptable, while 59% found them unacceptable. Among Republicans, 12% found the actions acceptable while 16% of independents said the same.

Men (19%) found the killer's actions slightly more acceptable than women (14%).

Murder was acceptable to some. This is a lot worse than math scores.

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Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm spoke Tuesday, warning the incoming Trump administration that "unfettered exports" of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, could drive up domestic prices and increase planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. "Unfettered exports of LNG would increase wholesale domestic natural gas prices by over 30%,'' costing American households an additional $100 a year by 2050, Granholm said.

So exporting a product, making it less available, and not using it raises the price.

Ms. Granholm does not include in her calculations the effect of the energy deprivation in Europe --a result of their aggressive taxation and anti-oil policies--that would result with the loss of U.S. LGN.

And an independent analysis found that increased LNG exports would support nearly half a million domestic jobs and contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product through 2040.

This woman is making policy.

It's worse. 

Available data and recent history contradict one of the key points of the Biden administration’s long-awaited study on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
“There is zero evidence of any such correlation,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the Daily Caller News Foundation regarding Granholm’s suggestion that more exports could lead to higher domestic prices. “It is abject nonsense.”
S&P Global released its own study on the impacts of long-term U.S. LNG export growth on the same day that DOE put out its report. S&P’s analysis found that domestic natural gas prices have not increased despite massive export growth, and that the LNG industry has the potential to contribute $1.3 trillion to U.S. GDP by 2040, in addition to generating enormous tax revenues for the public coffers.
“Not only is this not Granholm’s job, the study findings in the report published Tuesday simply do not support any such conclusion,” Blackmon said.

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The AI revolution is American. There is no such development in Europe

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"Energy Insecurity." Energy inequalities across the globe are astounding. On average, an American citizen uses 30 times as much energy as a Nigerian does. There are also inequalities within our own borders: More than a third of U.S. households experience some form of energy insecurity. That fraction will increase if decarbonization efforts continue their current course.

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Cost of living:

• France: $1,200 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• U.S.: $1,166 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Canada: $1023 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Thailand: $650 per month for a single person, not including rent.
• Portugal: $592 per month for a single person, not including rent.

The College

As time goes by, the question will move from where Trump got his votes to who could possibly have voted for Harris.

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Chicago police make arrests in only 20% of fatal shootings.

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Democrats are accusing Musk of usurping the Trump presidency, this from the party that has been pretending that Biden has been president for four years.

There is something to the charge your enemy will accuse you of their crimes.

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The Ohio legislature passed legislation to let a coal-burning facility claim renewable energy credits.

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Biden administration’s Middle East aid envoy Lisa Grande reportedly made demands of Israel regarding the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, in a harsh phone call with Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians, COGAT chief Gen. Ghassan Alian. 

Channel 12 news reports that Grande demanded during the call that Israel declare it is not following a policy of deliberately starving Gazans amid the ongoing war. She also demanded that Israel cancel all civilian evacuation orders, allow Palestinians who have been evacuated to return to their homes, and present a comprehensive plan to reduce harm to civilian infrastructure, according to the report.
Alian was “stunned” by the call.
Who are these people?

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The College

Senate Democrats proposed a constitutional amendment on Dec. 16 that would abolish the Electoral College and ensure the country’s presidential elections were determined by the popular vote.

It is easy to dismiss such acts as amendments to the Constitution are very difficult and cumbersome to achieve. And most of the supporters also supported the peculiar "Super Delegates" notion. But these skirmishes are important as they point to a misreading, either purposeful or ill-informed, of a basic concept that formed the foundation of the American Revolutionary movement: the Founders' preoccupation with the defense of the minority. 

The Electoral College recognizes the specific economic grouping of geography and statehood. Cities will have certain interests that rural areas will not share. The same for coastal versus inland areas. River versus mountain. There are countless such subtle subdivisions. All deserve representation.

From Many, One. 

They saw America as a collection of individuals and groups with common interests that needed protection. Strangely, this is not unlike Critical Theory, which sanctifies subsets with common backgrounds, histories, and immutable natures that isolate them from the majority. But, unlike Critical Theory, in the Founders' view, these separate peoples were united with a basic root of individual freedom, inherent to them. Unlike Critical Theory, these individual qualities were distinctive but unifying.

One has to look no further than the last election, where the news carefully examined the voting tendencies of the subsets of states throughout the national map, to see these groupings play out in practical terms.

GP-1 and Economies

Since 1969, major U.S. projects receiving federal funds must submit an Environmental Impact Statement  (ETS) under the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1985, the Chicago Transit Association’s Final EIS for the Orange Line ran 378 pages. The 2022 Final EIS for the Red Line Extension is 50 times longer, at 17,899 pages. That’s for a project that’s half as long.

The planned Red Line Extension is projected to cost seven times more per mile than the Orange Line, which we completed in 1993.

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In 1900, US income (GDP) was $4,096 per capita in 2023 dollars, while in 2023 it was $81,695. The US poverty rate fell from 56% to 11.1% over the same period. How was such a dramatic increase in our widely shared standard of living possible? The answer (without explaining how it came about) is increased labor productivity. Each worker has been able to produce more and more and hence earned a higher income.

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GP-1 and Economies

Ozympic and Wegovy, both GLP-1 agonists that contribute to weight loss, are made by Novo Nordisk from Denmark.

The GLP-1 boom has been such good news for Novo Nordisk that rising drug exports are currently driving the majority of Denmark’s GDP growth—since late 2021, Danish GDP has increased by 3.6%, but economic growth would have been 0% without the contribution of rapid increases in pharmaceutical manufacturing output. In fact, the pharmaceutical boom has been so strong that it has almost singlehandedly made Denmark one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union.

Most of that pharmaceutical production boom has gone towards meeting foreign demand for GLP-1 drugs, especially in the United States. Real Danish goods exports have increased by roughly 37% over the last four years.

Interestingly, despite the country’s increase in economic output over the last two years, Denmark has struggled to fully translate the GLP-1 boom into rising personal spending or domestic investment. Real Danish household consumption and capital formation have both been stagnant for more than three years, mirroring many of the economic struggles seen in Germany and many other parts of the EU.

To some extent, that should not be particularly surprising—pharmaceutical manufacturing is not a labor-intensive industry and the returns to successful drug discovery usually come in the form of increased corporate profits. Yet Denmark is economically synonymous with the Nordic model that has long successfully converted innovative growth into broad-based welfare, and Novo Nordisk itself is unique for being majority-controlled by a charitable fund that is now the world’s largest. 

The task ahead for them is clear—to continue the current GLP-1 boom while more durably translating it into general economic prosperity.--Apricitas

The Sacrifice for Energy

Twelve people are dead after their bodies were found inside a restaurant at a popular ski resort in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia.

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In 2023, the Vatican reported an operating deficit of $87 million. The number had increased by $5.3 million in a year. This is one of the largest debts the Vatican has ever accumulated,
Tourism, one of the Vatican’s largest income streams, has failed to return to pre-pandemic levels.
Pope Francis and his progressive policies are causing a rift with more conservative Catholics, decreasing donations.
The hope is that The Great Jubilee of 2025 - a celebration marking the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, expected to attract over 35 million pilgrims - will be a financial savior.

***

Travis Hunter from Suwanee, Georgia, is an anthropology major carrying a 3.798 cumulative GPA. He is the first Academic All-American to win the Heisman since former Florida Star Tim Tebow did so in 2007.

***

Honda and Nissan are discussing a possible merger.

***

The Sacrifice for Energy

Demand in China, the world's largest coal consumer, is likely to grow by 1% in 2024 to reach 4.9 billion tonnes, nearly a third higher than in the rest of the world combined. The country is set to import 500 million tonnes, more than double the previous import record.

One in every three tonnes of coal used worldwide is burned at a power plant in China to cope with the country's enormous electricity demand. Paradoxically, China is also powering ahead on clean power, building two-thirds of all new wind and solar in the world.

India is also expected to consume more coal than the EU and the US combined as demand in the Asian nation rises by more than 5% to 1.3 billion tonnes, a level previously only reached by ChinaGlobal coal production is expected to reach an all-time high, surpassing 9 billion tonnes for the first time, as the three largest producers, China, India and Indonesia, hit new highs.

The French continue to bail the Chinese boat. The WSJ summary reveals a particularly European view of government and its relationship with the citizenry.

Paris contemplates regulating delivery and returns services for e-commerce to ensure carbon compliance, urging consumers instead to repair defective products rather than replace them. Fancy a steak frites or a duck à l’orange? Not anymore: Paris will insist you switch to vegetarian ratatouille to limit the carbon footprint of your diet.

How and where the French travel will have to change too. The roadmap envisions more electric vehicles, stiff penalties for driving older cars, promotion of remote work to cut down on commutes, fewer business trips and vacations abroad, and denser housing.

The French won’t be able to escape climate policy even in those denser homes. The net-zero roadmap warns of restrictions on screen sizes and resolutions to limit the energy consumption for televisions and smartphones.

Paris even envisions regulating personal climates. The dream (or nightmare) is for “intelligent building control systems” that limit winter heating to 66 degrees Fahrenheit and summer air conditioning to 78 degrees.

This will be achieved via regulations, subsidies, penalties, and taxes. The economic and fiscal costs are proving ruinous wherever they’re attempted, and this month the strain crashed Germany’s governing coalition. With its chronic economic anemia, fiscal bloat, and commitment to the socialistic garrot, France is at the end of its growth. 

But China has plenty of time.

Little Ice Age (Or Be Careful What You Wish for)

Pope Francis has revealed he was the target of an attempted suicide bombing during his visit to Iraq three years ago.

***

Ms. Warren offers a national medical plan that budgets 43 trillion dollars over the next ten years. TRILLION! Mr. Sander's plan budgets over 70 trillion. TRILLION! These fabulous expenses are not even remotely possible yet many seemingly sensible-looking people nod solemnly along in agreement. 

A university professor recently asked what advance she thinks the world could well do without replied, "Agriculture." She apparently longs for 7.7 billion hunter-gatherers roaming the wild earth.

These are dangerous but not serious people.

***

Heavily funded European interests trying to invest in U.S. electoral processes have lost Round One in U.S. courts. 

Foreigners believe they have the right to influence U.S. elections. They are using First Amendment arguments.

***                          

Little Ice Age (Or Be Careful What You Wish for)

From an article in Aeon by Dagomar Degroot, an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Climate History Network. His most recent book is The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (2018).

Midway through the 13th century, parts of the Northern Hemisphere started cooling. The causes were complex but involved some combination of cyclical changes in the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis, repeated declines in solar radiation, random fluctuations in oceanic and atmospheric currents, and volcanic eruptions that temporarily shrouded the Earth in veils of sunlight-scattering sulfur dioxide.
Temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere fluctuated for a while before cooling sharply in the 15th century. They rebounded briefly in the 16th, then dropped across much of the world – including the Southern Hemisphere – later in that century. Temperatures in some places warmed briefly halfway through the 17th century, then cooled again until early in the 18th. After several decades of modest warming, renewed cooling beset much of the world until midway through the 19th century, when persistent warming finally set in.

These cooling waves are together called the ‘Little Ice Age’, which is more than a bit of a misnomer. Global cooling in even the chilliest decades of the 17th and 19th centuries – the coldest of the period – probably did not exceed 0.5 degrees Celsius. Unlike today’s warming, cooling reached different places at different times, with more or less severity, and hot years could interrupt even the coldest decades. Glaciers did expand out of many mountain ranges, but this was not an ‘Ice Age’.
Nor was it ‘little’. Temperature anomalies were probably longer-lasting and more severe than any had been for millennia, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. They brought short-term changes in ocean currents and wind patterns that repeatedly drenched some regions in torrential rain, or afflicted others with landmark droughts. For those who lived through it, the Little Ice Age was no trivial matter.

Archaeologists and historians have long argued that many societies were woefully unprepared for the cooling of the Little Ice Age, and therefore suffered tremendous losses. When the Little Ice Age first chilled Greenland, for example, the sedentary agricultural practices that Vikings brought with them from Europe were no longer viable. Yet the Vikings, they supposed, stubbornly adhered to those practices, victims of cultural assumptions that they could not abandon. As temperatures continued to drop in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Viking settlements disappeared.

At around the same time, waves of bubonic plague swept across Eurasia, killing tens of millions. Some scholars have argued that torrential rains associated with the onset of a newly unstable European climate in the early 14th century ruined harvests and spurred the rise of disease among cattle, leading to a Great Famine that killed perhaps 10 percent of the continent’s population. Malnutrition in children can permanently weaken immune systems, and those who were children during the Great Famine were especially vulnerable to the later arrival of the plague. Others claim that precipitation extremes provoked by the onset of a cool but unstable climate drove booms and busts in the population of rodent vectors for the plague. When rodents in central Asia multiplied, fleas that carried plague did too; when they declined, fleas overcrowded on surviving rodents fled in desperation to new hosts: humans living nearby. After such migrations, waves of plague slowly traveled west towards Europe.

Famines led to widespread starvation, migration, and epidemics, which in turn kindled rebellions, civil wars, and conflict between states. According to the historian Geoffrey Parker, this ‘fatal synergy’ between climatic cooling, starvation, disease, and conflict culminated in a ‘global crisis’ that killed perhaps a third of the world’s population.

From The Defence Reformation

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich.--von Mises

***

Andrew, the Duke of York, has said he “ceased all contact” with the businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.
Sources close to the government of the United Arab Emirates claim the Duke of York is considering a permanent move to the Gulf, where his royal status would still confer a degree of respect, according to the Sunday Times.

***

From The Defence Reformation

We, as a culture, are inundated with manifestos. Most are by self-indulgent lunatics but the culture is broad and forgiving. And curious.

This notebook has often been a sounding board for ideas of varying merit but this article, by the CTO of Palantir, is arresting, radical, and hopeful. 

It is an analysis of the DoD--and may have implications of our efforts to homogenize decisions in our suicidal war on merit that makes life so much easier for administrators..

These snippets are followed by a link, 4000 words. I think it's worth the read.

"In 1993, after the end of the Cold War, America wanted a Peace Dividend and defense spending was slashed by 67%. The Secretary of Defense held a dinner at the Pentagon — the so-called “Last Supper” — to tell the 51 primes they would not all survive. Today, there are 5.

The most important consequence of the Last Supper wasn’t a reduction in competition in the Defense Industrial Base, but the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense and the rise of the government Monopsony. Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so called traditionals. The vast majority of the spend went to companies that had both defense and commercial businesses. Chrysler made cars and missiles. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills — the cereal company — made artillery and inertial guidance systems.

But today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. The Monopsony’s fixation on cost-plus contracting, control, and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks — a luxury only affordable at the end of history. That is not what the most dynamic parts of the American economy do — only the dying parts.

Working with the Monopsony as a defense contractor is so unappealing that Ball would rather make beer cans than satellite buses. That is depressing.

The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. That resembles Europe’s sclerotic capital markets, not America’s.

But Palantir’s addition will not be the last. Because today the Founders are back — in the hundreds — and they are backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital to build in the national interest. However, their effort and capital alone is not enough to resurrect the American Industrial Base. We need a defense Reformation to upend the Monopsony and transform the way the government does business. Here is my treatise on how to get that done.

Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD. The only problem is that we are bad commies.

We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:

'This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.'
 
There is no process that can save us. Reform will be painful. We must be very careful not to conflate pain with error. As world champion cyclist Greg LeMond said, “It doesn’t get easier, you just go faster.” Just as there is no pain-free world class cycling performance, innovation will always be painful, messy, and subject to retrospective bureaucratic critiques from those not in the arena.

Our centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight process values time spent, not time saved. It values costs and effort, not value and outcomes.

The Great Schism has created a religion in government that is unaware or dismissive of power-law outcomes from power-law talent. In Silicon Valley we call them 10x or 100x engineers, meaning they are 10x to 100x as valuable and productive as normal engineers. We once understood this in defense, too: Rickover, Kelly Johnson, Ed Hall and countless legendary talents fought the bureaucracy and got stuff done. We seem to generally appreciate that Usain Bolt is more than a generational talent — even the gold medalist at Paris 2024 was not faster than him. But this is also true for Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Ryan Tseng, and the Founders at the First Breakfast. Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield."

https://www.18theses.com/

Sinterklaas

 

The World Bank estimates that crime costs South Africa 10% of GDP annually.

***
 
…the most significant destruction on the Korean Peninsula was wrought by the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century. Nearly two million Koreans, a staggering 20 percent of the population, perished during the Imjin Wars, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaigns of 1592-1598 to subjugate the Korean Peninsula. Hideyoshi’s object was the conquest of Ming China (1368-1644) but the result was to turn Korea into a ruined land.--meyer

***

Sinterklaas

Amsterdam hosts the largest Saint Nicholas parade in the world. The white-bearded legend traditionally makes his spectacular entrance into the city by sailing down the Amstel River then trades his boat for his white horse Amerigo, and the parade continues through the streets. Although the feast of Saint Nicolas falls on 6 December, the evening of 5 December is the main gift-giving occasion during the holiday season in the Netherlands. Called 'sinterklaasavond' (Sinterklaas evening) or'pakjesavond' (presents evening), Sint drops off a sack full of gifts on the doorstep before heading back to Spain. Following his late-night visit, much like at Christmas, everyone unwraps their presents from Sinterklaas and reads aloud the poems that have been written especially for each recipient. The author of these light-hearted poems remains anonymous.

Saint Nicholas has had close ties with Amsterdam since 343 AD. Legend has it that Sinterklaas originally came from Turkey to Amsterdam as St. Nicolaus, the Bishop of Mira. He is specifically described as a benefactor of young women. No one really knows why he then chose to live in Spain but historians point to the Spanish domination over the Netherlands in the past. His name appears on the oldest Greek list and on five other lists of participants in the Council of Nicaea and he is said to have physically attacked and beaten the major Arian bishop over the nature of the Trinity--and is often pictured as having a broken nose as a result.

The Christmas-like celebration on Dec. 5 has in recent years become part of the polarized discourse about race in The Netherlands. At the heart of the discussion is "Black Pete," Sinterklaas' helper--often the Saint's "enforcer" who punishes naughty children--who is often played by white people in blackface makeup and Afro wigs. Opponents see him as an outdated and offensive caricature that harks back to slavery, while the majority of Dutch people see Pete as a harmless children's character who has come to symbolize what they see as attacks on Dutch culture and traditions. Even the sacred United Nations has weighed in, with its Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, urging the Netherlands to "actively promote the elimination of those features of the character of Black Pete which reflect negative stereotypes and are experienced by many people of African descent as a vestige of slavery."
This has persisted in the country's public debate with the Black minority increasingly annoyed and the traditional Dutch surprisingly resistant to change. Some additions have been made with Zwarte Pieten evolving into a sort of sooty chimney-sweep.

Dutch Stamps:

  

Questions

Money is never unlimited. If private or public insurers have to blindly cover everyone, as Obamacare mandated, they will try to limit what they will cover. If insurers are further compelled to blindly cover everything, they will look harder at specific claims. If they can limit neither whom they cover nor what they cover, they will either raise their policy premiums or get out of the business.
It’s rich for progressives who have pushed for all of these developments – from the guaranteed issue of policies to people with pre-existing conditions to mandates of what those policies cover – to now complain about increasing premiums and rising claim denial rates. What did they think would happen?
So now, they are reduced to cheering for literally shooting the messenger.---McLaughlin

***

Questions

Does prudence modify principles?

*

It will be interesting to see, with the Healthcare CEO murder, how the NY DA office handles a real criminal. 

*

Luigi Mangione is charged with killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson - but police have now announced he wasn't even a client of the medical insurer. He potentially targeted the medical insurer because of its size and influence, a senior police official said Thursday.

*

Does populism come with a rise in vigilanteism?

*

A few years ago, a poll found that whereas 63 percent of voters said they viewed the Founding Fathers as heroes, among the under-thirties that figure shrank to 39 percent. Meanwhile, fully 31 percent of U.S. voters under 30 said they saw the Founders as “villains.”

"Villains."

Can a culture that does not hold itself in high regard, survive?

*

Kylie Kelce, wife of former NFL player turned media personality Jason Kelce, beat out Joe Rogan for the top podcast spot on both Apple and Spotify this week.

*

John Kerry met with Assad at least six times, including in February 2009, while he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gabbard met with him once as a member of the House of Representatives.

*

A year-long investigation by the General Accounting Committee found, that during the transition to the incoming Bush administration, Clinton’s staff had caused about $15000-worth of ‘damage, theft, vandalism and pranks’ although there were no prosecutions.

*

The Economist has chosen kakistocracy as its word of the year.
kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century
The word is derived from two Greek words, kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), with a literal meaning of government by the worst people

*

Much of the trouble in the world can be attributed to people taking bad studies seriously.
A study of whatever quality raises a bad idea to another power.

*

Russia stole $5 million John Deere tractors from Ukraine only to find they could be remotely disabled. 

Imagine that happening with other imported technologies.

*

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so-called traditionals. Today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. 

The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. 

 

Diversity of Outcomes

An 11-year-old girl was rescued after three days of being stranded at sea when a shipwreck off Italy's Lampedusa island is believed to have killed the remaining passengers on the vessel.
There were an estimated 45 passengers onboard the ship before it sank.
She survived without any drinking water or food and despite suffering from hypothermia, she was "responsive and oriented," according to the release.

***

President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic and is pardoning 39 Americans convicted of nonviolent crimes. It’s the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history.

***

“Violence is never the answer. But people can only be pushed so far.”--Elizabeth Warren on murdering a CEO
So violence sometimes is the answer?

***

Diversity of Outcomes

Inequality is all the rage. It is essentially "differences" in the culture. Its production. Its efforts. Its qualities. In the West, these differences, combined with liberty, have allowed for an astounding, diffuse economic advance across all groups, some more than others. But all have benefitted beyond all historical norms or expectations. Yet, despite this extraordinary achievement, some emphasize the unequal allocation of success.

Segments of a book review by James Hartley:

"Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns is a very bad book. Writing a review of it thus presents a challenge. Who wants to read a review that is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel of dead fish? Yet, while reading Robeyns’ tendentious screed, I was faced with the absolute certainty that quite a few of my colleagues and students would love this book.

…..

As I said at the outset, writing an entire review just documenting how bad this book is would be an incredibly easy task. Pick a page at random, and you’ll find multiple examples of an argument neither cohesive nor persuasive. The question is: how is it possible that the book is this bad? The answer is found in the Introduction. On the third page, Robeyns notes, “For a long time, I felt that there was something wrong with an individual amassing so much money, but I couldn’t properly articulate why.” So, she “decided to deploy my training in philosophy and economics to answer the question: Can a person be too rich?” The arguments in this book did not lead Robeyns to her conclusion; she started with the conclusion. When you start your investigation already knowing the answer to the question, then you may not notice that the reasons you offer for your conclusion are not persuasive to someone who is skeptical about the conclusion. If it seems like the arguments are non sequiturs attacking straw men, that isn’t important to Robeyns. The conclusion is right even if the arguments fail. The result of this approach is a religious book written for the already converted.

…..

To pretend that you can have all the riches of the modern world and eliminate the ability for anyone to become wealthy is a sure sign of someone who has no understanding of how all this wealth was generated in the first place. Robeyns’ book, however, provides insight into why people advocating income limitation plans often seem so unaware of how economic growth occurs. If getting rid of rich people is akin to a religious mandate to rid the world of evil, then of course it is safe to impute bad motives to anyone arguing that there are possibly benefits to the world from allowing people to do things that will make them wealthy. Despite appearances, Robeyns book is not really an attempt to persuade anyone of her beliefs; instead, it is an insight into the minds of zealots."