Notes

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on the Senate floor today: “Day by day, Americans are getting more alarmed by the slash-and-burn approach DOGE is taking to basic government programs.” But just in case anyone who was listening actually likes the idea of slashing and burning government programs, Mr. Schumer hastened to argue that the savings that may result from Mr. Musk’s recommendations are far smaller than the tax restraints included in the pending reconciliation bill in Congress. Perhaps Sen. Schumer intended his remarks as an homage to one of his most famous constituents. “Trump’s spending reductions are terrible—and such small portions,” a character might say if Woody Allen ever makes a film set in Washington. What’s New, Bureaucrat?

Separate stories from the NYT portray the Musk efficiency work as a disturbing threat to society and also a largely meaningless public relations exercise.--wsj

***

Data centers have been touted as big job creators. But after they are built, they need very few workers.

***

Notes

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power.

If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it – to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.

Jean Baudrillard – The Transparency of Evil_ Essays on Extreme Phenomena (Radical Thinkers)-Verso.

***“

And so Zelensky’s latest poll, he’s at 57%,” noted Mark Levin, the conservative commentator, just one day after Trump claimed that Zelensky’s approval rating sat at 4%. “The parliament — with all parties in the parliament — support what he’s doing. They’re trying to survive. Ukraine did not invade Russia. Russia invaded Ukraine.”

***

Bryght Labs' ChessUp 2 is a smart chess board that combines the tactility of an in-person game with the ability to play with anyone, anywhere in the world.

When you pick up a piece, the board will show you via lighting where that piece can move, and when it's your opponent's turn (either computer-based or remote), the lights show you where to move their piece. If you've turned on the AI Assist tool, the colors of the lights correspond to how good the board thinks the move is. You can even use this tool to balance a two-player live game, giving less experienced players a helping hand.

Immediately after a game you play on Chess.com, the app lets you review your performance so that you can learn from your mistakes.

***

Just before Trump’s inauguration, Panama’s government signed a $2.5 million contract with Washington lobbying firm BGR Government Affairs to represent its interests for the first year of the Trump administration with “U.S. officials and decision-makers,” according to Justice Department filings.

***

Inflation did make the median voter poorer during Biden’s term. In no part of the income distribution did wages grow faster while Biden was President than they did 2012-2020. This is true in the raw data, and even more stark after compositional adjustment.
In particular, the change in median incomes was well below its 2012-20 run-rate.
But, the change in median wages is not what matters; it is the median change in wages that does. And this metric was even weaker under Biden: lower than any period in the last 30 years other than the Great Recession.
People do not feel wages, they feel total income. And median growth in total income — post taxes and transfers — was not just historically low: it collapsed and was deeply negative from 2021 onwards. Much of this decline is due to timing of pandemic stimulus and even less the “fault of Biden” than other things.-- Mazlish

***

7.5 million undocumented immigrants are working in the U.S., or about 4.6% of the employed labor force, according to an analysis last year of 2022 Census Bureau data by the American Immigration Council. In construction, they make up 14% of workers, in farming 1%.

***

The United States is the largest contributor of military personnel to NATO, with almost 1.33 million troops in 2024. Turkey, Poland, and France maintain the next largest armies, each with more than 200,000 troops. In total, NATO has more than 3 million active troops.
In 2024, the United States provided the largest share of the NATO common funding, at 15.9%, approximately $567 million. This is one of the largest shares, alongside Germany and the UK.

***

Amazon MGM Studios is set to take creative control of the James Bond franchise.
Long-time producers and custodians of 007, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, would be stepping back.

War and Trade

Hims & Hers Health:  the online pharmacy's value has plummeted as the window closed on the legal loophole it used to sell patent-protected weight loss drugs. 

The company had been worth as much as $15 billion a few weeks ago or around 140 times trailing 12-month earnings.

***

White men are, for the first time, no longer a majority of C-suite executives.

***

$358 million was generated by crypto trading for Robinhood Markets during the fourth quarter. Companies such as Robinhood have already benefited from the rally in Bitcoin and other digital assets that followed President Trump’s election

***

Banana Republic will leave Walnut Street on March 31.

***

War and Trade

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu famously argued that:

"…Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities."

Similar arguments were made by Kant, Cobden, Angell, and others. The effect of free trade on war was perhaps most pithily summarized by the aphorism “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” 

In Territory flows and trade flows between 1870 and 2008 Hu, Li and Zhang offer supporting evidence:

"Countries gain and lose territories over time, generating territory flows that represent the transfer of territorial sovereignty. Countries also export and import goods, creating trade flows that represent the transfer of merchandise ownership. We find a substitution between these two international flows during the years 1870 and 2008; that is, country pairs with greater trade flows have smaller territory flows. This indicates how international trade enhances international security: reciprocal goods transactions discourage irreciprocal territorial exchanges."

Not all territorial exchange involves war but most do.

See also Polachek and Seigle in the Handbook of Defense Economics who find that “A doubling of trade leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence.”--Tabarrok

A Memory Trick

Appointing the conservative commentator and former Secret Service deputy director, Dan Bongino, places a political appointee, rather than a career agent, in the No. 2 job for the first time in the bureau’s 117-year history.

***

Mr. Bugs’ Wordy Nugz was the original name given a game by its creator, Josh Wardle, before the world came to know ithe game as Wordle.

***

A Memory Trick

We naturally forget older memories our brains deem less important in order to make room for newer, more valuable information. Memory is, essentially, a competitive process, according to Ranganath. 

After a month, people tend to remember only 20-30 percent of what they were first taught. 

Ebbinghaus recommended something called spaced repetition. Recalling information tags it as more important in your brain, helping it win the competition for your limited memory space. That’s why your teachers back in high school nagged you to review material multiple times before tests and avoid a single cram session the night before.

Studying that’s spaced out vastly improves memory and recall. 

Writing on Medium recently, an adult language learner named Hillel suggested a fabulously simple trick to put Ebbinghaus’s insight to use. He calls it the 2-7-30 Rule. 

Here’s the basic idea: When you’re trying to learn new material, test yourself by trying to recall it two, seven, and 30 days after you initially learn it. 

“The intervals were based on the Ebbinghaus curve and my capacity for retaining information (discovered through trial and error),” he explains. 

For Hillel, this meant making lists of Spanish vocabulary and then testing himself by translating them back and forth from English at the two-, seven-, and 30-day marks. But this technique isn’t limited to learning foreign languages. 

“You can write a one-page summary after finishing the book and schedule review dates 2, 7, and 30 days in the future,” he suggests. Rewrite the summary without checking your notes and see how well you do. 

He even suggests setting yourself calendar reminders on the second, seventh, and 30th day so you don’t miss a session. 

St. Paul and the Evolution of the Soul

 

Druckenmiller last year dumped all of his Nvidia shares, and in the fourth quarter, opened a position in another top artificial intelligence (AI) stock, Amazon.

***

Writers such as Henry James and Charles Dickens burned their personal papers while they were still alive.
In December 1999, Joan Didion began writing a journal about her sessions with a psychiatrist. She addressed these notes – detailing her struggles with alcoholism, anxiety, guilt, and depression, a sometimes fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana, and reflections on her childhood and legacy – to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
These post-psychiatry notes, discovered by Didion’s literary executors in an unlabelled folder shortly after she died in 2021, are to be published in April has raised questions about the ethics of posthumous publishing.
Didion left no instructions to her trustees.

***

St. Paul and the Evolution of the Soul

It's fun to examine the opinions of thinkers before the revelations of the crucial thinking necessary to reach a reasonable discussion. It leads to talk of aliens.

Cormac McCarthy has a scene where a character debating quantum mechanics references in Kant where he writes: "...that which is not adapted to our powers of cognition."

Here is Paul in his letter to the Corinthians on biology, evolution, and amphibian man.

Letter of St. Peter to the Corinthians
1 Corinthians 15:45-49

Brothers and sisters:
It is written, The first man, Adam, became a living being,
the last Adam a life-giving spirit.
But the spiritual was not first;
rather the natural and then the spiritual.
The first man was from the earth, earthly;
the second man, from heaven.
As was the earthly one, so also are the earthly,
and as is the heavenly one, so also are the heavenly.
Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one,
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.

Sunday/New Laws and Hyperbole

 

Money in the 1700's was simply a tradeable IOU or debt which one signed and could be called; those that incurred too much debt entered prison--although that seems to be more a punishment than a solution. Two out of three people who left England for America were debtors; Virginia and North Carolina, hungry for settlers, promised five years' protection from Old World debts. When a man was arrested for debt, his wife and children often went to prison with him, having no place else to go. Debtors in New York City's prison -- where a man and his family might stay for years -- established their own constitutions and courts and elected their own sheriffs, to enforce the laws.

***

Somehow I missed that Adam Schiff received one of Biden's preemptive pardons. 

One would expect that a guy this compromised would simply spontaneously combust.

***

Sunday/New Laws and Hyperbole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SatStats

 

SatStats

In Argentina — an oil-producing country — 20% of the harvest has been lost due to a lack of diesel.

***

Share of doctors who are foreign-trained in European countries in 2022 or most recent year available

Guardian graphic. Source: OECD healthcare statistics. Some EU countries have been excluded due to lack of data

Manning added: “For immigration to help, it’s got to be that immigrants are actually in work, and many European countries have quite low employment rates among immigrants.

***

***

Despite the surge in schools and teachers after 1880, Russian peasant children were considerably less likely to receive schooling than were African American children, especially if they were girls. As the statement about not needing literacy in order to make cabbage soup indicated, the subordination of females that characterized Russian society in general was as evident in peasant education as in any other sphere of life. Statistics on school attendance by sex indicates that, in contrast to former slaves in the Southern United States, for whom serfs in Russia rarely sent their daughters to school during the 1860s and 1870s, regarding it as a waste of time that would fill their heads with needless knowledge and make them less fit for their feminine duties. The evidence is consistent and overwhelming. Among African Americans in the Southern United States, girls were at least as likely as boys to attend school: the Freedmen’s Bureau Consolidated Monthly School Report for June 1867, for example, listed 45,855 male and 52,981 female pupils in the schools that it monitored throughout the South; in almost every state, female pupils outnumbered male pupils and there were slightly more males than females. The decennial census returns showed a similar pattern between 1870 and 1910: school enrollment rates in the United States for Black children aged five to nineteen (the great majority of whom lived in the South) were fairly evenly balanced between the sexes, with female rates slightly higher than male in four of the five census years. (The male rate was slightly higher than the female in 1880.)--kolchin

***

An addiction crisis is gripping Sierra Leone, one of the world’s poorest nations, driven by a surge in use of “kush”, a toxic blend of psychoactive substances. As the West African nation struggles to boost its economy, thousands of unemployed young adults have turned to the potent alternative to marijuana to fill their days.

The kush crisis is part of a growing trend of substance abuse across Africa, particularly among the continent’s youth.

“People are addicted to escape,” said Abass Wurie, a biomedical scientist in Freetown who is studying the effects of the drug on the heart and kidney.

***

A study by the National Infrastructure Commission, released on Tuesday, concluded that hitting the 2050 target will roughly double the amount of money we would have spent anyway on infrastructure over the next 27 years to £2 trillion: an additional £1 trillion spent on the green agenda.

For a word that skips off the tongue so easily, a trillion is mighty big. Imagine you were to spend a pound a second: how long would it take you to spend £1 trillion? The answer is more than 31,000 years.

So to have spent a trillion pounds by today at the rate of £1 a second, you would have to have started when woolly mammoths roamed free.

A study by the National Infrastructure Commission, released on Tuesday, concluded that hitting the 2050 target will roughly double the amount of money we would have spent anyway on infrastructure over the next 27 years to £2 trillion: an additional £1 trillion spent on the green agenda--ridley

Germany

cipher (n.)

Late 14c., "arithmetical symbol for zero," from Old French cifre "nought, zero," Medieval Latin cifra, which, with Spanish and Italian cifra, ultimately is from Arabic sifr "zero," literally "empty, nothing," from safara "to be empty;" a loan-translation of Sanskrit sunya-s "empty." Klein says Modern French chiffre is from Italian cifra.

The word came to Europe with Arabic numerals. From "zero," it came to mean "any numeral" (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) "secret way of writing; coded message" (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes often substituted numbers for letters. Meaning "the key to a cipher or secret writing" is by 1885, short for cipher key (by 1835).

Figurative sense of "something or someone of no value, consequence, or power" is from 1570s.
also from late 14c.

And, of course, to figure and "decipher."

***

Germany

“The problem with consensus societies is that sometimes the consensus is wrong, and when it is, there is no corrective mechanism.”-- Wolfgang Münchau, author of “Kaput—The End of the German Miracle.”

*

In 2023, Germany recorded 133,000 patent applications, less than half the numbers in South Korea and Japan, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

*

A summary from a WSJ's summary: 

Germany’s CO2 emissions per capita are above the global and the European Union average, higher than the U.K.’s and France’s, and just below China’s. Meanwhile, German households paid the highest electricity prices in the EU in the first half of 2024.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to accelerate a planned phaseout of nuclear energy. It meant Germany needed more fossil fuel, including coal and Russian natural gas, as it ramped up renewables. Then Moscow invaded the rest of Ukraine and began throttling gas deliveries, driving up prices and forcing Berlin to restart idled coal-fired plants. Germany’s last three nuclear power plants went offline in April 2023.

The country registered more than 250,000 asylum applications last year, down from 2023 but higher than any other year since 2016. Today, migrants are less likely to be working than Germans and more likely to commit crimes. The federal government alone spends 30 billion euros a year, equivalent to $31.46 billion, on benefits for refugees and asylum seekers—more than half the country’s defense budget.

One theory of Germany’s inability to change course when circumstances evolve, evident both in its nuclear energy and immigration policies, points to “a static view of the world,” that has become ingrained since reunification, that Germany no longer had to change. Its own version of "the end of history."

History may have another view.

Wealth of Nations

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them. -Turkish proverb

***

So why do Communist regimes turn out to be so evil? My hypothesis is that the Manichean nature of the ideology selects for leaders who are psychopaths and for followers who are willing to rationalize the cruelty of the leaders.

Because you are fighting for utopia against enemies who are trying to maintain the illegitimate status quo, the ends justify violent, repressive means. But I speculate that it is the violent means that appeal to the men who rise to the top of the Communist pyramid. The psychopaths who attain leadership positions claim to be aiming for the ends, but in fact what appeals to them is the moral license to engage in cruelty. What their followers think of as temporary and unfortunate is what the leaders find intoxicating.--Kling

***

Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations is primarily a book about the division of labor. That’s Smith’s answer to the title question: Nations become wealthy because of specialization and trade. As the division of labor progresses, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.” Smith had a presumption of liberty in policy.

Welfare-state policies are, in general, liberty-reducing in Smith’s framework. Insofar as they rely on redistributive taxation, they involve state coercion. You cannot pursue your own interests in your own way when saving for retirement, for example; Social Security is compulsory. Welfare programs almost always involve the government deciding what beneficiaries’ interests are. Food stamps can only be used on certain products. The scope of government health insurance coverage is determined by the bureaucracy that administers it.

...many on the Left are still guided by the FDR view that welfare programs increase liberty by contributing to “freedom from want.” Smith would reject that argument, and conservatives should, too. To the extent welfare programs exist, they should be considered a necessary evil, not an enhancement of personal freedom.--Pino

Hard-Working Americans

“It takes a lot longer to fly from Chicago to New York or Washington to New York than it did 20 years ago. There's no reason for that. There's plenty of room in the sky.”
— American Airlines CEO Robert Isom on the need to invest in air-traffic control, during an earnings call on Thursday.

***

“These are not acts of love or altruism. They are acts of depression and desperation.”
— Donna Cohen, a retired psychiatry professor who has researched murder-suicides affecting older adults

***

Trump has issued family tokens for sale. Why would he do that?
President Trump, who has lent his name to everything from steaks and wine to cryptocurrencies, now wants to sell you investment funds.

Trump’s social-media company, Trump Media & Technology , said Thursday that it has applied for trademarks on a series of exchange-traded funds and separately managed accounts. The financial products, which include funds labeled “Made in America” and “Energy Independence,” will launch later this year, Trump Media said.

***

The price of a one-day adult pass to Disneyland on the most popular days at the theme park is $206, more than $100 more than the price of admission on the lowest-cost day. Price hikes have moved Disney vacations out of reach for many Americans, alienating parkgoers and worrying executives.

***



Hard-Working Americans

Longshoremen won a tentative 61.5 percent pay increase over six years. The Wall Street Journal editorial page notes “the astounding fact” that there are only about 25,000 port jobs, so about half of ILA members do not have to show up for work daily. The rest stay home collecting payments previously negotiated in contracts protecting “jobs” (loosely — very loosely — defined). In 2010, [Harold] Daggett said his members should make more than $400,000 annually. Today, the Journal says, “some now do with overtime.”

Daggett, however, threatened another strike on Jan. 15 unless any additional automation — e.g., automated cranes loading and unloading containers — is banned. Resistance to automation is why no U.S. port ranks among the world’s 50 most efficient. The strike could “cripple” and “crush” (his promises) the nation’s economy before Trump’s promised tariffs do.

…..

Like his soulmate Trump, Daggett is a 78-year-old child of Queens. His helper with the task of striking the chains from workers’ ankles is ILA’s executive vice president, his son Dennis, who says the ILA “does not support any kind of automation.” “Machines don’t pay taxes,” says the automation-opposing president of the ILA local in Mobile, Alabama. But the more productive the workforce is, the more taxes it pays.

During the three-day October strike, Kamala Harris said, “This strike is about fairness.” But Reason’s Eric Boehm noted two discordant X posts from a progressive, ILA-supporting news outlet. One praised workers for blocking “job-killing automation.” The other lamented that ILA members’ jobs are “backbreaking.--Will

Subsidizing Unproductivity

Boston Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy is reportedly in a Boston hospital after sustaining an upper-body injury during a recent 4 Nations game. McAvoy was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, according to the Boston Globe.

***

The previously unreported operations of the Department of Special Tasks have included sabotage and a plot to put incendiary devices on planes, Western intelligence officials say. The unit was set up in 2023 in response to Western support for Ukraine and includes veterans of some of Russia’s most recent clandestine operations, reports Bojan Pancevski. The group, known by its Russian acronym SSD, is believed to be behind a host of covert attacks on the West, including the attempted killing of the CEO of a German arms maker. --wsj

***

Asteroid 2024 YR4 currently has a 2.3 percent chance of hitting Earth on 22 December, 2032, making it the biggest extra-terrestrial threat in more than two decades.
Scientists have calculated the impact risk corridor of the space rock stretches eastwards from the Pacific Ocean, over South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Middle East, and into Asia.

***

Bill Gates envisions a world where smartphones are supplanted by electronic tattoos. These temporary, electrically conductive tattoos would be applied directly to the skin, effectively turning our bodies into living, breathing communication devices.

***

Subsidizing Unproductivity

Vance's speech in Europe raised some uncomfortable ideas. There are more.

An article in The Telegraph has raised questions about England's disability program.  

Expenditure on incapacity and disability benefits for people of working age has risen from £36bn four years ago to £48bn in 2023 to 2024. And the number of new claimants each year has doubled to nearly 500,000.

it’s not got much to do with growing levels of ill health. It’s much more likely because incapacity benefits are quite a lot higher than ordinary unemployment entitlements, and in some cases, rather better than working for a living.

Combine this difference with a medical profession that seems prepared to sign patients off as long-term sick at the drop of a hat and create an immediate incentive for worklessness, especially for those in dead-end, low-paid, physical work who are approaching retirement age.

Young people who have never worked also seem particularly prone to jump aboard the incapacity bandwagon.

What we seem to have, according to the Resolution Foundation analysis, is a country where growing numbers are signed off sick, with the effect being offset by a similar number of previously inactive people, due to childcare or other responsibilities, coming back into the workforce.

In any case, none of this is good for growth and is a long way from the welfare state originally envisaged by its founding fathers.

More, it raises questions about the basic values the West has assumed for years.

Presidents Day and A Manual of Patriotism

While general tariffs carry the well-meaning intent of catalyzing and supporting domestic manufacturing, in many critical instances involving minerals, that isn’t possible, due to existing regulations and limited supply. Many key materials for AI manufacture must be imported, and tariffs on those imports will simply act as a sustained squeeze on the tech sector’s profit margins.

***

Within samples of African Americans (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004) and ethnic immigrants (Oreopoulos 2011), job applicants with less fluent names experience lower callback rates, and name complexity explains roughly between 10 and 50 percent of ethnic name penalties. But the results are primarily driven by candidates with weaker résumés, suggesting that cognitive biases may contribute to the penalty of having a difficult-to-pronounce name.--AEI

***

MAGA influencer Ashley St Clair claims she has secretly given birth to Elon Musk's 13th child.

***

Presidents Day and A Manual of Patriotism

Presidents Day is an unfortunate homogenizing and generaling of holidays that once were celebrations of individual, great men. 

A recent note suggested citizens read the Declaration of Independence. An interesting idea that might beef up the day.

From an article I lost somewhere. Maybe Noonan?

"I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900.  

The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.

Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.

Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.

What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.

How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”

Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”

Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Tell the story of the Mayflower, of the making and meaning of the Compact, of the landing on Plymouth Rock: Quote an old poem: “Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again.”

Remind children, as Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.” America wasn’t just some brute force that pushed up from the mud; we announced our birth with a Declaration that was “a revelation”: All men are created equal.

The manual includes a lot of opinions on historical events. One I liked was the assertion that the Civil War ended the day Ulysses S. Grant was buried in 1885. Why? Because America saw who his pallbearers were: “Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other.” The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was “a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.”

You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.

Parents, help your children love this country. It will be good for them, and more to the point this country deserves it.

Also when you don’t love something you lose it. We don’t want that to happen."

Sunday/Wilde and Valentine's Day

After supporting ICE activity in New York, Adams, the Democrat mayor of New York, was attacked by the Democrat Biden administration for corruption when he was upgraded on a flight. Trump's Republican administration dropped the charges, saying they were retaliatory. The Democrats are furious. Strange times.

***

Sunday/Wilde and Valentine's Day

Most rules have some sensible basis, even rules governing the behavior of consenting adults. Sometimes they are tempered with kindness, sometimes not.

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London in 1895 on Valentine's Day.

Though at the height of his success, and fond of applause, Oscar Wilde's personal life made him vulnerable to attack. He had heard that his eventual nemesis, the Marquess of Queensbury, planned to publicly confront him on the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest; he had arranged to have Queensbury's ticket withdrawn and to have a policeman present, but he declined a curtain call, just in case. The Marquess had made it clear in notes to his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, that his relationship with Wilde must stop -- or else: "If I thought the actual thing was true, and it became public property, I should be quite justified in shooting him at sight. These christian English cowards and men, as they call themselves, want waking up. Your disgusted so-called father. . . ."

Horribly, more recently, an elder son had committed suicide on the heels of his own homosexual relationship with a politician.

 

The Marquess was particularly incensed that Wilde's play was opening on Valentine's Day.
Having been prevented from attending the opening, three days later Queensbury appeared at Wilde's Albemarle Club with a witness and a calling card inscribed, "To Oscar Wilde posing Sodomite." This written accusation, the desire of Lord Douglas to spar with his father in public, and Wilde's naïve belief that he would merely have to deny his homosexuality in court to win, provoked him to file charges of libel. He found out too late that Queensbury would play by his rules, and be able to frighten, cajole or bribe a number of male prostitutes into testifying against him.

Not long after its triumphant debut, The Importance of Being Earnest was withdrawn from theaters across England and America; not long after that, Wilde was in prison. The last, tail-spin years ended in one of the cheapest, un-Oscar hotels in Paris, and with "un enterrement de 6^e classe" in Bagneux cemetery:

JACK: Poor Ernest! He had some many faults, but it is a sad, sad blow.
CHASUBLE: Very sad indeed. Were you with him at the end?
JACK: No. He died abroad; in Paris, in fact. I had a telegram last night from the manager of the Grand Hotel.
CHASUBLE: Was the cause of death mentioned?
JACK: A severe chill, it seems.
MISS PRISM: As a man sows, so shall he reap.
CHASUBLE: Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts. Will the interment take place here?
JACK: He seemed to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris.
CHASUBLE: In Paris! I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last. . . .

(from Steve King and Ellmann)

SatStats

SatStats

The National Archives has 13.5 billion pieces of paper and only 240 million are digitized.

***

There were 850,000 fewer retail sales workers in the US in 2023 compared to 2013 even though the US economy added more than 19 million jobs over this period.

There are nearly five hundred thousand fewer secretaries and administrative assistants in the US labor force now than there were a decade ago. At the same time, management and business occupations have grown very rapidly. There were four million more managers and 3.5 million more business and financial operations jobs in the US in 2023 than there were in 2013.

Keep in mind that these changes are occurring as employment and wages overall are rising.

***

In 2024, India’s thermal coal imports rose by around 12 percent, while China’s rose by 8 percent, a trend which is expected to continue for several years. The IEA predicted in 2024 that by 2035, global electricity demand would be 6 percent higher than it had previously predicted, leading to a prolonged reliance on coal to meet this demand.

***
China pushed global coal demand to a record high in 2024, @IEA said in its coal flagship report.
The IEA has now ditched its "peak coal" theory and sees higher demand in 2025, 2026 and 2027.


***

Rich democratic nations with higher levels of income inequality or larger increases in income inequality haven’t tended to have slower economic growth, lower or slower-growing household income, or worse household balance sheets…

The notion that income inequality is harmful for health has recieved substantial attention from researchers, and some now take it for granted that inequality reduces longevity. But the country evidence offers very little support for this conclusion.---Kenworth

***

More than 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, while only about “6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America,” according to historian Steven Mintz. Although the trans-Atlantic slave trade receives far more attention today, the trans-Saharan slave trade—which involved Arabs transporting captives from black Africa across the Sahara Desert and the Persian Gulf to the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East—involved a larger number of African slaves and lasted for a much longer period.

“It is striking,” Harvard scholar Orlando Patterson wrote, “that the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.” Nor, Mr. Patterson stressed, was slavery unique to Africa, Europe and the Islamic world or to a particular stretch of time. “There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery,” he wrote. “It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized. There is no region of the earth that has not at some time harbored the institution. Probably, there is no group of people whose ancestors were not at one time slaves or slaveholders.”--riley in wsj

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Massacre Alert: Researchers tracked a massive swarm of cod off the coast of Norway as the fish intercepted and rapidly munched down on millions of migrating capelin fish. It appears to be the largest predatory massacre of its kind ever recorded by humans.

***

 

St. Valentine's Day

The U.S. must slash its deficit to 3% from an expected 7.5% before the president’s second term in office ends, otherwise, bond markets will not be able to absorb the amount of new debt the Treasury issues, and a death spiral will ensue, according to Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio. He states the U.S. no longer had the luxury to form a consensus in society over the breadth and scale of the cuts needed. Read that again.

***

An app called TouchTunes lets people pick and play their favorite songs in more than 65,000 bars, restaurants, and other venues—even from hundreds of miles away. One user, Logan Bartlett, has used the remote control feature to troll bars in Ohio with the University of Tennessee’s unofficial fight song…all from New York.

***

Australia appointed its first rabbit tsar to combat invasive species

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St. Valentine's Day

Before the 14th century, St. Valentine's Day honored a Christian martyr. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer connected St. Valentine's Day to romance. 

Chaucer lived in the Middle Ages, the era of courtly love, celebrated with broad, romantic statements of devotion in poems, songs, and paintings. In his poem "The Parliament of Fowls," written around 1382, possibly to commemorate the engagement of King Richard II, he envisions birds gathering on St. Valentine's Day to choose their mates. The goddess Nature declares: "You know that on Saint Valentine's Day / By my statute and through my governance / You come to choose — and then fly your way — / Your mates, as I your desires enhance." From then on, Valentine's Day was seen as a day of romantic love.

Young girls in the U.S. and the U.K. once believed they could tell what type of man they would marry by the type of bird they saw first on Valentine’s Day. If they saw a blackbird, they would marry a clergyman, a robin indicated a sailor, and a goldfinch indicated a rich man. A sparrow meant they would marry a farmer, a blue bird indicated a happy man, and a crossbill meant an argumentative man. If they saw a dove, they would marry a good man, but seeing a woodpecker meant they would not marry at all.

Lawfare

$1,599 is the median U.S. asking rent in January, down 0.1% from a year earlier, according to Redfin.

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Total Estimated Cost of German driving license: €1,500–€3,000.

***

Many economists have argued that China could better rev up its economy by easing controls on its private sector, strengthening the country as it competes with the U.S., without many of the downsides of its state-led model.
Bad news. Rather than emerging out of a government lab, DeepSeek was built by a Chinese math geek who had founded a hedge fund.

***

Lawfare

Strassel has an informative article on the endless Trump litigation and the administration's response.

"The Donald Trump “resistance” is alive and well, though this time it’s centering nearly all its efforts on the legal system. Just three weeks into this administration, nonprofits and coalitions of Democratic state attorneys general have already filed nearly 60 lawsuits in federal court. Don’t think this litigation is ad hoc. Activists and attorneys general have been meeting since Trump won the nomination, debating his likely moves, hiring lawyers, strategizing legal responses and coordinating who would lead cases and where.

One result is that this resistance is on track to dwarf even the legal assault on Trump’s first term—which was itself unprecedented in size and scope. Just one stat: State attorneys general filed 160 multistate lawsuits against the federal government in Trump’s first term, compared with 80 over Barack Obama’s entire tenure."

These cases all have complex elements but it appears in her article that the administration is better prepared for the legal harassment.

A Minority Debt Report

Comedian John Mulaney has a routine:   there’s a horse loose in the hospital . . . !!

***

Some Disney insiders worry that the company has become addicted to price hikes and has reached the limits of what middle-class Americans can afford, reports Robbie Whelan.

***

Sierra Bille has received $350,00 so far in scholarships and financial aid to attend New York University. The 24-year-old Las Vegas native applied to dozens of assistance programs to afford her longtime dream school, whose published cost for 2022-23 topped $82,000, including housing and living expenses.

***

A Minority Debt Report

I don't know where I found this but what is astonishing is that this view is considered a philosophy.

The Federal Reserve has tools to keep interest rates falling, including buying Treasury bonds from its member banks. This drives borrowing costs down. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed used tools like these to hold 10-year interest rates around 2 percent for more than a decade, despite a growing national debt. Why assume that such policies won’t work in the future?

Of the $35 trillion in U.S. national debt, only about $8-9 trillion is held by foreign countries. China, the debt hawk’s No. 1 boogeyman, holds only $816 billion or 2.3 percent of this $35 trillion. The rest — roughly $25 trillion — is held domestically by U.S. government agencies like the Social Security Trust Fund and military retirement funds, as well as private corporations. Foreign and domestic holders earn interest on their holdings, so the debt is a paying investment for them. For China and others, holding dollars also keeps their currencies cheap so they can export more.

Instead of obsessing over a government debt crisis that may never happen, it makes more sense to borrow and spend money to mobilize our immense resources to deal with immediate problems, as we did in World War II. The U.S. needs to support stressed working and middle-class families, respond to dangerous conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, counter China’s growing global influence, and manage the transition to cleaner energy and the rise of artificial intelligence.

This argument avoids the basic question of debt: can the cost of it be maintained without pain? Debt can be productive, as borrowing for seed for a crop. But often debt is malignant and a good signal is when money must be borrowed to maintain it.

USAID

Marriages in China plummeted by a fifth last year, the biggest drop on record, despite manifold efforts by authorities to encourage young couples to wed and have children to boost the country's declining population.

***

Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.” This is from an informative article in Foreign Affairs, here:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/post-neoliberal-delusion

USAID

On her four-country tour through Africa in 2018 -- her first major solo international trip as first lady -- Melania Trump offered praise for what she described as "successful" USAID programs as she observed them up close.

The $50 million fund, known as W-GDP, was developed to be distributed by USAID with an ambitious goal of empowering 50 million women in developing countries by 2025.

The initiative was led by the president's daughter and then senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.

Apparently Rubio once had kind words for the agency.

These superficial endorsements have been floated as important discrepincies in USAID's recent critical evaluation.

But isn't that what fraud is: a discrepency between stated and planned aims? And isn't secrecy a part of that? “The documents my staff reviewed, on their face, failed to comply with standard classifications protocols. Only after demanding to speak to your USAID Office of Security, my staff uncovered that this data was, in fact, unclassified,” Senator Ernst wrote in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The foolish projects that USAID has supported may not be charactistic of the agency. But don't they prompt a look? And don't they raise questions as to the judgment of the people in the program?

What is it about overseeing the program that is so upsetting?

 

Feminism and Global Warming

The Halftime Show was a classic arts representation of an intense, popular, minority paradigm: Commercialized revolution.
 
***

More countries have produced a nuclear bomb than can mass-produce a jet engine.

***

In his 2020 annual letter Larry Fink, the CEO of the largest asset manager in the world, mentioned the the words “sustainability” and “climate” nearly 50 times. In 2023 it was less than 10.

***

Feminism and Global Warming

Good news! 'UN Women' is the United Nations entity dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. They have a research arm. Yes, their own research arm. UN Women researchers find that feminism holds the real key to preventing the planet from global warming. This was reported in Scientific American! Scientific American!

From “How Feminism Can Guide Climate Change Action:”

The current economic system that underpins that status quo is rooted in the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap or unpaid labor, often done by women and marginalized communities. This system therefore drives the climate crisis while perpetuating inequalities based on gender, race and class. It prioritizes the interests of corporations, governments and elites in positions of power and wealth, while destroying the natural environment that poor and marginalized people depend on the most.

So the jihad over faith-based global warming is not just about ending fossil fuel–based economies but a more fundamental transformation of our economic and political systems.

This is truly a rare outbreak of honesty in the so-called warming revolution. This is about political and economic power, achievable only by unilateral surrender of existing Western structures.

The paper focuses upon women from Indigenous and local communities who have used their traditional knowledge of tree species to lead sustainable forestry initiatives in Colombia; and in Bangladesh, during extreme floods, women relied on traditional rural cooking methods to provide food in remote affected areas.

These new systems would prioritize the well-being of people and the planet, over profits and elite power, to enable a more sustainable, resilient, inclusive and equitable future. This feminist vision builds on thinking from a diversity of cultural contexts and growing interest in “well-being economies.” For example, the Buen Vivir (Living Well) paradigm that underpins the development strategies of Bolivia and Ecuador is inspired by Indigenous knowledge and values that promote harmonious relationships between humans and nature.

So we are to abandon our current lives based upon Western knowledge and achievements which have elevated our living standards immeasurably over the last two hundred years in favor of the qualities of impoverished, autocratic, suppressed cultures reminiscent of the circumstances the Western miracle has overcome.

Bolivian and Ecuadorian cultures, as charming as they might be, will not rise to manage the world of Western technology, economy, and philosophy. They can meet only if the West declines to those more suppressed, primitive cultures. 

Strangely, the most important question raised by this plan for this new world is never asked: How will that decline be managed?

 

Sunday/Simon

What explains simultaneous sign language in a world of closed captioning?

***

Do our pets eat better than our ancestors 400 years ago?

***

Stagecoach was the major means of travel in the early Republic. Since the coaches averaged about two to three miles per hour, the trip from New York to Philadelphia could take at least three days. They were usually mule-drawn, not horse-drawn
A well known mule breeder was George Washington.

***



Sunday/Simon

In today's gospel, Christ preaches from a boat off the shore, then says to Simon the gospel's famous quote: "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." Commentators love the symbolism of it but, after the catch, Simon says something puzzling. He says, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man."

Why would he say that?

Certainly, as the analysts say, Simon Peter, as a fisherman, may have been rightfully impressed. But enough to make a public confession to a stranger?

And he also took Christ's fishing suggestion against his own experience, then gave up his profession to be a disciple.

Whatever happened, Simon Peter was more than impressed.

Sat Stats

Sat Stats

The results reported in the national exam officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress show New York school districts are spending $89 billion this academic year.

Records show across the five boroughs, public schools spent an average of $21,112 per student in fiscal year 2023-24, though dozens of schools spent more – up to $60,000 a student.,

Despite the sky-high spending, only 33% of New Yoek fourth graders scored proficient in math and just 28% were proficient in reading last year.

Older students’ results were even worse – 23% of city eighth graders were proficient in math and 29% in reading.

Even more troubling is the huge racial gap in test scores within New York City.

The results show only 16% of black and Hispanic fourth-grade students were proficient in math, compared to 53% of white students and 58% of Asian students.

***

The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at a cost of $125 million, was a 638-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998, to study the Martian climate. It crashed on entering Mars's atmosphere. The engineers did not take into consideration that the units had been converted. i.e., the acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds^2 for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.

Any confident in climate measurements or effective teaching techniques might ponder on this.

***

Only 3 of the top 50 largest Latin American companies are Argentine (22 are Brazilian, 14 Mexican, and 8 Chilean). Moreover, only 7 of the top 100 largest Latin American companies are Argentine.

There are just about $50 billion invested by Argentine companies abroad; compared to $300 billion from Brazil, $215 billion from Mexico, $140 billion from Chile, and $75 billion from Colombia.

Overcoming Chaos in Climate Science

USAID is a 10,000-person, $40 billion agency.

***

Philadelphia Eagles offensive linemen average 336 pounds and are 6 foot 6.

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Roland Busch, CEO of Germany-based Siemens, said in an interview there’s overregulation in Europe that stifles competition. “We don't have one market. When you're a startup and you want to scale, I mean where do you go? You go to the United States. You can scale within one market."

***

Overcoming Chaos in Climate Science

A characteristic of the limited climate discussion is how caution is only one-sided. Concern is permitted on the climate side but not on the proposed 'solutions.' One-sided openmindedness is an oxymoron, unwise and anti-reflective. It is the hallmark of anti-science, superstition and its derivitives. This is from an interesting article that examins the arruracy of faith-based climate science, the models.

In chaotic systems, the results only appear to be random, but they’re not random at all — they’re entirely deterministic. If you knew exactly the initial conditions of such a system and could precisely describe the physical processes, you could predict tornados. It’s only due to our lack of knowledge these events look random. You can’t average away chaos.

Climate modelers address this problem by taking our limited data and using the uncertainties in the many model parameters to tune the models in order to force a fit to the data [3]. But the fit isn’t unique as there are many ways to tune the models,. They believe this history-matching will neutralize the sensitivity to the initial data, but as soon as the simulation moves from the tuning phase to prediction, numerical dispersion takes over again.

Given this hypersensitivity to initial conditions, just how accurate is the temperature data that’s used in these models? There are certainly problems with the temperature data. Weather station instrumentation changes over the decades. Stations are relocated. There are maintenance and record issues, and very importantly, environmental changes.

The World Meteorological Organisation recognizes this and has set up a system for quality-ranking the location of weather stations, rating them from 1 thru 5. Naturally, meteorological bureaus are rather coy about how good their weather stations are according to WMO rankings. For example, I couldn’t find any data for the Australian Bureau weather station ratings, but I did find this chart for the UK Bureau [4] which seems to be a little more open than our own.

I don’t know how the UK weather station portfolio rates against the rest of the world, but I suspect it would be in the top tier. Station rankings 1 to 3 all have expected environmental errors less than 1 degree. But not even the top sites can measure to a trillionth of a degree. Rankings 4 and 5, 80% of the UK dataset, have errors of 2 and 5 degrees respectively. Basically, they’re junk.

They address this problem by averaging the data. For example, for each 100×100 km grid cell, there might one, ten or no weather stations. They average the good with the bad to come up with a representative temperature for each cell through what’s called a homogenization process, a fancy name for averaging. It’s easier to get Coca-Cola to reveal its secret recipe than getting the bureaus to reveal how this is done, and if a different homogenization algorithm is used, you will get a different temperature, far greater than a trillionth of a degree difference.

It’s clear that the certainty that many climate advocates place on these models and their data is grossly overstated, and more skepticism is required by decision-makers. I believe there should be audits of these models and their data, by statisticians from outside the climate industry. This is unlikely to occur after they saw what happened when McIntire and McKitrick tore apart Professor Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph which was once used as an International Panel for Climate Change logo, but now quietly memory holed.

(This is from an article by Greg Chapman, a former computer modeler. I made a few additions and corrections.)