On this day:
27 BC
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus is granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.
550
Gothic War (535–554): The Ostrogoths, under King Totila, conquer Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.
1572
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk is tried for treason for his part in the Ridolfi plot to restore Catholicism in England.
1581
The English Parliament outlaws Roman Catholicism.
1909
Ernest Shackleton’s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.
1969
Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 perform the first-ever docking of manned spacecraft in orbit, the first-ever transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another, and the only time such a transfer was accomplished with a space walk.
1979
The Shah of Iran flees Iran with his family and relocates to Egypt.
2003
The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus is granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.
550
Gothic War (535–554): The Ostrogoths, under King Totila, conquer Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.
1572
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk is tried for treason for his part in the Ridolfi plot to restore Catholicism in England.
1581
The English Parliament outlaws Roman Catholicism.
1909
Ernest Shackleton’s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.
1969
Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 perform the first-ever docking of manned spacecraft in orbit, the first-ever transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another, and the only time such a transfer was accomplished with a space walk.
1979
The Shah of Iran flees Iran with his family and relocates to Egypt.
2003
The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.
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Trump has the terrible strength peculiar to people who are incapable of embarrassment and cannot fathom that they look ridiculous. --Will
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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize medal to U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday during a White House meeting.
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The green dream is on life support in Sweden as politicians have grown skeptical and investors become wary of giant projects.
In the US, investors feel emboldened and are putting record funding into critical minerals and rare earths.--Bloomberg
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Political thinking tends to conceive of policies, institutions, or programs in terms of their hoped-for results – “drug prevention” programs, “gun control” laws, “environmental protection” policies, “public interest” law firms, “profit-making” businesses, and so forth. But for purposes of economic analysis, what matters is not what goals are being sought but what incentives and constraints are being created in pursuit of those goals.--Sowell
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Professors Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, I, and others who decry today’s obsession with income differences blame much of this obsession on intellectual errors, including (but not limited to) treating modern economies as being zero-sum, ignoring the effects of taxes and transfers, and failing to account for the non-monetary values of different voluntary choices that people make – choices that inevitably lead to different monetary incomes.
Further, your argument rests largely on an appeal to the authority of past prominent thinkers such as Plato, St. Augustine, and Karl Marx.
Most of the past thinkers whom you mention lived before the modern market era. Pre-industrial economies were far closer to zero-sum institutions than today’s global market economy. --from a response to a letter
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Trump wants to fix prices on credit cards, just like Bernie Sanders and AOC.
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"There are many who say that Romanticism is dead. But the tensions between Romanticism and the soldiers of the original Enlightenment are rising up again. We are undergoing a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism – as scientific enquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail, and as science is exploited into dystopian realities – such fraught areas as neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.
Precisely because scientific institutional authority has become a paradigm, it must have a counterculture."
This is from an essay by Jim Kozubek. So, a paradigm demands an alternative? Or is something like unequal access to drugs unrelated to the paradigm that created the drugs?
Paradigm
Noun:
1.a typical example or pattern of something; a model:"there is a new paradigm for public art in this country"
▪a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject:"the discovery of universal gravitation became the paradigm of successful science"
2.a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles:"English determiners form a paradigm: we can say “a book” or “his book” but not “a his book.”"
3.(in the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages) a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension.
Word Origin:
late 15th century: via late Latin from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknunai ‘show side by side’, from para- ‘beside’ + deiknunai ‘to show’.In science and philosophy, a paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field. The word "paradigm" is of Greek origin, meaning "pattern."
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Toward a Kinder, Gentler Society
On Dec. 15, the European Union added Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss army colonel and former intelligence analyst living in Brussels, to its sanctions list. His offense: appearing on media outlets Brussels dislikes and promoting what the EU calls “pro-Russian propaganda.” The official listing cites his (implausible) claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to accelerate North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership, which the EU labels a “conspiracy theory.” Others call it "nuts".
Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes. The result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one. Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively, which means targeting some viewpoints above others (by only the most objective, unbiased judges).
For an indication of where this censorious impulse can lead even in a democratic society, look no further than European Union nations and Britain, where the experiment in speech control is running not on university campuses but on national scales, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The results are so extreme that Americans might assume they’re exaggerated. They aren’t.
Start with Britain, where “grossly offensive” communications can be a police matter. In 2023, British police made more than 12,000 arrests under two communications statutes. For comparison, during America’s first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, oneeathrow for of the worst crackdowns on speech in the nation’s history, the United States averaged about 2,000 arrests per year, when the U.S. population was more than 50 percent bigger than Britain’s today, and there were a lot of commies.
Behind the numbers are stories like that of the Irish guy from Arizona who was arrested when he arrived in Heathrow. for something he had written about transgenderism on the internet, a dutiful official uncovered after a heroic investigation. Or Elizabeth Kinney, a mother of four who was arrested for having called a man who assaulted her a homophobic slur — not to his face, but in a private message to a friend. After the two fell out, the now former friend sent the messages to law enforcement. Kinney’s attacker wasn’t punished, but she was, under the Malicious Communications Act. Told she potentially faced 10 years in prison, Kinney pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to the British equivalent of probation and community service, and fined the equivalent of nearly $500.--mostly Lukianoff.
So, the government has a social 'paradigm'. Better watch your mouth--or pen--and pick your friends judiciously.
On Dec. 15, the European Union added Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss army colonel and former intelligence analyst living in Brussels, to its sanctions list. His offense: appearing on media outlets Brussels dislikes and promoting what the EU calls “pro-Russian propaganda.” The official listing cites his (implausible) claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to accelerate North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership, which the EU labels a “conspiracy theory.” Others call it "nuts".
Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes. The result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one. Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively, which means targeting some viewpoints above others (by only the most objective, unbiased judges).
For an indication of where this censorious impulse can lead even in a democratic society, look no further than European Union nations and Britain, where the experiment in speech control is running not on university campuses but on national scales, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The results are so extreme that Americans might assume they’re exaggerated. They aren’t.
Start with Britain, where “grossly offensive” communications can be a police matter. In 2023, British police made more than 12,000 arrests under two communications statutes. For comparison, during America’s first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, oneeathrow for of the worst crackdowns on speech in the nation’s history, the United States averaged about 2,000 arrests per year, when the U.S. population was more than 50 percent bigger than Britain’s today, and there were a lot of commies.
Behind the numbers are stories like that of the Irish guy from Arizona who was arrested when he arrived in Heathrow. for something he had written about transgenderism on the internet, a dutiful official uncovered after a heroic investigation. Or Elizabeth Kinney, a mother of four who was arrested for having called a man who assaulted her a homophobic slur — not to his face, but in a private message to a friend. After the two fell out, the now former friend sent the messages to law enforcement. Kinney’s attacker wasn’t punished, but she was, under the Malicious Communications Act. Told she potentially faced 10 years in prison, Kinney pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to the British equivalent of probation and community service, and fined the equivalent of nearly $500.--mostly Lukianoff.
So, the government has a social 'paradigm'. Better watch your mouth--or pen--and pick your friends judiciously.
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